27 Lessons About Blogging

1. Help people solve a problem and differentiate yourself
2. Be prepared to invest 2-3 years before seeing any serious returns
3. Make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to your RSS feed
4. Offer a full feed
5. A bad post is worse than no post
6. Be prepared to completely run out of ideas after the first 3-4 months
7. It’s not always what you know, who you know is important too
8. Write catchy headlines and list posts
9. Make the opening paragraph as compelling as possible
10. Courteously encourage friends, family, and casual acquaintances to vote up and link to your posts
11. Don’t write every post for the social sites
12. Listen carefully to every piece of feedback but don’t be a slave to it
13. Experiment. Take chances. Piss a few people off
14. Always look for a different angle
15. Don’t participate in every meme or trade links with everyone who asks
16. Write about your life in a way that’s relevant to your topic
17. Make people think
18. Don’t be anxious to plaster Google Ads all over the place
19. Design matters
20. Posting comments on other blogs is overrated
21. Respond to your commenters
22. Obsessively reading other blogs and checking traffic stats are not productive activities
23. Once you have a bit of success don’t flaunt it
24. Make use of blog carnivals
25. Display your best posts on every page
26. Read blogs about blogging
27. Do what works for you