The Reminisces of Top Bloggers
Greetings, welcome back to the Hornet Editorial.
Have you ever wanted to be a Top Blogger? What does the job entail? Well, I talked with several avid Top Bloggers here on Chess.com and they told me their many good and bad experiences as a blogger plus a bunch numerous other things I had never known.
I and the other bloggers participating in this took the time to write an essay about what they have done, what they have seen, and what they have experienced. Their essays are superb pieces of work, and I hope you enjoy them.
- @HornetCruise
Foreword
Hey everyone, Don here. Aspiring bloggers and casual blog readers, we have a treat for you to read; The Reminisces of Top Bloggers. 6 of the best bloggers on Chess.com will be giving their experiences as writers: their struggles and failures, their successes and peaks. You'll learn how to start a blogging career and craft amazing blogs in essays written by these great writers. Hope you enjoy!
- @DonRajesh
Chapter I: Beginnings
Hello, my name is Artur, otherwise known as @HornetCruise here on Chess.com. I started blogging on October 12th, 2022. Why? Well, let us begin.
The inspiration for me to start blogging came when I read a post made by the now closed @CDRED141. He and his counterpart @CaptainHugh were making a blog series on how to run a club. It was a very well-done series, and I really liked it.
This inspired me to look for an interesting topic to make a post. I decided to write about the recent drama with Hans Niemann.
It was a pretty good (and pretty short) post in my opinion. @Lightning still regards the thumbnail as the best one I have ever made.
I consistently posted every two days for a long while, but I now post only every now and then. It was a great start, but I still had a huge learning curve to conquer.
- @HornetCruise
Hello, my name is @simaginfan, and I have been blogging for very nearly six years and in that time, I have posted more blogs than most!
I freely admit that I would never have started without the inspiration and support of my dear friend @kamalakanta. Why am I still doing it? Because I enjoy it! No other reason.
I became a top blogger simply because I was asked to, and there were those who felt that my efforts were worthy of attention – that was in the days when blogs were not featured in the way that they are today, and 'top blogger' was more or less an honorary title. To be honest the title has never meant very much to me. Back then you didn't have to worry about being muted, having your work deleted, etc. – such things have happened to me. There was no ego – who gets the most attention, most reads, etc. etc. At one point that all got really pathetic, and I suggested the current format of a link to top blogs with a rotating 'headline', which has significantly improved matters!!
- @simaginfan
Hello, my name is @colorfulcake, and I started blogging in the summer of 2021, mid-pandemic. That was almost 2 years ago but already feels like a lifetime away. In the summer, I was writing and annotating some of my best games all morning and afternoon after midday tennis practice, day after day after day. I still don't know whether or not I missed those times. However, it certainly motivated me to continue writing about different topics. The community boosted me, giving me lots of feedback and leaving positive comments on my posts. I began writing about a larger variety of things, but back then, it still mostly focused on game analysis. I would analyze immortal games or my readers' submitted games.
Soon I began documenting my personal chess progress. It wasn't the best topic for attracting viewers, but it did give me a place to put down my experiences in words and a place for me to look back at later. Throughout all of that, I scattered posts about openings, legendary games, and some advice posts. That period was definitely when I was an extremely prolific writer - I posted over 30 times in 3 months. I can't imagine doing that at all now; I've barely posted a few times in the past half-year.
When I started my series on the King's Indian Defense,
I just wanted to share my knowledge of my favorite opening and help others and myself improve. At the time, I had no idea that to produce high-quality educational posts, I had to actually do quite a bit of research and digging to find accurate information and provide the reader with the best possible view. I still think I made a lot of mistakes and could have made the posts much better, but what's done is done, and I learned from it.
After around 10 months of monthly KID posts, I suddenly stopped posting in June of 2022. Let's just say life interfered. If you want to know more, you can read my post about my 2022.
- @colorfulcake
Hello, my name is @anikolay and I have been blogging for close to 3 years, and in that time, I have experienced many ups and downs. I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours researching, writing, and thinking about the art of writing on chess.com, mostly for 1 simple goal… become a Top Blogger. With all of my climaxes and lows, here is my experience as a blogger.
It all started in June of 2020, the pandemic had pretty much just begun, and I took up the interest of chess. I was playing many rapid and blitz games for improvement, and my USCF was only 1100 at the time. One day I decided that it would be interesting to share my experiences with the world. Thus, my first blog, which was on rapid improvement, was formed. In the next few months, I kept writing about chess improvement, but I noticed that my blogs weren’t getting the attention that I was seeking. Sure, I loved what I did, but I wanted more people to view my work.
