Frank Warren
PostSecret
PostSecret is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon that offers useful lessons for bloggers of all stripes. Frank Warren’s success is based on honesty and respect, as well as an intuitive, transcendent understanding of communication. From those tenets come the following basic rules that can be applied to any blog:
A blog offers an immediacy that is not available in any other form of individual media.
Treat comments from others with respect, and they will reciprocate in future comments.
The strength of successful blogs is their authenticity. Let content, rather than personality, rule your blog.
If it is to succeed, a blog must focus on something the blogger is passionate about.
If you make posting a regular event, people are more likely to return.
A simplistic page design is usually better than a complicated design. Try to make your page as close to pure content as possible, and avoid overwhelming your readers with too much content at once.
Comments to blog posts can be used to spot trends.
PostSecret
“Don’t start blogging for money; start blogging because of your passion.”
Nearly everyone has heard the story of Frank Warren’s community art project, PostSecret. How, in late 2004, he started handing out stamped postcards with his address on them. The cards were blank, and as he gave them to random strangers at Metro stops and elsewhere around Washington, D.C., he invited them to anonymously send him a secret—any secret. He further explained that the cards would be part of a community art project, and secret submitters were encouraged to decorate the cards however they wished.
The project culminated in a display at an art gallery in Washington, D.C. The display was gone after four weeks, but the postcards kept coming. Hundreds every week.
PostSecret is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon that offers useful lessons for bloggers of all stripes. Frank Warren’s success is based on honesty and respect, as well as an intuitive, transcendent understanding of communication. From those tenets come the following basic rules that can be applied to any blog:
A blog offers an immediacy that is not available in any other form of individual media.
Treat comments from others with respect, and they will reciprocate in future comments.
The strength of successful blogs is their authenticity. Let content, rather than personality, rule your blog.
If it is to succeed, a blog must focus on something the blogger is passionate about.
If you make posting a regular event, people are more likely to return.
A simplistic page design is usually better than a complicated design. Try to make your page as close to pure content as possible, and avoid overwhelming your readers with too much content at once.
Comments to blog posts can be used to spot trends.