[doubleplus]

How do you maintain a hit centered blog?

We've all run into this problem at some point: We sincerely want to put something out on the web that people will link to, helping us generate ad revenue. But not all of us have something useful or meaningful to say. This is something you can overcome if you just put a little pluck and perserverance into it. Here's what some others had to say...

howtosplitanatom.com - "A good approach for me has been to identify a universal problem and get my friends to relay truisms about said problem. If they're not available, I can Google up a list in less than 10 minutes!"

zenhabits.net - "Pasting universal truisms is great, but I like to throw a little twist in by enumerating them."

And remember to make sure to network with other vacuous blogs so you can upvote each other and downvote the competition on social sites. Happy po$ting!

[socalsamba]

I actually upmodded this because I think it might be worthy of note. All snark aside, "universal" as it may be it's the simple stuff that people deal with everyday that has meaning to them.

Not every post can be a treatise on HMM based speech analysis. Nor should it be.

As always, if something isn't meaningful to you - no one forces you to read it. If you had suggestions for stories you feel are more interesting, feel free to reach out to me (I can't speak for Zenhabits, but I imagine they would say similar).

[marvin]

The problem is, as always, that the members of the community that post the best stories and comments start to disappear when the front page becomes stupid. How's that for "no one forces you to read it"?

I agree that not every post should be a discussion on the problems and merits of academic subjects, but every post should be interesting enough that the smart guys here want to read it: be that a PG essay, a story telling that Prosper verifies that poor people must have high interest rates or this year's Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders. Boilerplate news can be found anywhere, whereas a highly concentrated feed of stories is a precious rarity.