I found interest in blogging about chess drama and entertaining subjects, which is where I mostly went from then on. I continued improving gradually, and took up a great passion in writing. The COVID boom was spreading rapidly, meaning I had way more time to play/write about chess. However, my passion took a quick fall in March of 2021.
I just recently started writing about leagues (more specifically, the Competitive Stars League, which I’m not sure is active anymore), but I started having less interest in writing. After all, it did take up a large chunk of my time, and there was no point in doing it if I didn’t enjoy it. I took a long break, for about six months, where I mostly focused on my personal chess improvement and other work.
- @anikolay
Hi, my name is @Fire and I started blogging on March 26th, 2022. My motivation for making my first post was that I thought I could have a better understanding of an opening if I wrote down the principles and concepts- after all, it works for school, so why shouldn’t it work for chess? So that’s what I did.
I did not write for other people, I did not write for fame, I selfishly wrote so I could play better chess. And it worked. It was the first opening other than the queen's gambit where I actually remembered all of the little lines and all of the wacky sequences of moves. I was soon beating candidate masters and 1800s with my new knowledge, and it was undoubtedly the best learning experience I had with chess. At the time blogging was not a leisure activity, but rather a tool to get better at chess.
And I wanted more.
- @Fire
Hi, my name is Nimzo and I was inspired to begin blogging in September 2021 after reading the blogs of adept bloggers such as @Lightning, @Rodgy, and, @Colorfulcake. My first post was a sloppy, hastily thrown-together overview of the Polish Opening (which has since been deleted by yours truly 
.)
My writing was scatter-brained, and I struggled to both stay on topic and avoid lengthy word walls. At this point in time, I was merely blogging for fun and had no aspirations of attaining Top Blogger status or accomplishing anything through my writing.
I soon forgot this post and dropped blogging for the next few months until February of the next year, when I competed in my third ever OTB tournament. It was in the days after this event that @Lightning suggested that I write a recap of the tournament, something I had never really considered. So, I set to work and spent about a week writing my first OTB recap, which became this blog. Yet again however, I still didn't care much for blogging and soon forgot about this post. A few months later I played in another tournament and was eager to recap it. This blog was a very important turning point in my blogging career. Not only was it the first time I had put effort into a blog, but it was also the first time I had bothered to create a thumbnail to go alongside it.
This was the first moment in my blogging journey where I thought to myself,
Okay, obviously I still have a lot to improve on, but if I continue on this path maybe becoming Top Blogger is something that I could feasibly accomplish.
- @Nimzo-IndianaJones
Chapter II: The Learning Curve and The Peak
I could never tell you anything about my learning experience in the blogging community without mentioning BlogChamps. BlogChamps is a club run by @Lightning. They host a blogging competition where bloggers compete against each other not just to win, but to learn.
@Lightning and the other judges in BlogChamps (who are all Top Bloggers) helped me so much. The judges freely give feedback on posts and also freely give their advice on what you should improve on. Without their help, I probably wouldn't be a Top Blogger right now.
As a blogger you learn to be patient. Patient for success, patient for views, and patient for Chess.com to acknowledge your work.
I competed in BlogChamps in January and didn't even make it past the qualifying stage. This was disappointing, because I thought I was at a level where I could actually easily beat the competition.
It was humbling, and I decided to stop blogging for a month... but on February 8th, 2023, I became a Top Blogger.
The rest of it is pretty much history lol.
I would have to say I haven't reached my peak yet; my posts (in my opinion) keep getting better and better. You should definitely check out my favorite post though, click the image below:
- @HornetCruise
What have I learned? That depends on what. In general, I realized that if you want to create high-quality posts, you need to put in time and effort - that means research for some topics, heavy writing and brainstorming for others, and analyzing, playing, or reading for others. It isn't easy.
I'd have to say the peak of my blogging "career" (if you can even call it that) would be my most recent post about Mittens. It's by far my most-viewed post with a count of over 3,000.
To be honest, it's probably only that high because of all the rage that surrounded the cat bot recently.
- @colorfulcake
School was starting, over the board tournaments were back up and running, and I was back at blogging. With my new victories in OTB chess, I had plenty of new topics to write about. For some reason, the quality of my blogs “skyrocketed” after this break. Perhaps it was because of the countless school essays that I wrote during this period, who knows, but for now that isn’t important. I started publishing blog after blog, quickly improving with each one.
After nearly 2 years of hard work and dedication, I decided to take a risk and finally apply for Top Blogger.
