This week I want to take a look at Boing Boing, one of the most popular and profitable blogs in the world, and work out what makes it tick.

I’ll be discussing the content elements which have helped make Boing Boing so popular, and most importantly, explain ways we can adapt these strategies to our own content.

Wunderkammer content

The word is German for wonder-room, which is another way of referring to a cabinet of curiosities. In the Renaissance period certain wealthy men kept cabinets (or entire rooms) filled with strange and interesting objects from different parts of the globe. The cabinet would be the pride of its owner and a conversation point for visitors to his home.

Boing Boing’s tagline is “A directory of wonderful things.” It’s not hard to see how this is similar to a cabinet of curiosities. The blog itself is the cabinet and each new item of content is another addition to that cabinet of oddities.

This is great content because humans are naturally attracted to the strange, the unusual, and the remarkable. Each new item of content is a conversation point just like the items in a cabinet of curiosities. People will naturally want to link to these items in order to add to the conversation and to tell others about what they’ve discovered.

Steal this idea
You can create your own ‘Wunderkammer content’ by giving some attention to the more whacky, remarkable, strange, and spectacular aspects of your topic. These items are bound to be a conversation point for your blog’s readers, and can also be attractive to social bookmarking services. A lot of the content indexed by StumbleUpon is also Wunderkammer content.

Another popular blog using this type of content to great effect is kottke.org, though Jason Kottke does this in a different way to the authors at Boing Boing.

Free creative works

If there’s one basic rule about people it’s that they like to get — if you’ll allow me to put it a little crudely — cool stuff for free. The site’s authors are strongly in favor of ‘free culture’ — a movement pushing for creative works to be freely available as long as they’re used fairly.

Following on from this, Boing Boing often links to free things that people might usually charge for, but in this case have not. Some examples are: freely available chapters of novels, free comic books and eBooks, free services, free music, and so on. According to our love of cool stuff for free this kind of content has the potential to be explosively popular.

Steal this idea
This is not the kind of thing that you find all the time, but when you do, it’s worth taking note of it. Whenever you discover something which is free and related to your topic you might consider sharing it with your readers. You could also save it up to release all at once: a compendium of free resources related to your niche. The more you include at once, the greater your chances of being bookmarked by the reader.

A good example I can provide is something that will both illustrate the point and let you enjoy the benefits for yourselves. Chris Garrett offers a free eBook called Killer Flagship Content to everyone who subscribes to his feed. Flagship content essentially means content that will define your blog or website. I enjoyed the eBook and I’ve been enjoying Chris’s feed. You can subscribe here.

Using reader tips

A dedicated network of readers has the potential to contribute content rather than just passively consume it. If you browse the main page of Boing Boing, take note of how many stories came via reader tips (credited by a Thanks, #name! link at the end of the post).

Though the site is maintained by four full-time editors their eyes can’t be everywhere at once. Allowing readers to submit stories they think would make good content decreases the time the site’s authors need to spend scouring the web, builds a sense of community, and means content can be discovered from many new and varying sources.

Steal this idea
Make it easy for your readers to tip you with great content or interesting news they’ve found elsewhere. Boing Boing does this with a How To: Get a link posted to Boing Boing page. You could make your own page with guidelines on reader tipping. If that seems like overkill, include a paragraph on your About page letting readers know that you like to hear their suggestions on what to cover.

Any site which frequently updates with referral content (content that points the reader to something interesting elsewhere) should as a requirement allow reader tipping. You’re getting readers involved, cutting down your own work, opening up new sources of content and allowing your readers to have some time in the spot-light by crediting them as the source of what you found.

Boing Boing’s key elements of success

• Wunderkammer content that magnetizes attention
• Oddities and spectacles are conversation points and attract links
• Offers free creative works and resources
• Utilizes a dedicated network of tipsters

Can you translate these elements of success to your own content?