Top of the 7 world’s most successful blogs… and what they’re doing right!
The success of blogs can be measured in many ways.
Image credit: 20th Century Fox
When it comes to marketing, the more eyeballs a blog gets, the more opportunities a company has to sell and make money. Especially if the site’s main focus lines up well with your marketing initiatives and target audience.A successful blog is one that completely locks into their target audience and highlights niche topics that align with the blog’s core focus.
7. LifeHacker
Estimated unique monthly visitors: 23,250,000
Year started: 2005
Estimated monthly revenue: n/a
Lifehacker bills itself simply as the site for “Tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done.” Simple and straightforward, yet highly intriguing (who doesn’t need help getting things done?) This site aggregates posts ranging from guides on reading sheet music to “A Helpful Woman’s Guide to Upgrading Your Entire Life With Homemade Marijuana Gummi Bears” and everything in between.
The lesson: Help people and show them what to do. Sites like Lifehacker, Pinterest and other ‘how to’ sites and platforms do incredibly well showing other people how to do something in a way that often makes their lives easier or helps them get ahead.
6. Gizmodo
Estimated unique monthly visitors: 23,500,000
Year started: 2002
Estimated monthly revenue: $325,000*
Gizmodo is tech-centred site that also excels at sharing a good dose of design, science and science fiction news. It was originally launched in connection to Gawker and in 2016 was bought by Univision Communications in their acquisition of Gawker Media. The site obviously still has a strong following and is another one that has benefited from using a number of different bloggers to capture and share a constant stream of posts. Its content topics were also popular with a dedicated audience at the time of launch, but then grew over time regarding tech, science fiction and design.
The lesson: Roll with the punches and learn to adapt to changes in your structure and messaging if needed. While the blog has stuck to its roots, it has also gone through major organisational change and still come out on top.
5. Mashable
Estimated unique monthly visitors: 24,000,000
Date started: 2005
Estimated monthly revenue: $2,000,000*
Another 2005-er, Mashable was started by Pete Cashmore in his Scotland home and quickly grew to be the go-to source for social media and tech news. Since then, the outlet’s focus has expanded a bit, but still emphasises social media news and updates while growing its audiences significantly, thanks in part to pushing content out on a variety of platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
The lesson: Making the most out of amplifying your message or content on social media channels early on can reap great rewards.
4. The Phrasee blog
Year started: Mind yo’ business
Estimated monthly revenue: For us to know
While the phabulous Phrasee blog may not have achieved the massive readership of the other blogs on this list (yet), it is growing steadily. Covering topics such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and email marketing, the Phrasee blog uses humour, alternative perspectives, and research to connect with the niche market it targets. Recently recognized as the UK’s best PR, marketing and communications blog at the UK Blog Awards, the Phrasee blog appears poised to take the internet by storm in the years to come.
The lesson: Read our blog, it’s awesome
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| AWARDS 2017 |
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3. Business Insider
Year started: 2009
Estimated monthly revenue: n/a
Business Insider focuses on sharing and analysing business news with an emphasis on the financial industry. One of the things that make the site so interesting is that it outperforms rivals from more recognised brands, such as CNBC or Forbes, yet doesn’t have a large staff of writers.It makes the most of its resources to do this, zeroing in on what its readers want to see most and aggregating relevant posts from other sources. Business Insider is clear on who its reader is, what their behaviours are (like how long they spend on reading a single article) and what they’re most interested in reading.
The lesson: Know your audience. Easier said than done, but it is the most important thing whether you’re a blogger or a marketer.
2. TMZ
Estimated unique monthly visitors: 30,000,000
Year started: 2005
Estimated monthly revenue: n/a
2005 must have been a good year to start a blog-style news site. Its the year TMZ, a wildly popular U.S. celebrity gossip site, was also started. For the nosy human beings, TMZ checks all the right boxes: the breaking scandal, the sexy photos and the shocking titles, trying to pique reader’s curiosity and keep them clicking for more. A recent gem:
SHOCKING!!!
It’s not just the type of ‘news’ TMZ shares, but how they do it, i.e. very effectively. Somewhat surprisingly, at least to those at more mainstream media outlets, TMZ has actually broken the story on several major celebrity headlines over the years. This includes being the first to report on Michael Jackson’s death and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s divorce. The content, combined with its ability to share big stories first, keeps readers coming back to TMZ as a trusted resource year after year.
The lesson: Give the people what they want (sex, scandal, fame, fortune, failure) and do it quicker than anyone else. While not all blogs may have the naturally juicy content TMZ shares, there’s something to be learnt from tapping into people’s curiosity and cleverly crafting your post titles.
1. Huffington Post
Estimated unique monthly visitors: 110,000,000
Year started: 2005
Estimated monthly revenue: $14,000,000*
Originally, this site started as “The Huffington Post” by blogger-cum-celebrity Arianna Huffington. It was recently renamed as simply HuffPost and regularly tops lists for global traffic and revenue.Whilst HuffPost has maintained it’s initial focus on American politics with a decidedly liberal stance, it has also greatly expanded to include a wide variety of other topics and localised editions. They’ve achieved this through pulling in content from a pool of individual bloggers and content creators that vary from professional writers to politicians rather than directly employing all of its own writers.Over the years, HuffPost has come under scrutiny for taking advantage of unpaid contributors to help grow its content database and, in turn, attract more viewers. Still, this approach has certainly seemed to work in its favour. The site rakes in the revenue from sponsored advertising across its different channels and is thought to be valued at over $1 billion.
The lesson: Crowdsource to your advantage and don’t underestimate the power of niche topics to attract more visitors.
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