A Post For New, Or Striving Bloggers

I wanted to make a few blogger-focused comments based upon my early morning post on Mark Levin and Gloria Allred. You'll hear my and the blog's name mentioned a couple of times, later Sean Hannity joins in, and readers know I also recently did his show. As I can imagine the conventional wisdom might one day be, well, he knows so and so, so such and such happens - I wanted to stop and make an important point for new bloggers, or ones desiring greater recognition.

I didn't know anyone in conservative media when I began blogging and never dreamed I'd get the mentions I have over the years, let alone get to appear on TV several times – with Sean's show recently being a big step up in that regard. But this isn't about me, it's about blogging and what actually happened that led to the mentions on that audio.

When I heard Gloria Allred mention Mark Van Der Hout in her interview with Mark Levin, it was a name I didn't know, one not previously affiliated with the story. So, I went to Google and started looking into him. That the housekeeper's immigration lawyer is a card carrying Leftist activist, precisely the type to want to help Brown, advances the story as a likely partisan election smear. No so called journalists bothered even looking into him at the time, if they even heard his name.

Bloggers are limited in resources, but there are hundreds of news stories breaking every day, many of them with facts and personalities that present tangents for exploring to expand the story, instead of just ranting about it, or offering your special brand of insight, no matter how clever, or witty, you might think it is.

Doug Ross often does that type of blogging, as does Weasel Zippers. You'll hit many dead ends, but with good reasoning and searching skills – and developed instincts, you can end up scoring, more often than not. And it's that type of new info that often gets your blog noticed, or appreciated by others over time. Of course, you'll also want to try and write reasonably straight-forward and well. Shorter or quicker, is better, imo. And don't make it about you, stay focused on the news and information.

Many bloggers don't do much of anything to break, or advance stories. They're good at regurgitating news from the headlines, or talking points handed them by an org or individual they know – and that does have value in its own right. But those things aren't usually available to the new, or struggling blogger, or offer nothing genuinely new to actually break through the clutter. Google, other search engines and the ability to think tangentially to advance a story are available to you.

So, unless you want to be a mouthpiece, a typist, or an essayist, your best bet is to try and produce unique information no one else has yet uncovered. You can bring value to the news cycle as a pure blogger, besides your latest rant, or summary of the headlines, which can be found on hundreds of other blogs, as well. Do that, learn to do it well and do it long enough, and your blog numbers and numbers of media mentions will likely improve.

Stacy McCain sometimes takes another route, mixing in traditional journalism. But that's a topic for another day. One last note about the method above, it works far better and is far more rewarding than Stacy's dumb-assed rules of blogging, or whatever the hell theyare. Heh!