10 Mouthwatering Tips on Can Achieve Mega Blogging Success!!

That’s what I titled a quick presentation I put together for this past Barcamp Tampa Bay. I thought I’d publish the slides here.

I’ll also summarize:

• Never title things like that. It’s sensationalist, poor English, and doesn’t say much about what lies ahead.
• Of course you have to be passionate about what you blog about it. In other words, your life should already be about what you are blogging about, and the blog is an extension of that.
• Don’t blog about something because you feel it could theoretically be successful. Only a topic you actually care about will give you the fuel for the long haul.
• Many (most) people don’t have a “thing” that would be well suited for blogging. If you think you might be one of those people, but you are jealous of people that do, work on that (your life) first.
• You should never have any shortage of ideas. After all, since your life is already about this topic, whatever you did that day it likely a worthy blog post. The best technique for me has been to start writing a draft of an idea immediately. More than just a title, write why that idea seemed so great at the time.
• Great design is like cheating. Average blog posts inside of great design will lend them credibility and excitement. Great design for a blog is the cheapest investment you can make into it’s success.
• All presentations that mention design need to have at least one slide about Jason Santa Maria.
• Unless you can figure out some ways to create actionable tasks from your analytic data, don’t spend any more than 10 minutes a month looking at them. With over three years of analytic data on CSS-Tricks the only actionable I’ve ever come up with is “people like the freebies” and I should work on that area more.
• If your blog isn’t doing well, it’s because you haven’t given it enough time. Time means time since you’ve started as well as time spent on each article. If you spend a lot of time and write a great article, it will do well. Great articles don’t gather dust.
• Don’t worry about people stealing content, you have more important things to do.
• Don’t allow mindless comments. Promote people that leave great ones.
• Align your expectations with successful blogging with being a good guitar player. Everybody knows learning the guitar takes loads of practice, effort, and time.

Wufoo helped sponsor the event and most of us were there. Kevin gave a couple of amazing talks, as usual. We tweet about this kinda stuff, including this one where you can download Kevin’s talk about running a startup like Genghis Khan.