The “How to Blog” Blog Response

Copyright to whoever made this cartoon.

It looks as though this Farhad Manjoo guy decided to write an article in Slate giving us fellow bloggers some worthy advice. There are some nuggets of goodness here: Probably one of his most valuable key points is the fact that bloggers must post on a regular basis. The blogosphere contains this massive–and I do mean massive–waste land of blogs where the author only wrote maybe two or three posts and then got distracted by a monkey or something. I have been guilty of this.

Also, Manjoo raises a very good point that a blogger needs to arrive at their “thesis” (that’s a scary word, so I’ll use the term “main point” from here on out) in the opening sentence. There must be a main point to every post, and it is true that most readers probably won’t read beyond the first paragraph unless they are incredibly interested. I rarely read past the first couple sentences of many blog posts unless I do find something interesting.

Another valuable point: You probably aren’t going to become famous. Also, if your blog does have potential, it will take a year or so to really get any eyeballs focusing  on your page. That’s just the truth. That’s why there are so many dead blogs. People don’t become famous after lame-post-number-two and simply give up.

This article does give some very practical advice. Other key points do include writing in a conversational style–don’t write like Thomas Hardy. Don’t spend too much time proofing–just get writing. Even if you don’t really gain anything from blogging commercially, you’ll at least have some good practice in writing. That’s another reason to like yourself.