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In a recent email, someone accused me of not being snarky enough lately. HA! You asked for it:
Here they are, 10 steps to writing a popular blog post in no time flat:
- Spend 2 minutes on Twitter and find a popular blog post on a hot-button issue.
- Open your blogging platform and start ranting in response. Logic here: rant = passion and passion = popular.
- If possible, make some audacious claim about Gen Y, or Gen X, or whatever generation you happen to be from. The more it inspires warm fuzzies or outright anger, the better.
- Think about creating an easily digestible list. [Ah, irony]
- Don’t acknowledge the article that started your rant. Links slow you down, and you can’t afford this one.
- Don’t ever stop to think through the issue critically or do any research beyond the blogs you read anyway. The clock is ticking!
- Channel your inner motivational speaker. It doesn’t matter if what you’re claiming is true, per se. What matters is that you inspire people to start nodding along.
- Leave a half-hearted plea for people to comment. Aim for quantity of comments over quality. This will make you appear to be popular and help to ease that nagging feeling that no one is reading your blog.
- Now that you’re done writing, go back through your post and link EVERY word that’s semi-related to another post you’ve written. This will keep people on your site longer, increase your page views, and of course, stroke your ego when you open Google Analytics.
- Hit publish. Make sure to retweet yourself several times over the next few days.
And there you have it.
What do you think? 
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Comments
02.19.10
I personally always have found everybody's insistence on being snarky, or just flat out pissed off in the blogosphere to be tiresome.
02.19.10
This put a huge smile on my face. Great job. But you forgot one key component - ranting and raving even more in response to every single comment, like a perpetual motion machine of generational angst.
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02.19.10
You're spot on Andrew. In fact, after reading this post I'm reminded that my most commented posts were rant-based (rant-based sounds sort of foul, doesn't it?) But, I have to say, some of my posts I took a great deal of time, care and effort got no love.
But, I don't think the reason why we're blogging is to just garner comments? Do you?
Great post. I love topics that keep the conversation rolling...
02.19.10
Pure Genius.
I think I'll go make a list of reasons why blogging advice is all bullsh**t.
02.20.10
Ranting based on other popular blog entries on hot issues does not sound original personally, although it does shorten the time required to garner comments and traffic to your blog.
02.22.10
@Ty - The billing of my blog is "Snarky remarks on Biz today" but most of the posts are really critical examinations of conversations that are happening online. Hence the accusation and this post. I think snark has it's place, but sure, it can become tiring.
@Brian - I think a general rule of thumb is that if your comment is as long or longer than your post something is probably out of whack.
@Andrea - I think I responded to this one in my blog comments, but no I don't think we blog to garner comments—we blog to share information and to add to a global conversation.
@Maureen - What's kind of sickening is that this post has been one of my most popular. Some blogging advice is good (like what you'd get from #blogchat for example), but I'll agree that most is BS.
@Stanley - It's horribly unoriginal, but it does boost traffic. I think it's a shame that incentives are stacked up for us to produce crappy content for the sake of traffic. Bleck!
02.22.10
@Andrew: just what I thought. I personally refuse to publish severely unoriginal content without my personal input. It's much simpler for me to retweet interesting posts that don't belong to me.
03.08.10
Wow, nice 10 blog post tips.
Thank you
03.08.10
@jack Hope that's sarcasm :)
03.09.10
Awesome post. Love it.
03.09.10
I love the sarcasm of your post... but I don't think everyone is reading it for what I hope you intended it as "10 things you should not do".
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