Since the late ’90s, random internet denizens have been screaming into the void via weblogs, or “blogs,” seeking to disseminate their thoughts to a wider audience and expand the marketplace of ideas in ways never before imagined.
Or they’re trying to make money. It’s the Information Age, after all, and everyone has information to sell.
In the not-so-roaring 2020s, blogs are very different from their late-20th-century progenitors. At the risk being accused of gross generalization, Gen Z moves fast and commercially, and Elder Millennials, once the bleeding-edge go-getters, find their heads spinning.
Welcome to middle age, friends. Fellow children of the early 80s, here is what we’re not supposed to be doing anymore.
- Make your blog your personal diary
Are you a celebrity? No? Then no one cares that much about your personal drama. Your acquaintances might be interested in watching real-life reality TV play out in real-time but the universe as a whole doesn’t. They’ve got actual reality TV for that.
Even the most interesting lives are boring without conflict. Reality TV has taught us that. You can be a guy with five wives and 20 children all living in a compound and if your non-monogamous existence is happy and functional, the producers are going to come in and introduce absolutely terrible ideas to create conflict among you for the viewing pleasure of the audience that wants salacious drama. (See, e.g., My Five Wives, an ill-fated TLC “reality” drama that I watched, enjoying the positive representation of non-monogamy, until obvious outside attempts to add drama ruined it.)
Moreover, your life isn’t that interesting. Your conflict isn’t that interesting. You’re not a good enough writer to make it interesting enough to keep the internet’s short attention span on you day to day.
And if you are a good enough writer to make your life interesting enough to hold people’s attention, get out there and publish already and stop messing around with posting your drama on random blogs.
- Write long, introspective posts that are difficult to digest.
You know, like this one.
You didn’t read all of the last bullet point, did you? Yeah, your readers won’t either. Keep it short and punchy. - Forget to profreed
Nothing will turn your readers off like misspelled words, run-on sentences, subject/verb disagreements, etc. Brush off the grammar guide (but throw Strunk & White out the window and find a better one, sorry) and remember everything you learned in 7th grade about sentence construction.
If you don’t, your readers may not be able to define what’s wrong, but they’ll pick up on unprofessionalism and be turned off. They know what “good” is and isn’t, regardless of whether they can reproduce it themselves. - Make your post titles obscure references or dull descriptive monikers
Which would you rather read?
“The Case for Search Engine Optimization in Internet Blogging Platforms”
or
“Top 7 Reasons Your Blog Is Failing (And How to Fix It)”
It’s the same article but you’d far rather read the second one, right?
So clickbait away. Still, I can’t bring myself to do the horrible clickbait “#3 Will Surprise You!” subheading. I tried up there but it made me feel physically ill. You have to draw the line somewhere.
- SEO? What’s that?
SEO = Search Engine Optimization and it’s how you get Google to pay attention to you. To be honest, I have very little idea how to do this. But WordPress does. So does SquareSpace and a whole host of other platforms. Don’t ignore it.
If you don’t show up on the first page of a Google search, you will languish in obscurity forever. - Forget that most people interact with the internet on smartphones
You learned how to use HTML in 1998? Cool! Go you! Now unless you’ve spent a whole lot of time keeping up with changes in web design since then, forget all that and get on a hosting site that will take care of that nonsense for you because your time needs to be spent creating content, not figuring out how to get that content onto people’s smartphones in a way that doesn’t break the page. - Forget to post
Your blog is nothing if it doesn’t update regularly. In an ideal world, “regularly” means “daily at least.”
This blog is about not quitting your day job to enjoy your creative side. And since I have no intention of quitting my reasonably lucrative but very time- and energy-consuming day job, it’s not going to update daily. I’m going to try for weekly. We’ll see how that goes.
And there you go. Pearls of wisdom. Go, ducklings. Get out there and start creating!
Yndiri Creates 
I really agree with you, especially the first point
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