Mary and I have been running our graphic design blog since September 2009. Boy, have we learned a few things. Boy, do we continue to learn things! I’d like to post our top 10 graphic design posts with some stats, and share a few tips we’ve picked up so far. This article is more about the tips than the top articles. Read the tips and notes and then view our list and evaluate for yourself!
First, the tips.
- Focus on quality, not quantity
- If you want a friend, be a friend
- Keep it real
- Be who you are, not what you are not
- Find some niches
- Be different
- Be opinionated and personal
- Ditch the ads unless you have a zillion hits a day
- If you are going to do a list post, do a useful, original one. Add a twist.
- Follow, befriend, and learn from other blogger / gurus in the design community. Many followers, few learners.
Now, a few notes.
A note about list posts
I like lists. I don’t like boring lists. If you are going to do list posts, do something clever with the content. Make it an interesting niche list, or make some commentary about each item in the list. I’m not sure the design community needs yet another straight-up “25 minimal WordPress themes” post, but it should could use an original post about that topic. There is another angle, be it personal or clever, on the same old material.
One more thing about lists: if you publish a list that is truly useful for yourself, your list will be great. If you are publishing a boring list of what you think will drive traffic, it will probably fail. Our best list posts (based on traffic) took time and effort to make and were very interesting to us as we made them. Passion and effort always yields good results.
A note about ads
Unless you have a huge amount of design related traffic, the addition of ads to your page just looks funny. I tried a couple ads for a while. We’ve had 150k unique visits since last fall and made enough off of ads to pay a few road tolls. Essentially, to get revenue off of ads, you need a huge readership. I mean huge. You need thousands and thousands of reader, not just thousands or hundreds. My advice, and the advice of some other fellow bloggers is to just wait. Gain trust and then if you want to put some high-quality ads on your site, try it out. I’ve heard great things about, for instance, BuySellAds. Just wait until the time is right and don’t clutter your site up with anything other than great content. If you have 112 followers of your feed and a right column full of ads, it just makes you look kind of desperate. Don’t do that! Then again, maybe you don’t ever want ads. Try developing a product (iPhone App, Book, eBook, etc.). You will likely make way more off of a product or line of them than you ever will with ads.
A note about posting frequency
As a small or solo blog team, it’s just not feasible to get design work done and do more than say one or two quality posts per week. I’m revising our goals this year to be to post four quality posts per month, and leave room for a few fluffy ones (read: post that are just fun and quick, out of pure joy). It’s a very modest goal. Some may think that’s too low, but if you do one great article a week that REALLY makes the rounds in the design community, you will gain a solid readership and a golden reputation. Frequent, cheap content is damaging. Infrequent, quality content is golden, even if it’s not that much gold. So yes, if you are going to lay an egg, at least lay a golden one .
A note about the state of blogging in Graphic Design
There is a lot of noise in the blogging design world, and I expect 2010 to be a shake up year. Don’t make noise for noise sake. Make good noise. Be something someone wants to read once a week and always be real and interesting. That should be your “brand” above all else. Personally, I love the infrequent but quality graphic design blog collection I have going. I have a “check once in a while” folder in Google Reader, and a “check every day” folder to go with it. Things move in and out of the folders as I’m impressed or underwhelmed by various posts. That might be a post in and of itself: “Low volume, high quality graphic design bloggers”…
That’s it for lists and tips. Now, our top posts since September 2009.
Top 10 Graphic Design Posts at BonFX
- 23,000 hits: 19 top fonts in 19 top combinations
- 12,000 hits: 72 Questions to Ask New Web Design Clients with PDF Chart
- 7,000 hits: 16 Top Useful iPhone Apps for Graphic Designers
- 6,000 hits: 14 Top Typeface and Font Combinations Resources
- 6,000 hits: 15 Top Graphic Design Limericks for your Amusement
- 6,000 hits: 23 Really Bad Font Choices
- 5,800 hits: 19 top fonts most preferred by graphic designers from around the web
- 3900 hits: Top 10 Fonts for Graphic Designers with PDF Chart
- 2400 hits: Top 10 annoying graphic design bloggers
- 2000 hits: The Logo Psychologist: 26 Mouth-Watering Restaurant Logos and Profiles
All of these posts continue to gain hits as the weeks come and go. The most popular posts, as one might expect, accumulate hits faster than the other ones, and maintain a pretty steady rate. For instance, our most popular post “19 top fonts in 19 top combinations” still gets 100-300 hits a day average since the peak leveled off late 2009. There you have it. I hope it was fun and useful!
