The blogging A-list is short, and you want on. But where do you start?
Believe it or not, the real starting point for professional blogging has more to do with character traits than it does with a “cool blog with great content.”
After six months of blogging, I’ve extracted seven must-have survival skills from some of the world’s top bloggers. These qualities have nothing to do with your niche or your audience — all you have to do is understand them and embrace them.
So without further ado:
Hustle — Gary Vaynerchuk
The web is a quick and dirty place to make a living — there are so few rules and regulations. The only way you’ll stand out is to have at least half as much hustle as Gary.
Gary is the master of hustle. If you listen to him, he’ll hustle you to hustle, too! His advice: get out of your comfort zone and start “doing some damage.” If you follow Gary on Twitter chances are you’ll read stuff like this:
hungry …………. and I don’t mean for breakfast!
Originality — John Chow
John Chow’s website tagline is “I make money online by telling people how much money I make online.” And it’s true, that’s pretty much all he does.
And if you really think about it, who else can make that claim as accurately as John Chow?
What’s your one-of-a-kind, often-replicated-never-duplicated claim to fame?
Ruthlessness — Jeremy Shoemaker
Accepting failure is something we must do ruthlessly as bloggers. The web is too vast and hypersonic to waste time on things we will never succeed in.
Shoemoney may seem rough around the edges, but look at the photo of him holding $132,000+ check from Google. If you read his story and get to know him you’ll soon learn how “get over it,” too, or in his words:
…I encourage you to take a hard look at what you fail at and quit wasting your time thinking you will get a different outcome by practicing it.
Usefulness — Brian Clark
Copyblogger is a one of the web’s most useful blogs thanks to a keen editorial strategy. Brian has leveraged a team of bright editors who work to ensure their content is always relevant, interesting and practical to readers.
One of the biggest challenges to bloggers — especially ones not marketing savvy — is being useful. It’s very easy to write post after post if all you’re doing is talking to yourself.
It gets a lot more challenging when you’re publishing to meet the needs and desires of a hungry audience. Brian understands this better than any blogger out there — because he’s useful.
Generosity — Darren Rowse
Go visit Darren’s ProBlogger and take a look around. Spend some time there and see what’s available — I guarantee you’ll find more helpful content about blogging than anywhere else in the universe.
The reason why Darren is one of the most successful, respected and appreciated bloggers out there is because he’s hugely generous. He’s more than willing to share what he has to help others.
The web demands reciprocity — give first before demanding in return.
Honesty — Aaron Wall
Aaron is a leading SEO guru who also blogs. His posts are usually very content rich and in-depth, but that’s not always why I read him (SEO is mind-boggling to me).
What I really admire about Aaron is his honesty. He’s the perfect kind of guy to explain such a complicated and messy subject like SEO — no sales pitch, no smoke screen and no one-sidedness. He just tells it like it is:
There have been SEOs who have argued – with a straight face – that whilst it’s ok for them to game search engine algorithms, it’s not ok for others to do so.
I trust Aaron because I know he isn’t hiding anything from me. And because I trust him, I value his ideas. So consider me a loyal customer — not a bad place to be in for the both of us. All from Aaron’s simple act of being honest.
Thoughtfulness — Steve Pavlina
Steve Pavlina is a blogger who takes his time, but never takes too long. When I read his blog, it’s one of the few times in my day when I actually slow down and listen to his ideas.
Steve’s style is clean and simple but deeply engaging. It’s obvious he puts great effort into his writing, as he notes:
To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing.
Thoughtfulness is vital to great blogging. It not only brings out your inner genius — but your readers’ inner genius as well.
Thanks! These are amazing tips for bloggers and the fact that you included these practical links is even more awesome!
This post of course is oozing with all of these tips, it was very honest, very thoughtful, useful, generous of you….need I go on 😉
Great list! Now I know what I have to work on.
PS. What about fearlessness – not sure if that’s what you meant by ruthless or hustle, but I would have thought that self-editing would equal self-destruction in the blog world myself.
