It’s never been easier to start a blog. So why is it so hard to have a wildly successful one?

To cobble the bard; “the fault, dear reader, is not in our blogs, but in ourselves.” It’s easy to start a blog. It’s hard to develop a unique voice and remarkable insight (a phrase I learned from Seth Godin’s book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Without either, you’re just another voice in the crowd. With both, you become indispensable.

To ask how to gain a unique voice and remarkable insight is missing the boat: If there was a step-by-step formula anyone could follow, the end result would be a crowd neither unique nor remarkable. To have both requires personal thought and experience at the very least, both of which you can neither skip the time and effort on to gain. Whichever your blog’s area of expertise, it’s as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the context of creativity:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Or as Benjamin Franklin succinctly summed up: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

1. Against the Voice of Should
2. How to Write Good: 5 Tips from a Paid Writer
3. For my Friends, the Makers of Things

Having some fun looking through what I wrote in 21 for the year of 2009. There aren’t a lot of posts, 44 in total for the entire 12 months (posting frequency was an issue, heh) but there are some in here that I’m pretty happy with.

Traces of Life Coaches Blog remained, with personal growth posts like The 3 Decluttering Boxes in January. I ventured into more poetic and personal writing like East Coast Night in February, which was something I wanted to do more of. I’m proud of the Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure post I published in March, I spent a lot of time making it as good as I could and it encapsulates a lot of what I think about martial arts and self-defense training today.

The 2 Ultimate Secrets to Blogging Like a Rock Star (Hint: it’s Not What You Want to Hear) in April was awesome, if I do say so myself. This was another post I spent a lot of time crafting, and I love how it combines snark with some serious thoughts about blogging well.

Lessons Learned at 30 was written in May, the month of my birthday in the year I turned the big three-oh. It was written in a rather reflective mood, imagining what advice I would give if I had the chance to speak to a younger me. I look forward to writing Lessons Learned at 40 a decade later, I wonder what I’ll have to say then.

I wrote Perfection in Motion after a great dinner chat with an old friend about relationships , I love it when everyday conversations like that spark ideas about articles to write. To be honest, a lot of articles like that are full of things I wanted to say at the time, but would have sounded way too polemic. Can you imagine me mouthing the content in Perfection in Motion during dinner drinks? I would have been getting weird stares all night!

I wrote Why I Love Writing after being asked why I love writing and finding myself unable to answer. I mean – did it have to be asked? How do you answer why your favorite color is, or your favorite ice-cream flavor, or why you love the people you do? You just do!

My Food & I, published in August, is another mega-post I’m really proud of writing. I spent a long time crafting this too; doing the research and tightening the writing.

I had to keep reminding myself though that I started 21 Dragons for me, and not as another niche subject pro-blog, and I wanted to share more of my personal thoughts with my friends. More Million-Dollar Questions than Answers in October was a step towards that, a post that had offered more questions than answers (a theme that sometimes seems like the story of my life!). So too The Digital Clutter, less a post about how to solve a problem, but more like “here’s my problem, what do you think?”

The Muse & The Work in November revealed a theory about creativity I’ve had for some time, and I hope it didn’t make me sound too crazy.

I’m Keeping the Cash, Planet Earth was a difficult post to write. It expressed how I really felt, but it was also a message that felt so politically incorrect. But it was a truth I needed to live with, and lo and behold, as the truth shall set you free, admitting it has already freed me to thinking about how to contribute in better ways.

The Photographing Tokyo series in December was fun to write. I really enjoyed shooting those photos in Tokyo, unfortunately I didn’t have an audience to lecture to about the thoughts and events that happened behind each photo – luckily I have a blog (with its millions of readers)! Blog as Self-Discovery articulated how writing in 21 Dragons has made me feel this past year, and I wanted to share the blogs I enjoyed this year with my Favorite Blogs of 2009 post.

