Chris Blattman

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Your guide to blogging

A friend and colleague is close to starting his own blog. He asked for advice, and I could not do better than to point him to Penelope Trunk’s advice. She makes many good points on starting up, how to get print attention, and why blogging’s good for your career.

All well and good for business and media people, you say, but academics seem to think that blogging is bad for tenure. I think the world has changed in the past few years, and that the opposite may now be true. One day soon I will blog why.

In the meantime: what do you think about Penelope’s advice? Any other tips and links to blogging guides?

8 Responses

  1. CAblon is dead on with advice about picking a domain name from day one… also get the name you want nailed down as well (think about 3 -5 years from now and what else you might be blogging about). We started off with Technology, Health and Development and realized it was far too narrow for us (we grew out of that).

    My most important rule – if I am not having fun blogging I take a break. It almost goes without saying, if you are passionate and having fun about your topic, the rest will take care of it self.

    Lastly, while not for everyone, being on twitter has been really helpful in terms of content and connecting with like minded folks.

  2. I hadn’t heard of Penelope Trunk before today. To be frank, her blog is a little scary – it has hit that threshold where the content is more about personality than ideas (she also seems to be constantly, constantly referencing her own posts).

    I would recommend that your friend worry less about Trunk-style self promotion and focus on writing about interesting things and enjoying himself. That’s what you seem to do, and so the blog remains unassuming but really well-respected anyway (even if you don’t have 30,000 subscribers).

  3. While directed towards semi-pro and professional bloggers, Copyblogger.com and Problogger.net are actually excellent guides on blogging.

    One piece of advice: Start from day one using the domain you want. Simply put, blog on xxxx.com not some xxxx.blogspot.com url. Changing domains afterwards is painful.

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