Interestingly, being kept a secret until now, I actually applied for Top Blogger in early 2021, but because my blogs weren’t really Top Blogger quality (I didn’t think this at the time), so I wasn’t accepted. Now, after much improvement and thought, I decided to apply after about years. It was a long and suspenseful week, but right on Halloween night, just as me and my family were about to sit and watch a movie, I got a notification on my phone…
This is it, I would either spend the rest of my day, or even a week mourning Chess.com’s painful message, or I would achieve something that I have been working on for about a quarter of my life. I looked at my phone, and there it was, a message from Colin. “You are now a Top Blogger! Congratulations!” I threw my phone. I finally achieved perhaps my most important goal at the time! This was proof that, with enough hard work, anything is really possible.
The rest is history. I continued writing higher quality blogs, for a greater audience this time, and continue to do so till this day…
- @anikolay
I started making more content, like endgame studies and game analysis. I thought my blog was really good, so I applied for Top Blogger. I remember seeing in the application form that they only responded to people who got accepted, so I waited for the response. A few days later, they had not responded. After a week, they never sent me a message. I knew I didn't get Top Blogger.
So, I went searching in the chess.com archives for any tips to get better at writing. It was then that I found my true love- I mean a club called BlogChamps. It was meant to be a blogging competition, but at the time, it was a 30-member club run by only two top blogger super admins. I joined, but to my despair, it was extremely inactive and was getting one note a week.
It eventually started going, and when season one started, my blogging career was going really well. I never thought I actually would get far in the competition, I was mainly just in it to get feedback from Lightning, but either the competition was really weak, or I underestimated myself because I won season one of BlogChamps. The prize? I got to be top blogger. This was the pinnacle of my blogging career.
- @Fire
Over the next couple of months the real grind began. I started working on my two main weaknesses (my word walls and my thumbnails), and began spending more time on my drafts, ensuring that I only released the best possible content. I partook in two seasons of BlogChamps, where I was able to receive the constructive criticism of several Top Bloggers, as well as that of my talented contemporaries. Their advice was key to my improvement. Fast forward to February 2023, four blogs later, and I've applied a second time for Top Blogger. And on February 9th I got the message that I had been added as a Top Blogger, almost a year after I had begun to take my blogging seriously. Now not only do I look forward to releasing content to a larger audience of chess fanatics, but I also look forward to helping aspiring bloggers and offering the best advice to them as I can.
- @Nimzo-IndianaJones
Chapter III: The Angle and The Technique
For me, the "angle" I see blogging from has continued from October until now.
I just have fun with my writing. If I succeed, good. If I fail, even better. - Hornet
It sounds stupid, but it's the best way! If you can't take negative feedback, you won't survive long blogging. I always appreciate good feedback, but people who tell me what they didn't exactly like about a certain post makes me better, and I am glad of that 
As for my technique, I just write about whatever I think is interesting or fun. This topic (I hope) is interesting to you the viewer, because not as many will follow you or check out your topics if they are not interesting topics to read.
- @HornetCruise
The angle that I see blogging from has changed greatly over time. It used to simply be an intriguing pastime for me in the summer of 2021 in the empty pandemic summer days. It became a place for me to record my progress for myself and others later, and then with my KID series, a place to share and receive knowledge. After that, I have to admit, I started to cater more to the interests of the audience and readers instead of myself.
As for my technique for making my semi-decent posts... well, I don't really have a technique. I'm not a structured blogger like many other Top Bloggers and I don't really plan, organize, and brainstorm for my posts that much. I just think of a topic and essentially wish it into existence, typing out my thoughts and formatting, inserting media, analyzing, and doing all of those blogging things as I go, only editing and occasionally rewriting after most of it is finished. Not the greatest technique. If I had to give advice for a better technique, it would be to lay out everything you want to write about before you actually do it. Organize your thoughts and put them into a graphic organizer or something similar. It'll probably help a lot. Not that I would know.
- @colorfulcake
Chapter IV: The Struggle and Advice
The big struggle for me was being afraid of writing a bad post. It feels terrible to write something and then realize after you wrote "wow that sucked." I have made quite a few bad posts before, it wouldn't take to long for you to find them.
There were endless problems with the linked post above.
- Firstly, the thumbnail is in the incorrect format.
- The thumbnail was downloaded as a jpg file instead of png (rookie mistake lol)
- Short post, facts mostly compiled from another article.
- Word wall in the middle of the post
The list just goes on and on. While many would say...
Wow, how does someone write such a terrible post - Other people
I say...
