One of the delegates who attended a course I ran, a little while ago, told me about the ZenHabits site. He said he had known the person who runs the site and since it is in the same genre as mine, I should check it out. Today I decided to do that. The site is run by Leo Babauta who says that his blog has twice been listed as one of the top 25 blogs in the world by Time – very impressive.
That makes it an interesting blog for me to study because, as you know, it’s time for me to play in the bigger pond, and this guy is already there. So here are my first observations:
The Site was started in Jan 2007, so it is just over 4 years old. If you were wondering how long it takes to succeed online, that’s a nice indicator. My own site is just over 8 years old and, although I am listed in the top 100,000 sites in the world according to Alexa, it is not nearly as successful as ZenHabits.
According to Alexa, global rankings:
ZenHabits: 6,807
My Blog: 73,252
That makes ZenHabits the 6,807th most popular site in the world. Of course, my own ranking is not to be sniffed at. But here is a guy who is 10 times more effective than me and he has been at it for about half as long. So what is it that he is doing that I am not?
First off, let’s take a look at his posting habits. He writes posts of between about 500-1,000 words in length. The frequency of posting is right now nothing out of the ordinary, in fact, it is currently less than daily. But when he started, his blogging frequency was very impressive indeed. In the second month of operating his blog, he wrote 68 posts, that’s an average of just better than two per day.
He managed to keep up a very high blogging rate of about 2 posts per day on average for well over a year before he started finally slowing down at the end of 2009, so that represents two full years of solid effort at approximately twice my own output rate for my blog. There’s a message in there for us bloggers 
He has a very nice ‘Start Here’ section. This not only providers readers with a nice experience, it no doubt improves his navigability and/or link structure for the search engines. So this is something I will definitely be doing too. His simple ‘Subscribe’ Link is also very nice. Again, this is something I can adopt very easily and will probably test.
The site is entirely reader supported which essentially means that he manages to sell enough of his own books to make it all work for him. Though, I notice he is an Amazon affiliate and he also runs his own affiliate program too.
As for content, Leo writes well and with passion. Like me, he does not seem to choose titles for search engine purposes and, again like me, he does not write keyword rich content with SEO in mind. I am glad to see that. I never wanted to do it and always wanted to write for people, not primarily for Google. So it seems that my approach is fine in this respect.
So what’s my main take-away from this analysis? I think the blogging frequency is the main difference between what he was doing and what I am now doing. There may be other things about his blog setup that are not entirely apparent to me, but that is the main thing I noticed.
When I think back to my article on the difference between average and excellent (see Life Lesson #1) it has certainly got me wondering.