Lessons Learned

All in all, I liked what I’ve done in 21 Dragons for the year of 2009. I would have liked to have posted more; it wasn’t for lack of ideas (those and drafts I have aplenty), but for lack of time, what with work and everything else. I also want to make 21 more personal, it isn’t really now not because I want to make it a pro-blog, but because I have a real barrier to putting myself out there. Contrary to what people might think of me as a writer, it’s actually hard for me to express myself honestly – and it’s something I have to work on every single time I write.

I do honestly feel that my writing for 21 Dragons is superior to anything I ever wrote for Life Coaches Blog. Sure, that blog was written at an earlier point in my life with less of the life and writing experience that I have now. But I mainly credit the change to one major shift in attitude. When I wrote articles for LcB, I imagined writing for a general, faceless crowd, trying to guess what might please them. Consequently, I wrote a lot of articles that to me, now seem pretty fluffy and insubstantial.

When I’m writing for 21 though, I imagine writing for my closest friends, because I know some of them read this (you do right? I love you guys!). I wonder if he would like this, if she would actually get something from this post or if they’ll think it sucks – because if my closest friends think something I wrote sucks, then it’s probably a good sign that I’m going way off.

Writing this way, I believe 100%, has helped me improve the writing I do here tremendously, and has resulted in work that I’m really proud of, visitor count, Technorati ranking and SEO be damned.

Here’s to an even greater 2010.

1. What Does ’21 Dragons’ Mean?
2. Why 21 Dragons Exists
3. For Brenda & Yezhong

I’ve been writing here in 21 for about a year before I discovered a direction I’m comfortable with going for the next year or so, and that’s about living the creative life.

It seems obvious in retrospect – I’m a full-time writer who’s also been a full-time 3D artist, who studied digital media design in school and loves creative arts like graphic design and photography. Big duh.

But I always thought of them as separate things (well, they are). Subdued by the belief that only people who specialize are serious professionals, I thought of myself as a wannabe Jack-of-all-trades goofball, instead of realizing that the one denominator that links all of them up is the act of creativity.

So there it is. I dig the creative act and I want to write more about it. Thing is, I don’t think I would have been able to figure that far out if I hadn’t been writing about random topics at 21. The act of writing, thinking and looking back at what I’ve written has been as much a journey of self-discovery as it has been an act of self-expression.

And that’s one unfortunate aspect, I think, of some of the blogs out there that are trying to make it too hard, too fast. They specialize too early and then lock themselves in, without allowing themselves the chance to grow, explore and change.

Maybe I’m the wrong guy to get on a high-horse – I’m hardly a shining paragon of self-publishing mad success (if I were, I wouldn’t be here! bwahahaha-sob). But I do know that the act of writing, if you let it, has the potential to open up so much more than niches, SEOs and sales pitches, it can also open you to yourself and let you know yourself that little bit more.

1. One Man. One Hill. Six Cameras. One Discovery.
2. Cheap, Fast & Good
3. Looking Back: 2009

HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog with Credibility! a SxSW ‘09 panel by Merlin Mann and John Gruber, has been on my repeat play-list for the past few weeks.

Merlin Mann and John Gruber are wildly successful web authors. They are both amongst my favorite writers; this is their first recorded panel together and it is insanely funny. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, not only is it full of great advice about how to blog well, but when you replace the word ‘blog’ with any creative endeavor – like ‘photography’ or ’3D animation’ – the advice translates across disciplines and gives insight about creativity, ownership and how to make something you can be proud of.

The first time I listened to the end of this one-hour recording, I forwarded it to my creative friends, because I knew they would get so much from it. But I was afraid they wouldn’t get the many (hilarious) Web 2.0 in-jokes and be turned off by the heavy blogging overtones.

So this short summary is for my friends; the makers of things.

Note: Quotes in this post are thanks to Jordan Cole’s full transcription.

