What have I learned?

Just like the persistent Hamster, sometimes you might feel like you are getting nowhere with your blog, but you have to stick at it.

Okay, so I've trawled literally hundreds of blogs, I've found three of my favourite Blogger "Blogs of Note" and conducted interviews. It's been fantastic and my interviewees have provided some great advice on starting a blog, making it successful and keeping it hot.

But what have I learned? It's time to take stock and look at the top five tips I've picked up via my interviews:

1. Find something original - One thing that is common to successful blogs is their unique content. "Have a gimmick, a schtick, something original to offer," said Angie and Chantale from CinemaObsessed.com. "Truly, nobody will care what you had for lunch, or how your cat's vet visit went." And Mattson Tomlin agreed, saying, "I've actually never come across another blog like mine."
2. Read a lot of blogs - Angie and Chantale describe themselves as not only bloggers but also "huge blog readers". Mattson Tomlin advised that you should "visit the blogs of those visiting you" and Holyoke Home said, "I comment on the blogs I love - all the time." It seems that to be a good blog writer you also need to be a good blog reader.
3. Make an impact - Most successful blogs have a very definite identity and within seconds of arriving at the blog you know what it is about. Angus and Chantale from CinemaObsessed.com said, "If people scroll through the entire first page of your blog and still don't really "get" what your blog is about, you'll probably lose them."
4. Lots of pictures - one thing that seems synonymous with successful blogs is visual content (consequently I've added my first picture to this post!). Mattson Tomlin found that visual content really helped increase traffic to his blog. "If you go to the beginning of my blog, there are no pictures, and thus, no comments."
5. Stick at it - Just about all the bloggers I interviewed agreed that you need to stick at it a while before your blog will gain any momentum. "I have a full time job, so the time involved in growing Holyoke Home can be taxing," said the bloggers who run Holyoke Home, but their success proves that if you do stick at it and promote, promote, promote, eventually your blog will take off.

So that's it. Obviously there is a lot more advice that can be gleaned from the interviews that are currently on my blog and from the future interviews that I'll be putting up. I'm veering away from Blogger's "Blogs of Note" now and looking at the many other blog recommendation sites out there, some of which were mentioned in my interviews.

So far I'm enjoying my first forays into the world of blogging, I have three followers and I hope to get many more, as I build my content and get better at this blogging stuff (thanks to tips from my interviews). I've also enjoyed visiting all these fantastic blogs, who knew this Blogosphere was so vast and wonderful?