Look how I went from that crappy post to where I am now
- Hornet
I learned a lot from my long drag of meh posts. After that, I would have to say my breakthrough came in December.
Incremental Time Controls was a pretty decent post. At that time, I had learned (to an extent) how to properly format a post.
After that, I really had no more struggle (except with procrastination lol).
My advice for all new and existing bloggers: Just have fun, go with it. Remember, blogging on Chess.com isn't a job, it's a hobby. Treat it that way. When you start taking blogging too seriously is when you fall apart. Don't do that.
Have fun, don't tear yourself up trying to make everything perfect, cause guess what: It will 99.9% of the time never be perfect.
Learn and have fun. Yup, that's all I have lol.
- @HornetCruise
When I first started, I had more time to spare than I do today and wrote a number of very large articles which were intended to be internet reference works. These days, with less time, I tend to just share the chess which I have been looking at.
So, advice for bloggers – the non-technical stuff (others with give you their thoughts on presentation, content, etc. I am sure.)
ENJOY IT FOR ITSELF. If you are not blogging because you enjoy it, don't bother.
Put effort into what you are writing. If you can't be bothered to make your blog the best it can be with the time available, why would you expect anyone to take the time to read it?
Be yourself. Blogging is not an academic exercise or a school exam paper. Share your personality and your pleasure in doing it.
Engage with your readers. If someone takes the time to comment on your work it is only polite to respond and to thank them. Many people have made wonderful contributions to my blogs in the comments, for which I am hugely grateful.
I am definitely not the teacher with my readers being a classroom of students. My blogs are basically me sitting in the pub with some friends, having a natter about chess over a beer or two, and having a good time.
- @simaginfan
On that note, my largest "struggle" with blogging would probably have to be time, at least currently. With so many things going on right now as a kid my age, I barely have any time to get in a few games and I honestly might have more time in school to play than I do at any other time. A few other problems I sometimes have are making thumbnails (which I sucked at, learned a bit, and suck slightly less at now), topic creation, and engagement.
Honestly, I don't believe that I'm the best person to come to for blogging advice, but I'll give it anyway. My biggest ticks in blogging are seeing messed up conventions (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.), word walls, and boring topics. To an extent, if you can remove all of that from your posts, you'll have a decent post, considering you have all of the other things such as the thumbnail down. I'm sort of a stickler for conventions although they're not the most important thing, but it makes your posts cleaner and easier to read for everyone. Nobody wants to read an essay like this, so if you're still here, remember to intersperse your posts with media like images, videos, diagrams, memes, or the like. It breaks text and keeps your reader engaged. Finally, give your reader something to enjoy.
I have done this horribly in the past. If you want to improve, you want to find topics that more people can enjoy. My KID posts are an example of something you should definitely NOT do if you want more readers. But if you just wanted to do what I did, then no problem. Be like me!
not really lol.
- @colorfulcake
I still see blogging as a way to learn more, but now about other news in chess and not just openings and endgames. If you are a new blogger reading this, go join BlogChamps, join the next season, and ask for feedback from the judges. That is how you become a top blogger. Take the advice to heart, and do not get discouraged if at first the judges do not like your posts.
- @Fire
As my journey unraveled, I released three more blogs, and then applied for Top Blogger. After a few days, I received valuable feedback from Chess.com's head director of written content, @ColinStapczynski, and found out my application had been rejected.
This was probably the hardest part of my blogging journey because up until this point I had thought that I was certainly worthy of the Top Blogger status, and I'd be accepted without a doubt. In retrospect, it's easy to see why I was rejected. All the thumbnails I used for my first five posts were garbage to be completely honest, and the text in my blogs didn't flow well and was full of long word walls.
This was a very humbling moment for me, and one that was extremely crucial to my blogging journey. It was hard for me to accept that most of the blogs I had posted up until that point were pretty bad, but I knew I needed to start from scratch, and put out new blogs. And so I did.
For new bloggers, I'd say it's important to pick a single topic to write about that you'll specialize in. It's important to not only be consistent with your blog subjects, but to also distinguish yourself from the crowd. Writing unique content is the easiest way to draw readers to your blog and to keep them hooked to your future posts. As for actually writing your blog, my best advice is to find a quiet environment when you're writing and once you begin flowing the writing will come naturally.
- @Nimzo-IndianaJones
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this, and now have a grasp at what you need to kick off your blogging ventures.
I would also like to give a big thank you to @anikolay, @Fire, @colorfulcake, @Nimzo-IndianaJones, @simaginfan, and @DonRajesh for contributing to this post!
Thanks again and happy blogging,
- @HornetCruise
