The Seven Tests Every Blog Must Pass

For months, I researched what blogs succeed and fail, and I found seven criteria or “tests” every blog passes before it becomes popular.
And here’s the thing:
To have a viable blog, you need to pass all seven tests. If you can’t, your blog will never succeed, no matter how hard you try.
On a more positive note, passing all seven of these tests practically guarantees you can build a popular blog. All that’s left is doing the work to make it happen.
Ready to find out what the tests are?
Here you go:

1. Size. The vast majority of popular blogs have a total market size of at least 5 million people. And that’s a minimum. Most top 100 blogs have a total market size of 200 million or more. To be clear, that’s not how many readers they have. That’s how many readers they could have if everyone with an interest in the topic read their blog.
2. Age. The vast majority of blog readers are between the ages of 30 and 55. If you’re targeting an audience younger or older than that window, such as teenagers or baby boomers, it’s almost impossible to build a popular blog, simply because these people don’t like reading blogs. Not yet, anyway.
3. Longevity. Because blogs publish content on an ongoing basis, you need an audience that has an ongoing interest. Ideally, it’s a topic like personal finance or social media that changes all the time, and so people want to read about it forever. What you don’t want is a topic like wedding planning or pregnancy, because people are only interested in those subjects for a few months.
4. Language. In general, blogging as we know it is confined to the English language. Yes, it’s totally possible to build a popular blog in Japanese or Spanish, but the traffic techniques are totally different, and it’s much, much more difficult. In my opinion, it’s far more efficient to use other more traditional methods to build the audience, such as advertising.
5. Network. For a blog to really take off, you need an audience who is networked with each other through social media. Moms talk with each other on Facebook, foodies hang out on Pinterest, bloggers and journalists are big on Twitter. As a result, they are easy to reach. If your audience isn’t hanging out on a particular social media platform, on the other hand, it’s almost impossible to get any traffic.
6. Influencer. If a blog topic is viable, you pretty much always find influencers who have already built up their own audiences in the space. Sometimes they are bloggers, sometimes they are podcasters, sometimes they are best-selling authors. The key point: with a little research, you can easily find 5-10 influencers or “thought leaders” already dominating the space. If you can’t find any, there’s always a reason why, and it’s never good.
7. Desirability. Last but certainly not least, you need to like the audience. Surprisingly, this is the number one reason a blog stalls out following a period of rapid growth. After attracting a small audience, the blogger discovers they can’t stand them, and they stop writing because it’s not fun anymore. The moral of the story: make sure you like the people you are trying to attract because you’ll be hanging out with them for years.