Lets Talk Blogs

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February 8, 2016 by megannski

There can be an infinite number of blogs on the internet, but are all of them successful? Blogs can range from one contributor to numerous contributors. Blogs can be about just about anything. Just search the internet and you can find blogs about entertainment, sports, current events, ideas, vacation spots, literally anything and everything can be talked about on a blog.

I looked  at three different blogs, for the the purpose of this post to my blog. I looked at Mashable, ThinkProgress, and LifeHacker. Both Mashable and ThinkProgess are news blogs. They have multiple contributors and allow for current events and hot topics to be talked about. Lifehacker is a little more unique, its more like a group blog. It encourages anyone to post suggestions on how to make something in someone’s life easier. Lifehacker doesn’t have one specific subject that it focuses on other than making life easier, it is open to just about any and every aspect to a person’s life.

Mashable, brings lots of different news related posts together and then ranks them. It has three different columns and the articles are ranked off the number of shares to determine which column they belong in. In the smallest column all the way to the left of the page is the what’s new section. In the center, the second largest column is the what’s rising portion and in the last and largest column, the what’s hot section. At current the hottest article has 3.1k shares. The number of shares are indicated under the headline of each article.

Mashable allows the users  all over the world to be involved with their blog. In the menu bar at the top of the screen, there is an option to link to Mashable from another region in the world. Mashable is well known to many social media users because their articles are constantly being shared, linked to, or retweeted. Many of their authors also have Twitter accounts, making it easy to connect with them. I would consider Mashable to be a successful blog. The contributors are always posting new content; these can be original stories on just about anything since so much is covered on the blog.

Mashable does utilize advertisments on their blog. There were advertisements from AT&T, Toyota and IBM. My suggestion to Mashable would be just to attempt to work towards being more visually appealing. The ads seem to break up the flow of the website, because they’re a different size or shape than the other items in the column.

ThinkProgress is a politically motivated blog. Their purpose is to promote progress in the United States and their claim is that they will provide critical editorials on all the parties. Their attempt at being unique is the attempt at being non-partisan.  A large majority of the  pieces written on ThinkProgress are written by the multiple editors of the blog.

Much of the brand is promoted through Twitter and Facebook. ThinkProgress has its own twitter account as well as all of their editors. The blog even has a link to the ThinkProgress twitter feed, in the furthest right column of the site.  Every article that is clicked into gives a button for the option to share or retweet the article.

I would classify this blog as successful. There are original ideas and new stories across the entire blog. The blog also indicates the number of shares for each article written. In searching the blog there have been articles with as many as 5k shares and as little as 100 shares.

ThinkProgress is very well organized. There is a menu bar at the top of the screen which allows viewers to quickly move to what subject areas interest them. The main page of the blog gives the most recent story under each of the categories. There several advertisements on the page. New home source, Kraft, Century Link are several of the advertisers on the page. The only suggestion for improvement would be to add a monitor for the number of tweets, like is indicated for Facebook shares.

Lifehacker provides the world with valuable lifehacks. These are supposed to help get you out of a jam, make your life easier, or simplify situations whenever possible. There have been many a social media meme about lifehacks and how they save the day. The Lifehacker blog is incredibly popular.

The Lifehacker blog gains most of its traffic through social media promotion. There is a Lifehacker Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube channel. All of these provide links back to articles posted on the blog. They also have a newsletter that you can subscribe to from the blog.

Lifehacker is unique because of its content. Its kind of a how-to blog, but a how-to blog on everything. It is also a group blog. People are invited to comment and post and put in their two sense on making something better or easier.

Lifehacker allows three different types of advertising. Sponsored posts, which companies pay an individual to put up articles on their behalf, companies that post articles, and physical ads on the page. Shopify has a sponsored post up on the feed currently and AT&T has an ad in the header of the blog. Below is a picture of a post by a member of a company. He linked his personal Twitter account to the page. He also added the you may like section including other products and articles about the company.

I would deem Lifehacker successful based off their numerous social media accounts that allow users to be quickly in touch with authors. Also they are generating new and original content on a daily basis.

I feel the blog has a lot of room for improvement though. Although the content is great and contains valuable information, it is hard to share with others. You can follow Lifehacker on your social media accounts, but if you are visiting the blog the only way to connect to social media is a Facebook like button. There isn’t an option to tweet straight from an article. There is also no running feed from Lifehacker’s Facebook or Twitter  account for users of the blog to connect to. Lastly, there is a lack of organization to the blog. There is one search option all the way in the top left corner, but there is no menu to break the articles down by category. This can be frustrating for the viewer, unless they have a ton of time to kill going through articles.