To be clear, I don’t know how to grow your traffic 100x, I don’t know how to get more Twitter followers, I don’t know how to sell things, I don’t know how to A/B test, I don’t know how to increase click-through rates.
I do seem to be able to write articles of between 500-5,000 words in length that a reasonable number of people are interested in reading. I think I’ve figured out a few simple ways to promote them that feel like the kind of thing a real human would do, rather than a machine that feeds solely on spam and eyeballs. And I reckon I have a reasonable idea of how to come up with ideas and convert them into something you’re happy to attach your name to.
And so without further ado or self-aggrandising (there will be plenty of both later), here is a hefty but painstakingly edited guide of the most interesting and non-obvious things I have learned about the ideas, motivation, process, reception, traffic, style and practicalities behind blogging.
You have to actively want to write, and you have to want to do it instead of all the other things you could be spending your time on. There are lots of things that it would be kind of cool to be able to do or to have done, like rap battling, macaroon baking or playing intermediate club-level tennis.
But unless you are actually intrinsically interested in these things then they won’t stick, you’ll give up, and you’ll have to look for the next thing that you might be an undiscovered genius at. Writing is no different.
However, if you have no reason to believe that anyone will ever read what you’re writing, then it becomes very hard to write well or even at all. It seems that there do exist artists who compulsively create with a genuine disregard for the attention or opinions of their public or critics. But I am not one of them, and you probably aren’t either.
It’s worth being honest about this, because then you realise that it’s important to do a basic amount of work on putting your writing where other people might see it.