Well, I decided to join the blogging about blogging bandwagon. I bet most of my readers are bloggers anyway, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

The one thing I’ve learned that a blogger absolutely has to do is this:

Pay attention
Pay attention to the news. To other blogs. To your friends. There is blogging inspiration everywhere. And of course, pay attention to your readers. You probably have some good ideas of your own, but remember that your readers have their own interests. I’ve noticed that my best posts aren’t the ones where I’m rambling about my own ideas, but where I seek out and meet the needs of the reader.

Paying attention is the best way to choose a niche. It’s the best way to choose a topic to write about. Paying attention to social phenomena can have a huge payoff:

How Does a Bestseller Happen? A Case Study in Hitting #1 on the New York Times

Pay attention to technology
If you got into blogging late, like most bloggers have, you probably wish you had gotten started a lot earlier. Many of the now full-time professional bloggers got started years ago when there was a lot less competition. If you’re like me, you probably had to hear the word “blog” a thousand times before you stopped ignoring it. It’s not too late to learn from these mistakes. New technologies (plug-ins, widgets, monetization units, etc.) come out everyday that could assist you in blogging if you took notice.

Don’t wait until things are “proven”
I just said new technologies come out constantly that could help you. Unfortunately, when these systems are still in their infancy, you’re going to have to decide whether or not to use them before they’ve been “proven” to work. Why not wait until things are proven? Can you imagine if bloggers that started early and now make full time incomes waited until professional blogging was “proven” to be a viable option? The truth is nobody has that luxury at the offset. The early adopters of a technology are always going to have the advantage: more opportunities and less competition. This is a terrific article about how holding onto a technology when success is uncertain can yield huge dividends:

How Not Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water Earned me Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars

That’s not to say that you should adopt every single new plug-in or widget that comes out. However, it would be beneficial to take some risk; evaluate technologies by their potential and not just by their success stories. For example, I’m currently using Blog Rush. I’m not sure if this will perform well, but I do know that is has potential. And there are definitely benefits to being an early adopter in this case.

Attention Deficit Hypertext Markup Langue Disorder
As a final word of caution, be careful how you budget your attention. You can only focus on so many things. Blogging is all about synthesizing a huge amount of information and adding your own twist. But there’s some information you’d be better off limiting your time on or avoiding altogether.

  • Destructive criticism about your blog.
  • Posts on other blogs that rehash ideas you already know.
  • Threads in forums where you gain or contribute nothing.
  • News articles that won’t help you write posts.
  • Email, analytics, statistics.

Most people already know they shouldn’t waste their time on these, but they do anyway. You won’t always know when something is worthwhile to pay attention to. When all else fails, simply ask yourself this:

Is this information that could help my readers?

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