A Christmas gift to aspiring bloggers

As your humble blogger sells his soul for institutional prestige and filthy lucre, no doubt some of you are thinking, “Hey, Drezner’s leaving a niche for the independent foreign-affairs-minded blogger with a healthy fixation on Salma Hayek.”  And you would be right.  So for those of you interested in breaking into the world of independent ...

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.

As your humble blogger sells his soul for institutional prestige and filthy lucre, no doubt some of you are thinking, "Hey, Drezner's leaving a niche for the independent foreign-affairs-minded blogger with a healthy fixation on Salma Hayek."  And you would be right.  So for those of you interested in breaking into the world of independent blogging, Farhad Manjoo has an excellent column up at Slate offering some useful advice, based on his queries of successful bloggers.  I think his second point is his best one:  Don't worry if your posts suck a little. Unless you're Jeffrey Goldberg, your first blog post is unlikely to be perfect. Indeed, a lot of your posts aren't going to be as great as they could be if you spent many hours on them—and that's OK. Felix Salmon, who writes Portfolio's excellent finance blog Market Movers, puts it this way: "Quantity is more important than quality. Don't be scared of being wrong, or inelegant; you have much less of an idea what your readers are going to like than you possibly imagine. So jump right in, put yourself out there." Nearly every blogger I spoke to agreed with this sentiment. If you're trying to gain an audience, you can't afford to worry over every sentence as if it were ... see, I was going to spend 15 minutes thinking of a hilarious and deeply insightful simile there, but, damn it, I'm in blogging mode and need to move on. Oh, and also, I signed up for every guide produced by these guys:    I still have some free e-mails. 

As your humble blogger sells his soul for institutional prestige and filthy lucre, no doubt some of you are thinking, “Hey, Drezner’s leaving a niche for the independent foreign-affairs-minded blogger with a healthy fixation on Salma Hayek.”  And you would be right.  So for those of you interested in breaking into the world of independent blogging, Farhad Manjoo has an excellent column up at Slate offering some useful advice, based on his queries of successful bloggers.  I think his second point is his best one: 

Don’t worry if your posts suck a little. Unless you’re Jeffrey Goldberg, your first blog post is unlikely to be perfect. Indeed, a lot of your posts aren’t going to be as great as they could be if you spent many hours on them—and that’s OK. Felix Salmon, who writes Portfolio‘s excellent finance blog Market Movers, puts it this way: “Quantity is more important than quality. Don’t be scared of being wrong, or inelegant; you have much less of an idea what your readers are going to like than you possibly imagine. So jump right in, put yourself out there.” Nearly every blogger I spoke to agreed with this sentiment. If you’re trying to gain an audience, you can’t afford to worry over every sentence as if it were … see, I was going to spend 15 minutes thinking of a hilarious and deeply insightful simile there, but, damn it, I’m in blogging mode and need to move on.

Oh, and also, I signed up for every guide produced by these guys: 

 

I still have some free e-mails. 

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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