Blogging Elements

Mashable: What Bloggers Can Learn From It

Posted on 08. Jul, 2009 by Ashwin in Social Media

I love reading Mashable. Not because it talks about social media — which should be reason enough for reading it all by itself — but more so because of the following reasons which can make for very good lessons for bloggers. Here are some of the things I think we should religiously follow:

Top-Notch, Reader enthralling content: I absolutely love the content on the blog. I never miss a single post out there and I ensure that I tweet some of those  posts if I think they would benefit my followers. It is this kind of content that makes a blog sticky. It tears the barricades down and lets readers pour in relentlessly. Could you imagine how your blog would be if you could develop content like that?

Note: Most of the content at Mashable and even Smashing Magazine, for that matter, are of “lists” or  “how-to”. You get an idea?

Never misses the frequency: These blogs are always updated with a new post. Each time I go there, I am given something new to read and digest. The frequency, as we did talk about plenty of times, is paramount for a blog’s success.

Completely Social media optimized: Did you observe that almost everything on mashable is sharable? Everything can be bookmarked, shared, emailed, tweeted and linked to. Mashable is a beautiful example of how social media can be used to bring in tons of traffic and backlinks, while riding on trust of the web 2.0 community.

Great design: Mashable’s design is minimalistic and effective, no frills and no-nonsense. It loads quickly and you don’t have to guess to navigate. However, I mentioned this last because I don’t want you to frown on this from the word go. When you are first starting out, you don’t have to worry too much about your blog design. Choose your theme and get started — build great content and drag traffic in. When your blog starts to earn some money, you could invest on design.

Tags: Blogging Lessons, Mashable