Best blogs send audience away

Jeff Jarvis writes “The problem with portals is that they aren’t portals at all. …They want to lure you in and then not let you leave.”

When Yahoo was young, cofounder Jerry Yang told me that his site’s job was to get you in and out as quickly as possible. That certainly changed. Now Yahoo licenses and creates content and services to keep you in front of its ads as long as possible; it is known for collecting and not sharing traffic. I say that Yahoo is the last old-media company – still trying to get viewers to come to it – but it is successful because it is unencumbered by presses, towers, talent contracts, and other media legacies…….

Contrast this with Google, which does still try to get you in and out quickly. It makes a fortune by putting targeted ads on many of the sites it sends you to. Thus its potential is unlimited, for the more content there is, the more Google has to organize, the more we need Google to find what we want, the more its ads can appear everywhere, and the more it earns.

Some of the best blogs are what Buzz Bruggeman describes as intelligence agents. They post what they believe would be of interest to their target audience. Look at Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion or Dave Winer’s Scripting News. Read their blogs. They cover the globe for their readers by sharing via links what they read and hear. Mixed in you’ll get their strong commentary.

LexBlog still gets clients saying they want all links on their blogs to open a new window. Why? Because they fear people will leave their blog. Is that nuts or what?

Want to tick people off? Have your links open new windows. Have users click to a number of links on your blog so they now have 8 or 9 windows open. Make it difficult to browse because the back button can’t be used to browse because every link is a new window. You’ll have people unsubscribing from your blog in a New York minute.

Your blog is not going to become all things to all people on a niche topic. If that’s your goal, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Be a success by sending your audience to what’s of value to them. That’ll guaranty they’ll keep coming back to you for more.