Julie & Julia: How Her Blog Succeeded

Last name, my wife and I (on our weekly “date night”) went and saw the movie Julie & Julia.  I would have personally liked to see Inglourious Basterds, but I didn’t put up a fight.  (I have tons of fond memories watching Julia Childs with my grandmother.) I thought the movie was great and Meryl Streep does deserve an Oscar for her performance.  (Amy Adams is pretty cute, too!)

This is not meant to be a movie review, though.  I wanted to talk about the “blog” concept that this whole movie was based around.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, it is based a woman (Julie Powell) who loved Julia Childs cooking and chose to cook every single recipe in her book within one year…and blog about it.  This was back in 2002.

The punchline line is that she did it and throughout the year became a mini-blogging celebrity.  Her popularity lead to book details, public appearances (and of course, a movie:  Julie & Julia).

(I hate to be a spoiler-alert here, but this important to my point! - Stop reading if you don’t know to hear more…)

Anyway, Julie never meets Julia and finds out that Julia Childs was not happy with the blog.  She felt that the blogger (Julie) had used the popularity of her own branded name to make herself popular.

You know what, I totally believe that!

This whole story made perfect sense to me, especially at the time it occurred (early 2000s).  This is really the “beginning” of blogs.  That was her first advantage.  Second, she chose to devote the theme of her blog to Julia Child.

That is where the difference was made!

Think about it…Julie was writing a blog during a time when blogs were not well known, yet highly influential to the search engines. Second, you pound out 300 plus posts on the topic of Julia Childs and you are VERY LIKELY (especially then) to rank for every “Julia Childs” keyword under the sun.

If she wrote her blog about “general cooking”, do you think she would have been this successful?  Probably not.  But the term “Julia Childs” would be highly searched due to her own branding.  Essentially, she leveraged the power and search of the term “Julia Childs” to create her own celebrity.

Now I am pretty sure she did not do this intentionally, but you can see that without this branded name as the theme of her blog, she would not have probably made it.  In fact, the tactic is quite common these days to leverage the name of a profitable, highly searched term to bring targeted traffic to one’s own blog.

I bring this up because there is a “huge” lesson to be learned here, especially those who are just starting off in blogging:  Consider leveraging off of others to bring interest.  Running a generic blog about cooking might be great (and even better than Julie/Julia Project Blog), but it is this added twist of drawing the attention of others (including search engines) that may be the ultimate key to success.

cheers…matt