How NOT to Write a Blog

Grow Your Blog is a book you should read before you decide you want to write a blog. Once you decide you want a blog about t-shirts that don’t exist, it will be way too late to read the book. Believe me.

I usually find that instructions seem too obscure and boring until you are smack in the middle of something you have no idea how to finish. Then, the very same instructions suddenly become amazingly clear and relevant. While this process might work quite well with furniture from IKEA, unfortunately, it did not translate successfully into blog creation.

The book starts off explaining how much thought should go into the process BEFORE you create the blog. Now that I have already created the blog, this book is only helpful to me in highlighting areas where I went wrong. Allow me to share these insights in case you ever want to start your own blog.

1. Choose an appropriate title. You should definitely give your blog a short name. NOT something with a bunch of hyphens and extra words like, The Best Self-help T-shirt Catalog Ever. Now one is ever going to remember a long name like that.

2. Never be yourself. You should pick an anonymous identity so you won’t be identified by your friends and relatives. If you use your own name when you write your ridiculous blog, then everyone is going to know you have a PTA card or that you don’t care about football. It is going to be humiliating.

3. You should include pictures in your blog. Real pictures, not the same damn t-shirt over and over with some other thing written on it. People are going to catch on to that you know. They aren’t stupid.

You will find this is the case regarding a lot of things. Ironically, this inane t-shirt is a great truth of life.

4. Don’t annoy people by publishing new posts every day. You should leave the same post up at least a week. Plus, people who subscribe to your blog don’t want your crap showing up in their mailbox all the time. My last post was yesterday. But that doesn’t count because this post is a post about not making posts. It is therefore exempt.

There are other tips in this book on how you can generate traffic, but I haven’t started that yet. I think I’ll do that all wrong too, and then read the instructions.

I will tell you that, from my experience, people in Wal-Mart parking lots have time on their hands and enjoy drinking large cans of beer. I’m planning to find people in Wal-Mart parking lots, and hand them large cans of beer in exchange for reading my blog. I don’t want to skip ahead to find out if this plan is or is not part of the instructions. It would totally ruin the surprise.

Ordinarily, I would give attribution to the author here, but this guy wrote both his blog and his blog book anonymously, which is good. If I misled anyone as to the book’s contents, it is going to be way harder for him to yell at me. Hang on though, I will link you over to his blog.

Oh man… I just found out from his latest post, Random Thursday Thoughts, that “eating lunch at 11:30 is wrong. Don't do it.” Damn. I already ate lunch at 11:30. Guess I should have read the instructions for that too. Who knew?

Addendum:
Turns out I had Number 4 wrong. You are supposed to post MORE than once a week. Specifically, break up long rambling posts like this one into shorter segments. Please do not mention that my addendum about avoiding length has made this post longer.

Also... Don't eat lunch at 11:30. That rule still holds.