The 2 Ultimate Secrets to Blogging Like a Rock Star (Hint: it's Not What You Want to Hear)

Warn­ing: The post below assumes you want to get bet­ter at blog­ging. If you’re blog­ging just for fun (hell, I am), this rant is not for you. It also con­tains snarky arro­gance, so don’t read it if you’re not pre­pared to admit how wrong you are and how right I am about every­thing. Namaste.

Forget about sure-fire tips to wild blog­ging suc­cess, there are really only two secrets to be a suc­cess­ful blog­ger and I’ve found them:

1. Write well.

2. Or be a cute and nubile girl who blogs lots of pho­tos of herself.

To every­one else who says you don’t need to write well to be a good blog­ger: that’s bloody stu­pid (cute and nubile girl photo-bloggers excluded). Blog­ging is a writ­ten medium and it is read. To say you don’t need to write well to cre­ate good read­ing is like say­ing you don’t have to cook well to make a good meal. To be good at your art invari­ably demands that you be good at your craft.

And this is art. Not Art with a cap­i­tal ‘A’ that involves a lot of what-the-fuck moments, feigned under­stand­ing and pompous exclu­sion. But art because when it’s done well, it involves cre­ativ­ity, thought, and hope­fully adds to the world of the per­son who’s read­ing it. Not uncon­sid­ered word vomit.

Web 2.0 Doesn’t Kill Good Writing

But Alvin, this is blog­ging! It’s not stodgy old lit­er­a­ture or dusty cob­webbed print jour­nal­ism. It’s Web 2.0 now, gramps, so suck it up and deal.

Well, fuck me. The arrival of blog­ging kills the craft of writ­ing as much as the arrival of MP3s killed the craft of music. Don’t con­fuse the medium for the mes­sage. The fun­da­men­tals of qual­ity work don’t change. A weblog is sim­ply a tech­no­log­i­cal tool that helps you pub­lish your work online eas­ily with­out hard-coding and FTP-ing. Sim­ply put, a blog is an easy-to-use dig­i­tal pen.

Just like a more expen­sive cam­era won’t auto­mat­i­cally make you a bet­ter pho­tog­ra­pher, a new pen won’t auto­mat­i­cally make you a bet­ter writer. Pens don’t write words, peo­ple write words. And you’re stuck with you, no mat­ter which social media is your choice of poison.

As John Gru­ber says so succinctly;

The entire quote-unquote “pro blog­ging” indus­try — which exists as the sort of pim­ply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO indus­try — is pred­i­cated on the notion that blog­ging is a mean­ing­ful verb. It is not. The verb is writ­ing. The for­mat and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

This is what pisses me off so much about peo­ple who pro­claim the com­ing of blogs/Facebook/Twitter as the sec­ond, third and fourth com­ing of the Inter­net that will rev­o­lu­tion­ize your life. Does it change your life? Hell yes. Does it make you more com­pelling just because you now have a louder micro­phone? Hell no. The Inter­net is not a magic pill. You’ll become awe­some by becom­ing awe­some, not by press­ing a button.

Or become awe­some by upload­ing lots of pho­tos of your­self (hint: doesn’t work if you’re not cute, nubile and female).

Notice the awe­some­ness of this blog just explode by five times? ‘Nuff said.

What if I’m not Cute & Nubile or I am and I Just Want to be Twice as Awesome?

‘Write well’ is a blan­ket term that’s easy to say and harder to define. Mer­lin Mann prob­a­bly put it best when he said:

Topic times voice. Or, if you’re a lit­tle bit more of a mav­er­ick, obses­sion times voice. So what does that mean? I think all of the best non­fic­tion that has ever been made comes from the result of some­one who can’t stop think­ing about a cer­tain topic — a very spe­cific aspect of a cer­tain topic in some cases. And sec­ond, they got really good at fig­ur­ing out what they had to say about it.

Topic, inter­est or obses­sion is your thing. What you love is some­thing you find on your own – that’s all you. To write well, ‘voice’ can be bro­ken down into tech­nique and opin­ion. Tech­nique with­out opin­ion leads to stal­e­ness, while opin­ion with­out tech­nique leads to inel­e­gance. Nobody can help you with opin­ion if you don’t have one, but luck­ily there are many sources for technique.

Pick up On Writ­ing Well: The Clas­sic Guide to Writ­ing Non­fic­tion by William K. Zinsser or On Writ­ing by Stephen King. Lis­ten to John Gru­ber & Mer­lin Mann’s Blog­ging Panel at SxSW ’09. Then dive in and do your darnest. Think about what you want to say with each post. Be as orig­i­nal as you can. Try dif­fer­ent ways of arrang­ing your words. Think about how this post adds or doesn’t add to your reader’s life. Let your draft rest for a cou­ple of days before re-reading it again and see what new ideas turn up. Edit and trim your work so you pub­lish a pol­ished piece not a hasty first draft.

You take care of the way you present your­self for an impor­tant date, why not do the same for the words you present to the rest of the world? Good writ­ing is a plea­sure to read, and you want to show the peo­ple who visit your online house a good time, not stick them in the barn and feed them rot­ten cabbage.

I know I sound like an elit­ist arro­gant smart-ass writing-Nazi, but the last thing I want to do is scare any­one away from try­ing a new cre­ative endeavor. Hav­ing worked in cre­ative fields all my life, I know how reward­ing the cre­ative act can be and how daunt­ing it can look like to out­siders – when cre­ativ­ity is really just prac­tice, work, try­ing and falling and try­ing again. Don’t assume you have to be a licensed ‘cre­ative pro­fes­sional’ to be cre­ative, I’ve seen enough of clue­less pro­fes­sion­als and astound­ing ama­teurs’ work to know different.

Yes, it can be really hard at times (and I’ve fallen off the band­wagon so many times), but when you make some­thing you can be proud of, it pays off so many times over. And there’s no bet­ter time to try this than now, when the means to broad­cast your voice to the entire world can be both easy and free with just a Word­Press or Twit­ter sign-up.

And have fun. Because if you’ve never had fun, aren’t hav­ing fun and think you’ll never have fun writ­ing, then blog­ging isn’t the cre­ative medium for you. Thank God there are count­less oth­ers. I can’t dance for fuck but maybe you can.

Good luck and good hunting.

P.S. The last time I wrote a post like this, some help­ful per­son wrote a com­ment about traf­fic. Yes, I know traf­fic, thank you. But all the cute SEO tricks in the world won’t help you if you write badly. And this is the blog where I don’t fuck­ing care.

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