1. Find Your Obsession and Your Voice

The core of the panel can be summed up in one simple phrase: find your obsession and your voice. Mann says:

So what does that mean? I think almost all of the best non-fiction that has ever been made comes from the result of somebody who can’t stop thinking about a certain topic — a very specific aspect, in some cases, of a certain topic. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.

… Like, you’ve got something that you care a lot about, and you’re obsessed about — it’s almost like an intellectual fetish. And then you’ve got something that’s your angle on that…

2. Make Your Aim Higher than Your Reach

Have a goal about making a quality product that’s beyond just becoming popular or rich. Gruber says:

I think it’s so important to have a goal that’s out there that you know is beyond your reach, so that you’re always improving. I do feel, I feel that I am such a better writer now than when I started the site six years ago. I mean, there’s just no doubt in my mind that I’m better at it. And I still feel like I’m nowhere near as good as I wanna be. I can write something and it’ll be the article that, y’know, when I meet people at a place like here, and they’ll remind me, they’ll say ‘I love that thing you wrote a couple weeks ago’, and it’s something that I just think, ‘Oh my God, that is so far short of the idea I set out to write, but thank you so much for saying it’, but that to me is the whole point, is that you’ve gotta have a goal that is so far out of your reach, and… it seems to me that almost everybody else is setting their goal to write…

To which Mann chimes in:

… write on a very broad topic that a lot of other people cover to a very large audience that they they don’t really care about… if everything is what you wanna do, then you’re not really doing a thing.

3. Who do You Want to Delight?

Instead of making a generic thing for the masses, think about one specific person your thing will reach. Mann says:

I think about it in terms, the phrase is, ‘Who do I wanna delight?’. I try to think a lot, less about, like, ‘Is this something that will, y’know, get me this kind of link?’, and more like ‘Is this something that John would think is not a piece of crap?’.

… Do you follow me? Can you think about, like, one face behind your monitor that you see when you’re making something? Like, can you tell, like, whether you’ve made something that would make somebody’s day? Or are you just thinking about a big pot of people who will click on your stuff? Because the truth is, once you figure out who those faces are, it gets a lot easier to make something that you’re really really proud of, regardless of what it is that you wanna make.

… And again, I’m talking about photography, I’m talking about music; whatever you make. Like, who are you making it for? Who’s your ideal reader?

4. Be a First-Rate You, Not a Second-Rate Copy

You can’t re-create someone else’s success by copying him. Find your own obsession and voice, Mann says:

He goes ‘The thing is, people go out there, and they’re always trying to emulate the success of other people, right? And so you get on TV, and you try to pretend you’re Ted Koppel. But you know what? They’ve already got a Ted Koppel. They don’t need you.’ So y’know, like, your competition is somebody who had a unique opportunity a long time ago, and now you’re gonna try to, like, trace the shadow of that on a sidewalk and hope it’s a career? Right? It’s… we’ve got our Koppel, now who are you?

5. You are Not Your Work, You are Your Creativity

Don’t confuse your work for your creative ability. Mann again:

And if you don’t have the confidence to go, like, ‘My ideas, and the things that I have to say are so valuable that, like, I’m not worried that I’ll run out of them. I’m not worried that there’s any scarcity to what I have to say about this.’ So yeah, people scrape my RSS feed hundreds of times a day. But that’s not me; I’m not my RSS feed. I’m the ideas that went into the RSS feed.

6. Embrace Ambiguity

Don’t be in a rush to figure out exactly how what you do is going to make you a millionaire. Have a tolerance for exploration, discovery, change and growth. Mann says:

The biggest tolerance that you’ve gotta have — and I’m as thin-skinned as anybody; I don’t like people saying mean things about me — but, I think what we’re saying, in some ways, is, you need a tolerance — this is gonna sound so unhelpful — you need a tolerance for having no idea where your thing is going. Y’know? ’Cause if you have too much of an idea of what it is, like, you may be accidentally making the wrong thing.

