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HOW TO BLOG
Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo has up a nice piece entitled “How to Blog.” After noting that the very clever editors of the Huffington Post has published a book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, Manjoo asks some of his own colleagues for their advice on the medium. Here’s one useful tip:
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.
