So, I guess I should ignore HubSpot, Mashable, and Social Media Today?

That has been my experience; I find that I post less frequently, waiting until there is something a bit more juicy than say, I just made some new stickers and ate some spaghetti. Obviously this doesn’t apply to a case such as BB, Wired, etc. but it does seem to drive the more “personal” blogger toward quality over quantity – hopefully not at the expense of readers.

Also, nice article Rob – very thoughtful as usual.

Some don’t even take the time to blog anymore because they’re busy hawking their new applications or e-books.

Chances are, if you looked at their histories, you’d discover that they had previous careers selling magical fruit juice, inverse tachyon healing bracelets and Amway. It’s the Ponzi gene.

Luck is a part of it, sure. But I was a news reporter with a background in design, and an amateur coder: just the right mix of things to have spend a few thousand hours doing when the blogging world was growing. Getting lucky has prerequisites.

The opportunity this created got me hired right into the thick of things, allowing me to skip building an audience completely from scratch: Wired’s gadget blog had maybe 100k page views a month at the time. That’s not much, but was a great headstart.

As for your tips, they’re fantastic, especially the last one. Spot-on. I am tired of the many “gurus” who achieved only mild success in their career. Some don’t even take the time to blog anymore because they’re busy hawking their new applications or e-books.

Or are you saying that it was it the strength of your comments and forum discussions that got you that job?

I think the reason people are hung up on the “blogging A-list” is that to an outsider it seems like sheer luck that most people become successful at blogging. Or it seems that you need a “big break” (such as a job at Wired) to get in on it rather than being able to build up an audience slowly as you suggest.

It puts me in mind of Peter Jackson feeding the endless appetite of the fans for updates and behind-the-scenes details when making the LOTR films, then repackaging and polishing much of the material to include on the extra disks.

Robin Sloan wrote the best article about balancing aggregation and original meaty stuff: http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890

Blogging about tech, biz and entertainment are traditional high CPM areas, but it’s also where the strongest competition is. Politics will be good for the rest of this year, too, but will fall off a cliff in november.

A nice five-figure income should be easy to come by for someone with a million page views a month, but it could go a lot lower if you relied on something like adsense and you write about something with no advertising market — but a lot higher if you put a lot of effort into selling ads directly and your readers are all 40 year-old gay doctors. And it’s not a linear thing: people don’t seem to earn much of anything until they get to a certain threshhold of traffic in the first place … and I’d hate to have to get to millions, or even hundreds of thousands of unique readers a month, from scratch.

On the “don’t stop doing what brought them to you” point, some of these young writers might have multiple competing interests that shift over time… is the friction between those themes likely to add depth or to alienate readers, or how does one balance them? Better yet, how does a young writer find the voice that lifts them to the next level?

And what about self-scheduling some longer, more thorough pieces to move from just producing comment and curation to producing original content? I’d think the distinction with original content might look different from years of experience in the evolving medium than it might to writers entering the field as it is today. Even better, what’s next?

Of course, that’s at odds with the advice not to blog about one’s self :)