All good tips, Douglas — especially in relation to “list” posts. The trouble with those is that when you seen another one in your feed reader, you never know what you are going to get. Some list posts are truly useful, while others (particularly their titles) have just been contrived to draw traffic. And traffic that is ultimately uninterested is worthless traffic.
I would also avoid posts that simply repackage techniques found elsewhere, unless you are adding something new or showing a better way. With the similar intentions of many list posts –garnering traffic — I see coding articles that were originally written by people who didn’t understand the subject being rewritten by other people who don’t understand the subject, and consequently are full of bad JavaScript practices or downright dangerous PHP! Sadly, some bloggers don’t know enough to know that they don’t know what they are talking about!
@ Keith: List posts have turned into “bait and switch”. It’s more like 1 out of 5 list posts that turn out to be at least moderately informative, or even entertaining. Even fewer are actually useful.
Right after I posted this, I came across another “50 amazing minimal WordPress themes” again with most of them recycled from previous posts I’d seen many times before, even a few that were a year or two old. But then again, how would a copycat even know what was fresh and what was not?
I hadn’t thought of how someone might co-opt code articles without knowing what they were doing. That’s a bad, bad idea.
Doug, you are my Yoda of design bloggers. Your posts are always so well written and your advice is always spot on.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when looking at the list of top 10 graphic design posts at Bonfx. They are all excellent posts, but what really stands out is that for a post to become popular it needs to have a number in the title. I don’t know, that is kinda disappointing.
With regards to post frequency, I am also trying to focus on producing 4 quality posts per month. If I have an off week and can’t produce something meaningful I simply wont post anything. So be it.
Congratulations on the numbers, your success is very well deserved. That “Low volume, high quality graphic design bloggers” post is a great idea!
@ Duane: Thanks for the kudos, but I am not a Jedi yet.
I don’t think I quite realized that all my top posts have numbers in them. Wow. Of course, the numbers are a deliberate attempt to get attention, but it hadn’t occurred to me, even with the most popular posts permanently listed on the sidebar, that they all had that in common.
I think some advice from Jacob Cass is embedded in my blog-brain, that you will need some lists posts to get traffic (based on the current state of design blogging), but that you need to build on that and around that, and not try to become Noupe or anything. I don’t want to become that, at all.
I constantly add and remove designers from my special filtered twitter list. If there are too many tweets that lack personality, I remove them from the list, but still follow them but in a general “all friends” category using TweetDeck. There is just too much noise.
For instance, I look for David Airey’s tweets, which tend to be personal, interesting, bite-sized things I actually might read, as opposed to getting 400 Tweets about the “300 Top Best Most Awesome WordPress Photoshop Minimal Black Beautiful Themes use CSS5 with Grunge Textures from Croatia in a jQuery plugin”.
Really, how many a day of those can you read? To what end? That’s not how I learn, drinking who knows what coming out a firehose!
One last tip:
- credit the use of photos.
Hi Dave: I thought I did that correctly – the photo links directly to your original on Flickr. If I missed something I’ll be glad to correct it.
Doug
The link is correct (that’s how I found your article). It is customary to add a bit of text e.g. ‘image by DaveBleasdale’ either underneath the image or where other credits are.
Here is the text from the CC site:
“This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.”
I use cc images from Flickr in a departmental newsletter I produce, and because I don’t want people jumping away from the newsletter all the time, I put the credit at the bottom with a link to the original flickr image from the name of the ‘artist’.
My point is that there are many ways of ‘crediting’ an image and I guess you have done well enough, but I think it is customary to put a name(Flickr name) somewhere.
Regards, Dave