Blogging is no different when it comes to the IT factor. You know IT when you see it, read it, hear it, taste it, smell it…etc. The IT factor is something that you really can’t explain, you just KNOW. It is why some things get instant notice and go viral and others no matter how good are just missing the “IT” that would make it become an instant success.
As a blogger I often find myself looking for the IT factor in my posts, not only my own but the articles written by my staff. I have seen several of my writers have breakout success articles that exceeded my wildest hopes for an article, one writer in particular I paid more than $120 in performance payments for a single article over the course of 8 months. This is because the article just kept delivering traffic by the thousands, month after month and caused a huge spike in AdSense earnings just from the traffic it brought in.
Blogging for the IT Factor
When blogging I can translate the IT factor into being something that stands out in a readers mind, either you solved a problem that many had, or you provided a unique perspective that many were looking for in your article. Each article is important and you have to strive to provide meaning to your article. Each article you should have a goal of what you want your reader to takeaway from this article, ask yourself this:
What do I want my reader to have gained after reading this article?
Is it information about a product or service that you want to sell? Is it leaving with a chance to win something? Is it having a solution to a problem that was plaguing them?
The other thing you need is to measure how successful your article was at providing what you wanted your reader to gain from it. This comes many different ways and can be measured by # of conversions if you are selling a product from the article, # of visitors to the article, # of comments which are engaging and clearly for the article and not a backlink…etc.
Read your own article from the mindset of a new unique reader stumbling on it, see if they would have gained everything needed in a clear, concise way. Articulation is everything and you must make sure you write only the number of words you need to to get the information across, don’t overstuff your articles and don’t leave any thing out that would help make your article have the IT factor that a rushed article would.
Your blog is your voice and why would you mute it? You want to be heard and you want to be heard clearly, so leverage all of your personality when writing articles. You will become a better writer and blogger if you keep thinking about your article IT factor and remembering to write for the reader and not just for the sake of writing (or trying to make profit from a affiliate product review).
Image Credit: sxc.hu
IT factor in blogging, very nice and totally new topic as I never heard it before. Thanks Justin for opening my closed mind. In fact I read your this post twice and feel honored to have IT factor in blogging. Before that I thought it’s just a hobby with no big thing but now I am also a blogger with IT factor. Thanks and good luck
Thanks Ejaz and good luck on your ventures as a blogger, remember to be open and establish trust with readership, never push or promote a product you don’t stand 100% behind.
It’s definitely a lot of ways to improve. When I write my essays and articles my aim is to win my audience to present them my ideas in the most professional way. I thing that it’s all about being unique and just dedicated to what you are doing. It’s not about PR or Keywords mostly but more about your audience. Just check out the Bodyrock site people adore that girl and she is so popular because she is unique!!!
Unique and memorable is so key, being honest, open and engaging is important. I rarely if ever write for keywords, but I do try to make sure whatever I write about has a fair amount of keyword optimization usually after I finish writing the post and before I publish it.
the beauty of the Internet is that there is always something new to learn from others, while having a humble and teachable mindset in being a better blogger. Today, I focus more on creating meaningful content. Because I want my readers to feel where I am coming from, with content published to my site. Additionally, I want my content to be valuable to people, whereas they feel encouraged to come back for more in the future. While I don’t know much about the “IT factor”, I look forward to learning more from basic blog tips 🙂
Don’t ignore video content, it is the future of reaching out to readers and if you haven’t started a YouTube channel connected to your blog you should sooner than later. Introduce yourself and let readers put a face to a blog and they will get to know you and connect at a level more important than simply reading words on a page.
Drewry keep da “puters puting”, when it comes to online video. I’m flooding the YouTube block every day with new videos from “delicious hibachi Szechuan lunch”, every, eat at the buffet restaurant… LOL 🙂
Good post Justin and I like the way you explain the “IT” factor – you can’t really explain it, you just know it when you see it. I will have to focus more on letting my personality come through on my posts. I think this is a key difference maker especially in crowed niches like tech and blogging tips. There are so many sources for people to get there info you need to attract and retain the readers somehow.
Right, I have a post coming up soon about the difficulty in tech blogging where you don’t have the inside information from the big tech giants like the media and giant blogs do, so you have no choice but to be on top of trends, unique insights and opinions to stand out from just spouting guesses and repeating breaking news articles from TechCrunch and other tech sources.
The “IT” factor is something hard to explain, it’s really more of a gut feeling that you sense through experience. I can look at plenty of blogs and know they don’t have “IT”, but it’s much harder to say what they can add that would give them the “IT” factor. In my own writing, I’ve tried to stop forcing some sort of “IT” reaction, as I find it seems to come on it’s own.
It does come on it’s own, and sometimes when I read one of my writer’s articles and realize it “moves” me in a way that I didn’t expect I feel a sense of joy. Sometimes I think an article is great and get disappointed when it doesn’t perform, so in not all cases the “IT” factor for one person is the same for another too. Everything is subjective.
Nice post. We call it the ‘IT’ factor because it’s hard to explain what ‘IT’ is. You did a nice job of taking ‘IT’ and breaking down just what ‘IT’ could be.
Thanks, as mentioned above the IT is subjective and means different things to different people, also some people see IT and others don’t on the same post/video. It is like art, different perspectives and different levels of appreciation exist. The key is finding your audience and fans.
