The last few posts have been a mixture of snark and angst, so I thought I’d do something different this time. Inspired by a number of new bloggers I’ve met in the last week or two, I decided to share what I’ve learnt about blogging over the years. Trust me, this is useful stuff. Forget all those people who tell you how often to post, or how to install WordPress plugins, this is what you really need to know.

- There’s a man in Germantown, Washington County, (USA) who is quite scary. I’ve never met him, but he’s turned up here twice looking for something so odd, I can’t even include it in the posts listing weird search terms – and if you’ve seen those you can imagine how odd this is. Really, it’s weird in a totally-not-funny-makes-you-feel-kind-of-sick way. Go away nasty man!

- You can spend hours crafting what you consider to be the finest post you’re ever written, yet only three people will read to the end, and no one will comment. The next day you post a picture of a lolcat, it gets over 100 page views and a dozen comments within 10 minutes of publication.

- Of course, that finely crafted post may never see the light of day because your blogging platform of choice will eat your best posts. You can publish an endless stream of those lolcats, but the day you write something worthwhile, everything will go haywire and your post will vanish into some kind of vortex, never to be seen again. I’m pretty sure they’re all out there somewhere, just whirling around. You know how you hear about those random showers of fish, Saharan sand or gerbils? One day that will happen with blog posts. They’ll come raining down in some obscure, out of the way place such as Basingstoke. People will be shopping one minute, the next, they’ll be dodging missives containing film reviews, rants about annoying ex-boyfriends, tutorials about WP plugins and the better lolcats.

- Some people read your blog when they’re drunk, you can tell because they leave seriously strange comments. Yes, I am looking at you and you

- No matter how long you’ve been blogging, or how good you are at it, someone who only started last month but has read a book about it, will try to give you advice. This usually consists of changing your theme to the same one everyone else uses and adding lots of adverts. When you politely decline their ‘advice’, they’ll become quite irate and dismiss you as an amateur. Three months later you’ll still be blogging, their blog will have disappeared.

- Good news for singletons -  bloggers can have groupies too! Really. As your subscription numbers rise, so does your physical attractiveness. This is why Pete Cashmore is widely believed to be the second most attractive man on the internet, and Darren Rowse is known as the Tom Jones of blogging. Actually, that last bit isn’t strictly true, but I have a feeling some of his readers throw virtual knickers at him as they read his latest post.

- You’re either a blogger, or you aren’t. Like the advice giver mentioned above, some people just don’t get it and will give up in weeks – seriously, most bloggers stop within three months. Others stick around. Oh yes, we might have times when we say we can’t do it anymore, but it calls us back like a siren song. Even as you lie prostrate on a chaise longue, one arm draped elegantly across your forehead like the heroine in a Victorian melodrama, bewailing your complete lack of talent/inspiration (and seriously irritating anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot), deep down you know, you will go back to it. And I did.

Hope that was useful, feel free to share your wisdom in the comments.

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