The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

30 November 2005

The 7 types of highly effective bloggers

Assuming you define "highly-effective" as "traffic-generating," anyway. Mister Snitch explains:

Not every blogger practicing these distinct styles gets as much traffic as they might like. However, each style has the potential to drive traffic. Other styles of blogging, such as the let's-discuss-what-I-ate-for-lunch style, aren't suited for driving traffic, unless of course you're talking about what Madonna had for lunch. As a rule, navel-gazing gains an audience of one.

Incidentally, Swanson's new Chicken Strips dinner is new only to the extent that it contains fewer strips than its predecessor.

The seven types (see the linked page for full descriptions):

  1. Meme-du-jour bloggers comment on the high-profile ideas of the moment. This type of blogger is usually focused on political issues.

  2. Caterers determine what an audience segment wants to hear, and pursue that theme aggressively.

  3. Nichebloggers, aka localbloggers. The subject is usually something the writer is passionate about, or has special expertise in.

  4. Internet guides, such as Instapundit, create little original material. Their strength is that they are trusted link finders/filters.

  5. The celebrity-blogger is someone whose site traffic comes from fame achieved outside of blogging.

  6. The service blogger performs a service, often to the 'Meme' blogger (see 1).

  7. The long-tail blogger is the rarest of successful breeds. This style requires consistent blogging over a long period of time (hence the rarity in a fairly new medium).

Some blogs, of course, are hybrids: they have characteristics of more than one type, or of types not under consideration here. I see rather a lot of overlap between #3 and #7, for instance, as does Snitch.

(Disclosure: Mister Snitch sent the #7 paragraph to me for review before posting, mostly for statistics verification.)

Posted at 4:30 PM to Blogorrhea


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I tend to be more of an eighth type of blogger, the search-phrase blogger, who derives most of his traffic for weird fetishes explainable only by combinations of seemingly random terms.

Posted by: Brian J. at 7:26 PM on 30 November 2005

Right now, I'm an undisclosed type 10 who generates enough traffic to startle an earthworm stranded on the sidewalk after a rain. But when I grow up, I want to be a #5.

Posted by: William Squire at 8:17 PM on 30 November 2005

And which are YOU?

Posted by: girlfriday at 11:09 PM on 30 November 2005

Oh man. Please diagnose me.

Posted by: sadie at 1:38 AM on 1 December 2005

Mister Snitch seems to think I'm the apotheosis of 7-ness.

(Sadie strikes me as a 3/7 hybrid, for what it's worth.)

Posted by: CGHill at 7:16 AM on 1 December 2005

There is an 8th kind of blogger..me..a blogger who thinks he is an effective blogger simply because nobody has argued otherwise :p

Posted by: Zak at 5:58 PM on 4 December 2005