Blog Writing Guide 2012

First of all, in the spirit of a grand joke, I wholeheartedly encourage you to take up blogging. Blogging is a plodding, shoddy habit that some people are paid for, which is a shameful thing in and of itself. The trick is to be famous, make things up, or attempt to be as faultlessly abrasive as possible. Really if you do all three, add in your perquisite dosage of edgy attitude and snappy writing, you can possibly get one thousand views in less than twenty-four hours. You ask in despair, "But how does one do such a thing?" I have the answer ready, but you'll not like this medicine at all. It's the blog writing guide 2012.

Welcome to the new year. Now tell me in as few words as possible: how do you feel about it? Congratulations: you have your first blog post, and fittingly enough it is tweet-length for cross-publication. If it's catchy enough in some way it could become a meme or, better yet, a book deal. But as always, there is a hangover/honeymoon effect: that trick may not pay off twice. Where in hell does a blog go? What would you do if your name and your blog somehow become connected years down the line, and your children begin to laugh while you eat a joyless breakfast?

Those may be important questions, but in the spirit of guidance I have laboured for hours to provide some helpful hints about blogging in This Year, 2012. One such hint is to never use capslock unless you're making a snide call about the internet. So always check your capslock situation before you begin to blog beautifully into the vapid void of the internet.

The above image illustrates a point. It helps to have abstract imagery to understand how to judge blogs, and that one, which cost me twenty-five cents of internet currency, roughly represents my blog. Other blogs do not need abstracts because they have positive branding such as logos and merchandise. Can you even begin to imagine your life after merchandise? You will be able to afford three sandwiches and a beer each day – or an installment plan on a brand new guitar, which you can then blog about.


If you are reading this you are probably quite serious about blogging and or 'content' (in its vaguest sense yet), and you have reason to be. There are many things to consider. Ignoring them is the best option – but if things were ignored, how would the hype industries continue to thrive? So you have to think about them. The tone of a blog is important, because an inconsistent tone will drive away an audience.

Tone can make or break your endeavor. Will you post earnestly? angrily? ironically? post-ironically? Will you follow the news and attach yourself to events or politics? There are many television shows you could focus on. A Cheers blog would not be unwelcome, for instance. In the end it is best to have a focus or specialty. Ubiquitous blogs are unheard of for a reason. In some cases it will probably be difficult to articulate a focus or specialty.

Blogging language, no matter what tone you use, has to be effective. There's no point in being wordy, because the wordy audience is reading books and magazines and established websites and maybe a few blogs of note. There is so much wordy shit, so you have to make some great attempt at being an information dealer. This is the era of the info-junkie, and the dissonance out there makes it so that you can post anything without being heard.

At this point you are getting into an uncertain vessel. Practice your webcomic while you stave off seasickness. When you look up, you will find that there are some extremely large blogs in the distance, and that the coast is choked with small ones. Keep trying against those waves. Out in the deeper waters you can cast out adnets and take in revenues amounting to more than just burgers and beer. Hits per day all day, every day. The meta-goldrush is out there, and it's not a thing like the internet collapse of 2000.

If you lose heart, have a videogame you're good at and a capture program, then you can give up on blogging and try something called 'LPing'. LP is internet shorthand for Let's Play (itself a grammatical shortcut of 'Let us Play', which seems like a one-sided request), a sort of cry for attention in which the presenter can be as ambiguous as the protagonist of whatever game is being 'LPed'. You record these, typically directly onto your computer, and then upload them to YouTube. You can insert your voice, a picture-in-picture of yourself, or text into the recording. One great example to is begin a Minecraft LP, which is an LP of a game that was very popular a year ago, LPs of it have remained popular until at least this date in time, January 5th, 2012.

So even if you get into blogging and become discouraged and move onto greater things, or a life, just remember: on the internet, you can't go low enough! It's a great distraction from more important things, and you never know if you'll be at the center of a tepid hype-vortex, causing things on the internet.