You want to be a blogging star?

You may not gain the popularity of Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit or Mark Cuban at Blog Maverick, but you can learn from the successful bloggers reports Paul Botin in the New York Times.

• Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice. ‘Blog about your passions,’ says Cuban. Don’t blog about what you think your audience wants. Post because you have something you are dying to write about.’
• Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. ‘Deal with the rest of your life first,’ advises Reynolds who slips in posts between classes, as a break from writing law review articles and during slow time at home. ‘The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work.’
• Just post it already! The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the ‘Publish’ button. Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing says ‘Don’t bottle up your ideas forever believing you have to hit the same kind of mature, complete, perfect point as you would with a magazine or newspaper article. Blogs are always in progress.’
• Keep a regular rhythm. Whether it’s several times a day or a month, establish a reliable rhythm for readers.
• There’s no one right length for blog posts, but the most successful blogs, like most professional publications, seem to have their own reliable formats. Reynolds at two or three lines per post, Boing Boing at one to three paragraphs each, or Cuban’s browser window length when he’s on a roll.
• Join the community by linking back to bloggers whose ideas you reference and they’ll link to you. Links from other bloggers increase your readership two ways: they send readers directly from other sites, and they raise your ranking in search engine results.
• Plug yourself by emailing a prominent blogger about a good blog post of yours, post a comment with a link on more established blogs or submit your blog posts to news aggregation sites like Digg, Fark and Boing Boing.
• Allow readers to post comments on your blog for interaction and increased readership.

I’ll add be patient. It takes time before you develop your own style and the readership you’re looking for. It’ll happen by following what the successful bloggers are doing, but you’re not going to be an overnight success.