Crystal
That’s a really useful overview. It’s obviously impossible to hit all of those traits at once so it is much more about finding the style or qualities that fit you personally, which may not even be on this list. Personally I am all for the principle of giving first and receiving second, which I believe Darren Rowse and Steve Pavlina are both big advocators of. 🙂
Thanks,
Sam
great list if Steve Pavlina is on it! His site is what got me interested in the whole blog world in the first place-then I read he actually made money doing it?! well I was hooked
I will now explore the others on this list since it shares company with my favourite personal development site!
hopefully I can apply some of the tips to my artblog?
thanks for sharing!
joe
Great compilation!
As a newly (re-)starting blogger myself I appreciate hearing these points. I understand much more deeply what it takes to create great content – I’m in it for the long run!
Thank you for this clean, straightforward post!
– Cynthia
Great article with great examples!
There’s a post that practices what it preaches. I predict a well deserved spike in your readership numbers after that sort of aplomb.
Excellent! Great list of people. It really is about the personalities, isn’t it?
Bookmarked and ready to be reviewed many times.
Wow! Thanks for all the comments everyone– I’ve never had so many so quickly and from all very interesting people (I’ve looked at all your blogs).
I’m looking forward to continuing our conversation here and elsewhere on the blogosphere.
Aloha,
Charles
Sorry to ask an unrelated question but how do you highlight your personal comments like that? I would like to implement something similar on my blog if possible… Is it something in the stylesheet?
Thanks,
Sam 🙂
Sam — to be honest I’m not sure how to do the colored backgrounds on my own comments. That feature came built into with my Thesis Word Press Theme.
It’s a paid theme but I totally recommend it — worth every penny! Plus you can customize it to any design you want.
Great post! Thanks for the great advice. I will try to apply the top 7 traits to my blogging work. Many thanks! Look forward to reading more of your posts!!!
Nice blog post. I have been reading your posts for the past couple weeks and I feel like I learned a great deal about blogging. I just showed your post to a couple of my friends and they agree with me!! Great blog!!!!!!!!!
Wonderful post!!! My friends and I are reading it right now and it is quite awesome! Personally, I am a big fan of John Chow’s blogs. Currently, I have not been blogging at all, but I have been actively getting my art work published at various online literary art blogs. I hope to make my own creative arts blog some day.
Wish you the best of luck!
Well if you link to 7 of the worlds biggest bloggers one might just link back to you 🙂
True words, Charles, true words. Along with a few other people here, Steve Pavlina was a huge inspiration for me as well. (I even wrote about that when I reviewed his book Personal Development for Smart People.)
And I completely agree with your choice of Vaynerchuk. That man kicks it, kills it, and loves everyone. (If you’ve heard him speak before, you’ll know what I mean.)
Speaking of linking back, Steve Pavlina recently twittered about your post. I guess value does find it’s way around. 😉
I like the honesty of John Chow on the quote you mentioned here. Darren Rowse is definitely generous with his blogging knowledge and like that about him.
I need to check out Steve Pavlina. I do not like Shoemakers radical approach, a little too rough for me.
Some more names to add: Chris Brogan and Seth Godin. They are more on the “marketing” side but great, inspiring and very helpful bloggers too.
Yes, I actually had Seth Godin on my list but the best way I could describe him is “genius,” and I didn’t want to add that as a prerequisite for being a blogger.
Seth seems to transcend most definitions of bloggers — he’s more like a pioneering of marketing.
Is writing a post that links to seven massive blogs the eighth trait? 🙂
Seriously, there are definitely some great ideas here, but what’s most striking to me is the degree to which this post goes “meta-meta.” A post about blogging about how to blog about how to blog.
Dan
Geez… what a great list of bloggers. If I could only be half as good as them I’d feel like I had done something special.
Big Island is blessed to have a blogger like you on it Charles.
Very kind words, Damon, mahalo.
Your contributions to blogging here on BI are also valuable to the awesome community you’re building.