The 31-DBBB at problogger.com day 4 'task' is analyzing top blogs in one's niche. I do so here, defining niche as 'ASP.NET'.
What do these blogs have in common (content wise)? Stuff they focus on, and what people like and as more of, are:
They cover ASP.NET topics with a fairly tight focus. Coding Horror is an exception in that this ranges more broadly across the programming landscape (& history), but the stuff is written so well, it's almost mandatory. Janko at Warp speed is focused on the graphical side, but that's cool as well, as it is an area I'm fairly weak.
All blogs are focused on providing something useful to the user - mostly in a direct fashion. They assume a fairly high level of knowledge from the user, but speak informally. They post at most once a day, more often with 3-7 days in between. Announcements are either really short or they are long and immediately applicable. The sites are mostly additional discussion medium(forum, twitter) free - interestingly (comments are possible though).
Topics with immediately applicable items (downloads, usable code) get the most responses, topics with hot news get the most social network logs. Questions from commentors are mostly on how to apply examples in their specific situation, or commiseration. Kudo's for interesting writing and though-provoking are also possible.
Designs vary from clean/white-ish to extremely bold. Clean/whitish is normal in developer land, but can cometimes feel a little disjointed (IMHO). All sites offer feeds (some with feedburner.com), many have ads, many have social site linking options, some have sponsors. Many promote (self-written) books. I believe there's some amazon affiliation going on as well.
Coming from a SEO, these people have their meta covered, but (due to the nature of blogging platforms) violate a bunch of rules concerning external scrips and amount of links (google tech guidelines).
All in all, analysis is a learning experience - which is the whole point. Go read some of these!
Edit: Tx for the dotnetkicks, people! If new visitors want to kick as well, here's a handy button. See the traffic spike dotnetkicks gave this blog.
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