7. Awesomeness First, Bling Second

At the beginning of the panel, Gruber asks if you’re crafting for money, or are you crafting so you can create even more?

And so there’s this quote that I’ve sort of hung this whole thing on, right from the outset, from Walt Disney, and it’s, to me, it’s the thing that made me wanna do this talk. And he said: ‘We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.’ And I think that’s so profound, and to me, it’s not about a subtle difference in strategy; it’s a fundamental, you’re either going this way, or you’re going that way.

Mann says that it’s not just about making money, it’s about doing awesome work, and that opportunities can come out of that:

Because the real opportunities of this stuff — this sounds like bullshit, but I am dead serious — the giant opportunities in this are not short-term gains… I’m giving you an opinion here, which I don’t usually do. But the real long-term gains for you are not pageviews and CPMs; it’s the opportunities that come out of being awesome at what you do. And if you think that’s BS then, like, I can’t help you.

But I swear to God, if you look at the people around who seem like they were born on third base, yeah, it’s good timing; yeah, it’s hard work; but I think a lot of it is they had a tolerance for the ambiguity about where it was gonna go, they had a tolerance for the fact they were not gonna take short-term money that got in the way of what they really wanted to do. And the ancillary revenue streams and opportunities that come up as a result of making extremely-high-quality content…

Gruber adds that there are more ways to get paid in than money, and while these ways might not pay the bills, they also have value:

But a lot of times they’re very true, they’re totally true; and there are things that money cannot buy that have tremendous value.

And one of them — I mean, you’re (Mann) practically making a career on it — is that attention, human attention, is valuable and it is limited. There is nothing you can possibly do give one person more attention in a day. You wake up; you have eighteen hours; and then you go to sleep. And in that time, you only have so much attention. It’s a limited resource. You can’t directly buy it. You can’t… there’s no dollar value on it.

… But it is incredibly valuable. And so that is the one thing that when you give stuff away in the Internet, it’s like, well then how am I gonna get paid for it? Well, you’re gonna get paid in attention. And I know you cannot pay your rent, I mean, I know…

… Honestly, you cannot pay your rent with attention. I mean, I’ve tried. You can’t buy fast cars; there’s all sorts of stuff you can’t buy with it. But it has value, and you’d be surprised at what happens when it builds up.

And Gruber quoting Mann, summing this point up:

Don’t do stuff that seems profitable, but potentially messes up the reason people like you.

1. Unleashing Your Creative Monster: Be Proud
2. Haters Gonna Hate & the Other End of the Stick
3. Top 10 Plus 1 Productivity Lessons of 2008

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.

1. Against the Voice of Should
2. Recovering from Imperfections
3. The Writer’s Ego

There are lines that shouldn’t be crossed; like shoving little old grannies off the stairs, stealing candy from a baby, and scamming people of their money.

Unfortunately, the get-rich-quick scam has probably been around since the day the first coin was minted. The sad thing is that, with the times being what they are, there are going to be a lot more of these guys peddling their schemes and more people desperate to hear them out.

Just flip open the papers today and see how many ads promise you buckets full of cash for no money down.

Cue words of wisdom from Seth Godin:

If someone offers to sell you the secret system, don’t buy it. If you need to invest in a system before you use it, walk away. If you are promised big returns with no risk and little effort, you know the person is lying to you. Every time.

The Internets is for Large Free Bags of Cash

Now, I’m an Internet guy, so here’s a rule of thumb when you hear about these get-rich-quick on the Internet courses: most of what they say is available online for free, if you’re willing to do a little work.

Yea, that’s it in a nutshell. Oh, and one more: it’s always going to be a lot more work than they say it’ll be.

Sorry, I can’t resist. One more: watch out for the guy who’s making it rich only by telling you how to make it rich.

Keep your wits together. Ask around. Don’t make impulse buys of large, expensive products and courses. Google is your friend.

