Thinking out of the “text is king” blogging box

I always focus on creating new content. So are the majority of bloggers. And that is what majority of the blog advice sites suggest. Write great content consistently and grow your blog and audience that way.

And great content is usually seen as text. A lot of text. I have now written 108 posts with some 500+ words on average per post on this blog since late October 2008.

Informing, entertaining, inspiring

People follow blogs to be informed, entertained, and inspired. Your content must clearly address at least one of these needs. My blog, and majority of blogs, are here to inform and inspire people. But have we neglected entertainment too much?

I have already written about how video blogging can give you unique perspective into a saturated world of text blogging. But there is a new trend - picture blogs. Picture blogs with an aim to entertain the visitors.

Picture blogs to the top

Several picture blogs have been launched, made it big and got book deals in a record amount of time. The bloggers of picture blogs are usually relying on the readers to contribute the majority of the content.

The blogger comes up with a good idea, puts it online on a blogging platform, and then lets the readers be contributors, and lets them provide the majority of the content. The blogger is basically the editor that compiles all the best material and publishes it on the blog.

These picture blogs are very viral and do very well in social media and get thousands of visitors from Digg, StumbleUpon etc. It is not unusual that they get millions of visitors just weeks after the creation of the blog.

Getting book deals

The viral popularity of these blogs gets them on the radar of the publishing industry and at least 8 books created from user-contribution, picture blogs would be published during the year.

One of the first releases, “I Can Has Cheezburger?”, a book of cat photos with bizarre captions, has sold more than 100,000 copies. And the blog domain name was registered as late as January 2007. Examples of popular picture blogs:

• I can has cheezburger? – http://icanhascheezburger.com/
• Pets who want to kill themselves – http://petswhowanttokillthemselves.com/
• This is why you’re fat – http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/

Think of pictures for your future projects

Looking at these blogs, they get lots of comments, lots of reader interaction, tweets and diggs. There definitely is a huge interest and a huge audience for the entertainment blogs. And the job seems easier than writing a lot of text several times a week.

So my advice is, whatever your next blogging project is, try to think a bit out of the “writing a lot of text content” box. Can something be said better with pictures? Maybe with video? Is your audience willing to contribute with the content?