The social media blog Mashable along with the political blog Huffington Post are evidence of the mainstreaming of Blogs into the global niche digital publishing arena with both companies providing a great example of best practice.
To understand this more I would like to investigate the rise and rise of Mashable. Peter Cashmore began the Blog in July, 2005 in Scotland and it is now approaching its 5th birthday and claims to have 2.6 million followers and using the tool at compete.com achieves monthly traffic of 5.16 million.
It is not surprising to find that it was built on the foundation of 2 core elements (that I have mentioned regularly in past posts) and are the foundation of any successful blog despite the online scammers claim to easy fast money online.
1. Passion for the subject
2. Hard work (he worked 20 hour days regularly)
I think it is worth noting that Mashable’s success goes beyond these foundational elements.
Here are ten other reasons for its success that are worth highlighting.
1. He picked a trend early “I felt like social networking wasn’t being covered to the degree it could be. I didn’t necessarily know there was an audience for it. I find it best to dive right in and learn the hard way.”
2. Mashable has been on Twitter’s Suggested User List (SUL), since day one and reaped the benefits the huge following numbers brings.
3. They use list headlines to great effect
4. He wrote 7 blogs a day during his first year
5. Mashable is now posting 20 plus times a day in 2010
6. They break stories early from the source quite often in simple format.
7. Encouragement To Share On Social Media so consequently they have been early adopters of new social media sharing technology such as share buttons for Twitter, such as Retweet, Facebook share, Facebook like and others such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Delicious.
8. Bridge the gap between bloggers, social media, technology and also some of the the “famous people using social media such as Ashton Kutcher and Co.
9. They keep it simple so that almost everyone can read the articles
10. They run off line events that create community and tribe. Mashable says “A lot of the benefits from running events has been in terms of greater visibility for Mashable as a brand. We are connecting our audience to other members of the tech community, and people are going away and talking about Mashable.”
What other factors have made Mashable so successful?