I met Howard from Howard's Musings last week at the Seattle Weblogger's Meetup. He's been blogging since 1999 and has some funny and interesting things to say about becoming a blogger and what it takes to succeed. Check out this entry.
Below are Howard's points on "What it takes to Succeed as a Blogger"
- Write well
- Be early
- Be smart, funny, and opinionated
- Make friends with other bloggers, preferably A-list bloggers
- Violently disagree with A-list bloggers
- Be consistent, surprising, and at least somewhat extreme in your views
- Update frequently
- Leave comments on other sites that link to your site
- Be a link whore
- Have an RSS Feed
Remember also how people operate. They're going to hit your site either through a link from another site or through a search engine. This is going to point them directly to your entry. If they're half-interested after reading through your post, they'll click on the name of your blog at the top to see what you're talking about now. Here's where that consistency thing helps immensely. If you're focused, you'll have a post that's similar (and more timely, if they're coming from Google) to what they've just read. Now you'll have them hooked.
I think these are good points to keep in mind, for me particularly, as this is one of the first posts of this site and generating traffic is pretty high on the list of priorities. Thanks Howard.