More blogging advice

In the wake of the advice I gave to new bloggers last week, several others have posted some valuable advice that’s worth clicking on: 1) Electric Venom offers her top ten lessons after six months of blogging. Numbers nine, six, and five seem particularly relevant, but her #1 lesson is the most important: If it’s ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

In the wake of the advice I gave to new bloggers last week, several others have posted some valuable advice that's worth clicking on: 1) Electric Venom offers her top ten lessons after six months of blogging. Numbers nine, six, and five seem particularly relevant, but her #1 lesson is the most important:

In the wake of the advice I gave to new bloggers last week, several others have posted some valuable advice that’s worth clicking on: 1) Electric Venom offers her top ten lessons after six months of blogging. Numbers nine, six, and five seem particularly relevant, but her #1 lesson is the most important:

If it’s not fun, don’t do it. But if you enjoy it, if it really adds something to your life, then don’t let anyone’s opinions or personal issues or downright nastiness stop you from pursuing it. Just blog.

By the way, after reading some selfdescriptions by Electric Venom, let me just say I’m reeeaaalllyyy glad she doesn’t think I’m stupid. 2) Wizbang offers some advice on how to get an Instalanche. He makes a very important point on Glenn Reynolds’ role in the blogosphere:

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe InstaPundit actually links to more new bloggers than any of the other major sites.

One other comment if you read his post: Kevin is probably the first person alive to believe I have “a cool last name.” [UPDATE: Amish Tech Support offers a different route to attract Glenn’s attention. And Instapundit gives his own take] 3) John Scalzi offers some thoughts about the enterprise — which is a professional gig for him — after five years of blogging (link via Matthew Yglesias). Two comments of his stood out in particular:

  • Paid bloggers are a vanishingly small percentage of the entire blogging population, and will almost certainly continue to be so. I would suspect at this point in time, there may be 100 to 200 people around the world who take home significant pay from blogging (“significant” being defined as “you can actually pay bills with it”). There are probably a million people who blog. Even if the number of paid bloggers expands tenfold in the next year (and why not?), that’s still a 1000-to-1 ratio of amateur to paid.
  • The number of “big” bloggers has expanded, and the diversity of the “big” bloggers is fabulous. But if you rented a convention hall for all the bloggers who get more than 5,000 unique visitors a day, you’d have a big, empty convention hall and a small clot of guys near the punch bowl, talking about the Dean campaign and shuffling their feet.
  • Heh.

    Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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