There are so many blogs out there, you need to differentiate yours from the others. You need an angle or a “hook” to stand out and attract a loyal subscriber base.

One blog that has such a hook is Design Talk, a blog of helpful home decorating advice and tips do-it-yourself interior decorators, owned by HomeVisions, a DMSI brand. (By way of disclosure, DMSI is a client of ours and we built the blog for them.) DesignTalk’s “hook” is to share a wealth of home decor ideas that would rival any home decorating magazine.

But you can’t stop there. Being helpful is great, but you need to be memorable in terms of personality too. Whether you want your retail blog to be snarky, witty, professorial, egotistical to the point of humorous, self-deprecating, nihilistic, or voyeuristic, a great hook should either be written into every post or presented in such a way that it becomes unique for your brand.

One example of a retail blog that I think really nailed this concept is the Sparkle Like the Stars blog, owned by ice.com. Their blog is snarky, irreverent, fun, voyeuristic, trendy and useful — all at the same time! It’s like a celebrity gossip rag but with fashion advice that the average person can use to recreate a particular movie star’s look.

We at Netconcepts decided to follow in the footsteps of Sparkle Like the Stars to create a blog about celebrity footwear fashion we affectionately named, “The Shoe Paparazzi.” The idea behind it was to fuse a love for shoes with the “sport” of celebrity watching in order to capture and keep readers’ interest. At this point it’s still just an experiment, a pet project of Netconcepts that wasn’t commissioned by a client, but is something we hope can be used in the future to prove the case for the “celebrity watching hook” as a viable angle for online retailers. If you have the chance, I invite you to take a look at our “Shoe Paparazzi” blog experiment and let me know whether or not you think it has what it takes.

What about you? Does your brand / company have a blog, and if so, what’s your hook?