That is the advantage of the internet , to be honest I don’t have any idea about this IT factor until you have explained it well, I keep on hearing about this IT factor but I don’t get the main point here. but thanks anyway, you have answered my questions I need regarding on IT Factors.
In every industry there is an IT factor, it isn’t the most talented musicians who become famous it is the ones who have something special, charisma or “IT” which leads them to become marketable successes. In most “Entertainment or Arts” fields more than any other, experience and ability don’t lead to the most successful or popular in most cases.
Thanks for explaining this well Justine, at first I don’t have any idea about this IT factor. its not about the field we are expert on. it about how we can be successful. am I right?
Yes, successful by being different, unique, standing out and having something that readers connect with. It isn’t easily definable, but having a personality injected into your writing helps stand out and get remembered, shared and noticed.
Nice to have you combined all together with IT. I’m training myself hard to become a better writer from time to time. But I have admitted, it takes me so much time to change.
Just recently, I realized I was working too hard which ended not very much good result because I tried to write on a paper with 2 small paragraphs and was all mixing up. Tense I was used; structure sentences….
So I think it’s better to put my voice in there to make natural and slowly improve it afterward.
Write, think it out, talk it out. I know many bloggers who dictate into a recorder to better formulate what they want to say and then type it out after they play it back to themselves. Find out how you communicate best and then use that medium to help improve your communication with readers.
Each blog should possess a charisma (you call it an IT factor) that triggers the emotion and the interest of the readers. This is done by making sure to know what the reader wants and not just based your writing on your personal interest. After all you are not writing for yourself but for the readers. Great post!
Thank you, and the beauty of blogging is that Charisma comes in many forms, some have more charisma doing vlogging, others with pure writing while others in Social Media, find out where you seem to draw attention and leverage your best communication medium to help increase attention and fans.
Again- there is this belief that you should have a new blog post everyday to keep your readers from getting bored. This is partially when guest blogging is becoming more attractive for blog owners. Make it difficult to give each blog a good solid informtive centre.
You don’t need to blog every day, but you should have at least one or two posts per week at a minimum if blogging is your primary function, if you are in services and blog on the side then once every week or two is fine as long as the posts are engaging and provide detailed benefit. At one point on DragonBlogger.com I was doing 2-3 posts per day to keep up momentum but recently pulled back to 1 and sometimes 2 posts per day average.
I am unaware of IT factors importance however after reading that post comes to know how important this is? thanks Justin for keeping us up to date about our blogs and other important things.
Great advice. I sometimes need to be reminded to write with more passion. Because let’s face it, after a while its all starting to be routine and we fall in this writer’s trap. Creating content just for the sake of creating content and getting pages indexed.
Very true, it is important to inject personality into articles. This is what I look for in my writers that I hire as well, people willing to have individual personalities that mesh with the site and where readers can latch on and become fans of their work and differentiate their articles from my own.
My blog does not really have the “it” factor (although I wish it did.) I think I need to further improve on my writing skills and just plain learn how to get my creative juices flowing to come up with unique content. Although some of my posts might be about things folks have never heard of, I have a lot of work to do as far as making it interesting to read and more entertaining rather than boring.
There is a way to turn legitimate business information such as your austin home loans site and get your articles more “energy”. These can be catchy headlines that keep up with the local real estate news, times and inviting people to share their positive stories (I know too many would have negative stories at this point).
Chris,
I think it’s pretty much safe to say that I too need to brush up on my writing skills on the World Wide Web. The beauty of the Internet is that business does not go away, when we unintentionally use bad grammar, improper spelling, as well as other things that may raise an eyebrow from site visitors. As we get more experience with our online businesses, our writing improves automatically. This is the beauty of being in on line entrepreneur 🙂
I agree, to illustrate this even more I wrote a post back in 2010 that wasn’t very popular, 1 year later the post got 10k pageviews in one month all because what I wrote about suddenly became of huge interest a year later. You never know when something written can be found and gain notice later on.
With constantly changing innovations and ideas generated through the Internet, it is easy for anybody to start up a business online with IT factor or not.
this is very true and also the reason why it pays to create content and learn along the way, in efforts of being a better online entrepreneur 🙂
Learning along the way is key, nobody stops developing and learning in any field.
this is very true, Justin. That’s the reason why I keep humble and a teachable mind in learning from others because I too am a student of life 🙂
Hm.. That’s a very nice explanation, mate. Thanks a lot for sharing this.
I love blogging and writing unique content. As a matter fact, I’m going to write an article today and submitted for inclusion into a directory. Who else writes and submits articles everyday ? 🙂
yes, going back and emphasising key points helps, breaking sections into decent sized paragraphs, and have a good conclusion to help sum up what you have just said so it will stay in the readers mind
After reading your Article I can say that we must have IT factor in our writing so that we can deliver the actual message which we wanted to convey..
Solving the queries of reader is called the real Skill or we can say IT Factor !! 😉
You are absolutely right, if your article solves the readers question they will be grateful.
Justin, the “IT” factor is indeed central to virality. A humorous piece of mine (below) brought in a week’s worth of traffic in one day, and doubled my traffic in the days preceding. The IT factor in this case (apparently) was its relevance to St. Patrick’s day. It appealed to the search engines, so not viral in the usual sense, but it relied on a burst of human interest. Still a trickle of hits, too.
It is a cool topic, I did a post about Funny Retirement Home names and another about 10 worst jobs and they brought in a lot of traffic. Personality and posts that connect with people, culture, traditions and entertainment can be powerful tools.