Ittybiz (a great non-scammy website) has three must-read posts before listening to any internet business pitch online or offline; How to Spot the Scams, Can You Tell a Scam from the Sales Copy? and How to Make Money Online and Avoid the Scams.

If you’re ever in doubt, just listen to Gabe and Max here. They’ve got it all figured out, man.

1. 9 Keys to Building a Blog You Can Make Trillions From
2. Unleashing Your Creative Monster: Be Proud
3. Best Personal Growth Books of 2008

As a coronary to my 9 Keys to Building a Blog You Can Be Proud Of post, I thought I’d write this tongue-in-cheek contrast (this blog post itself is worth $37, so read up!).

9 Keys to Build a Rock-Solid Turnkey Blog That Will Make a Trillion Dollars For You While You Sleep – Even If You Have One Hand Tied Behind Your Back & No Fucking Clue

1. It’s All About the Money

Keep your eyes on the prize, honey.

It’s not building a blog you can be proud of, it’s not writing because you enjoy writing, it’s not posting intelligent, carefully crafted articles that make people think. It’s especially not about sharing your passion with other people in an authentic voice that doesn’t make you cringe.

It’s making a trillion dollars while the authentic people hug trees and snort wheatgrass.

2. Get Rich or Blog Trying

While hippy tree-huggers are talking about following your bliss, I’m talking about following the cold hard cash. If it’s something you’re passionate about but it won’t make the bucks, drop it like it’s hot. A hot dead dog, that is. While we hold the cash, because it’s cold and you can hold cold stuff like that.

3. It’s Not Copying – It’s Inspired

There are millions of people out there saying the same thing over and over again – so you’re lucky you won’t have to make up anything new. Just copy, copy, copy, paste and change a couple of words – it’s not unoriginal, it’s inspired.

4. It’s All About You

Imagine making truckloads of cash just by writing about what you had for breakfast and how nobody loves you – its a little magic we call personal marketing. So post that video of yourself choking on potato chips while you talk about how you haven’t had a date in years and watch the cheques beat down your door.

5. Use Viral Words to Get Marketing

Use the exact same viral words experts are using to generate 120% profits while they lie on beaches rubbing suntan oil on hot Brazilian models. And the best part is you don’t even have to think about what to say: just say what they say the way they say it and soon you’ll have your own hot and oily model to get viral with!

6. Recycling – Good for the Planet and Good for Blogging

Evolution’s for the dinosaurs. It’s totally okay to say the same 3 to 4 things over and over again in a few hundred different ways. That’s the secret turnkey system that will triple your income while your kitten takes a nap (that’s right, it’s so easy your kitten could do it falling asleep).

7. Walking the Talk is for Lame People

Here’s the Good News: on the Internets nobody knows if you blog about adventure mountain climbing but you’re really a fatso staying in a dingy basement who hasn’t stepped out of the house in weeks. Walking the talk is for people with jobs, real bloggers make money the smart way: by thought-leadering.

8. Traffic Is King

Make the people come, then build it. We’re talking SEO, link-bait, link exchange, paid links and Alexa rankings, baby. With Page Rank like that, you won’t need compelling content at all to make your trillions.

9. Be Just Like One of the Boys

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Blogging has made us billions – after all, we say so on our blogs – so why try to be original? This is your chance to be one of the cool kids. Be just like us, do exactly what we’re doing, and you too can be rich and famous on the Internet.

And here’s a bonus key, just because you’re so awesome.

10. Follow My Rules Unless You Want to End Up Yesterday’s Eighties Star

Nobody wants to be yesterday’s eighties star. There are real secrets to blogging success that they don’t want you to know about – and I know all of them. And they can be all yours for the cutthroat price of only $899.99, and that’s cutting me own throat!

P.S. But if you order within the next 17 hours, they can be yours for only $499.99 – which is practically stealing from my bank but I’m okay with it!

1. Looking Back: 21 Dragons’ 2009
2. A Vegetarian Synchronicity
3. Haters Gonna Hate & the Other End of the Stick