9 things every blogger should understand

Aaron Hockley, who’s been blogging for 4 years at, Another Blogger and Metroblogging Portland, among other places, has a nice list of 9 things every blogger should understand.

Read the whole post, it’s good. Here’s abbreviated quick nine.

1. Every reader has an opinion… and they’re all correct in their own mind. Don’t be thin-skinned.
2. Posting the same things as everyone else will render you invisible.
3. Posting unique content is the way to get noticed.
4. It is better to have your controversial posts read by folks who disagree with you than those who are on your side.
5. Only a very small percentage of your readers will leave comments.
6. It will likely be the same folks leaving comments over and over again.
7. A hit counter is useless in and of itself. The fact that one has had 14,872 page loads means nothing.
8. Don’t bitch about traffic (or lack thereof) unless you’ve taken the time to analyze your web logs with a decent stats package.
9. Not having your blog hosted on your own domain is setting yourself up for failure when you need to move it or your web host.

I’m starting to think I am the biggest violator of not writing unique content. 80% of my posts are generated by reading other blogs.

I try to weave such posts from others into a general comment of mine. But bottom line, the value I offer is the sharing of information with folks trying to become better bloggers, especially those in law and other professional service firms. These folks just don’t have as much time to stay on top of things relative to blogging.