The Successful Blog Indicator Evaluation | Post 5

The Successful Blog Indicator Evaluation | Post 5

What are the characteristics of a successful blog?

Just do a search on a topic like Telescopes on Google and you find there's 1-10 first page results of 6,930,000 page.

That's a lot of pages competing for those top 10 spots.

So what's a blogger to do, throw up their hands in despair? Well we could do that...or we could use what's known as Reverse Engineering.



Reverse Engineering is taking a deep look into a system that is already functioning, then evaluating why it is successful and building our own replica. This is not just a copy and paste method. We're not going to steal anything.

Here's a web search definition:

We are going to make our own version of our Top 5 successful blogs in our chosen niches and build our niche sites so that over time Google will give our site the kudos it deserves.



Here are some of the things we are going to be examining from our successful blogs:

1. Blog Titles
2. Blog URLs
3. Blog Structure
4. Blogs Post Length (How long are their post, or word count)
5. Blogs Length of time it's been existing (number of years)
6. Blogs keywords
7. Blogs Backlinks
8. Blogs Revenus Source
9. Internal and External Linking

Were going to examine Top 5 Blogs that are in small niches. We'll examine there Traffic and Keywords that they rank for, how long they've been active, etc.

We'll also investigate they're copywriting method including headlines, page layout and overall site appearance.

We'll also be using the free version of Spyfu.com to legally spy-out the information we want to find.
So let's get to it with #1.

#1- Help Scout blog [Customer Support]

URL: https://www.helpscout.net/blog/

Approx. Subscribers: 65,000+

Main income source: Software

Help Scout is a customer support blog with the goal of helping customers to have the best customer experience possible. As shown above, they're main income is derived from software sales.

On their resources page at the above link they list:

• Acquiring Customers with Email

• Customer Acquisition Strategies for Entrepreneurs

• 10 Ways to Convert Customers with Psychology

They also have two other categories they offer help with:

1. Support
   
   
   
2. Retention

Each of these images are links to their owns blog post. There are 17 blog post in all.  This is what's know as internal linking, a good SEO technique.

So when designing your blog be sure to sow internal links to the other post on your blog.

The Acquiring Customers with Email shown above is written by Justin Premick.



While the Customer Acquisition blog is written by:








Now we take a look into Spyfu investigative results:

Help Scout gets between 380k and 500k clicks per month for the last year.

What you'll notice about most of all the blogs you'll see that it's all organic traffic. So you can rank well in Google with the right combination of site elements.

The estimated monthly clicks are valued at:



They've been around for:




They have an exclusive keyword total of:


Here is a small list of the keywords they rank for and the monthly clicks associated with them:



It looks to me that the owner of Help Scout has done a very good job on his blog. I've included a link to the blog in every beginning evaluation.


#2- Digital Photography School [Digital Photography]
URL: https://www.digital-photography-school.com/

Approx. Subscribers: 846,000+

Main income source: Advertisements, affiliate links, e-Book sales

This site is run by Darren Rowse. He has another site called Problogger but this is his main money making site.

This is a very large site and in a profitable niche. It can be competitive as well. The types of products he sells are expensive from camera lens to cameras themselves. It's not uncommon for these items to range over $1000.00.

He also has a large following of over 800k. Here's what his site looks like:

Post Production




First we see lots of colors which a Photography site should have. Next it's plain he has guess post bloggers. Once your site gets large enough you can start getting others to write for you but at first it's going to acquire your time and effort.


Here are some of the headlines used in the first post:

How to Master Natural Light Portraiture

Be aware of the quality of light.

What kind of photo do you want?

Use light to your advantage.

The Golden Hours.

The post in this blog are short but they contain a lot of content overall:

Of course, making portraits with the rich morning or evening sunshine (often called Golden Hours), or even subdued light can produce very pleasing portraits. Be careful though not to have your subject look directly ahead into the sun as they will typically make an unpleasant face. Backlighting or side lighting your subject at these times can be more effective and more comfortable for your subject. Diffused morning and evening light is lovely to work with as it is soft yet can still be quite rich and warm toned.

To make this easier to read I would have made the text of the paragraph more like this:

Of course, making portraits with the rich morning or evening sunshine (often called Golden Hours), or even subdued light can produce very pleasing portraits.

Be careful though not to have your subject look directly ahead into the sun as they will typically make an unpleasant face.

Backlighting or side lighting your subject at these times can be more effective and more comfortable for your subject.

Diffused morning and evening light is lovely to work with as it is soft yet can still be quite rich and warm toned.

Same words used but much easier to read

========================================================================

Person note:
When writing try to think of making your post easy to read by keeping your sentences and paragraphs short. One to two sentences per paragraph.

Spyfu Investigative Results



Monthly clicks averaging almost 1 million




This site started 11 years ago (still here for the long term) and est. monthly click value $1.3M. Impressive. I'm bringing you all these stats to give you proof that blogging is a profitable choice in online marketing.





These are just a few of the keywords they rank for here's the total number exclusive to Digital Photography School: The longer your blog ages and you add additional content the more keywords you qualify for. Continuous growth.





Lets go to successful blog post #6