In the space of a year and a half, I have managed to further the independence movement of a small African country. Am I staging a die-in in Red Square? No, I’m doing something that actually achieves results: blogging.
I have often implored my friends to blog about their interests. I know I’m bothering my friends, but they’ll appreciate it eventually. If you gave your friend a stock market tip, the proper response would be gratitude, not annoyance. Many Georgetown students who are supposed to be so career-oriented are ignoring something that could be a potentially huge boost to any career.
Popular tech blogger Michael Arrington, for example, was invited to the prestigious Davos World Economic Forum just because of his blog’s influence. Last June, the New York Times hired 21 year-old Brian Stelter, the blogger behind the cable news blog TVNewser, for its business section. A 21 year-old would normally have to work for years as an intern or at a smaller newspaper before getting such a prestigious job, but all Stelter had to do was establish himself as an authority on cable news through his blog.
I write a blog about Western Sahara, a North African country occupied by Morocco. Even though I only get around a hundred hits a day, blogging has expanded my network and given me access to some free dinners.
My blog, small though its audience is, has a global following. It’s been talked about on Iranian TV, and I know more Norwegians (who are inexplicably obsessed with Western Sahara) than I ever thought I would. Just by writing coherently about the Western Sahara twice a week, I’ve met that country’s president and have been asked to speak at the United Nations. Since I’m not especially industrious, I know blogging can achieve much more.
People will tell you successful blogging means connecting with other bloggers. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. The real trick to successful blogging is avoiding competition. Communities breed competition, so they’re antithetical to your goal of becoming the internet face of an issue.
A misguided friend of mine wanted to start a blog about “cool stuff” on the internet, but anyone who wants something that vague is already getting it at better-established blogs. Given alternatives, no one wants to read which sites a college student pulls off Digg, a website where users vote to highlight websites they like.
Instead, you want to give people an itch they didn’t know they had, then scratch it like mad. No one’s writing well about West Papua or press freedom, just to give two examples I’ve been staking out. By being the only one writing coherently, you set the standard.
Even if you don’t know a lot about anything esoteric, your blog can still have a good chance of standing out because you’re young. Being under 30 means you can write about the most exhaustively covered topics but be embraced in the blogosphere because yours is the “youth angle”. If I’ve learned anything from visiting nursing homes on high school service projects, it’s that youth will make even a substandard dominos player look like a phenom. The same thing applies to blogging.
If you manage to get enemies, even better. I’ve been told by angry Moroccans that no drop of sand will ever touch [my] traitorous hands. While I was puzzled, readers ate it up. Enemies, especially incomprehensible ones, will unite your readers and make them personally involved.
And the importance of antagonizing the right people (those with internet access and a lot of time) brings up a secret pleasure of blogging: being able to wreck someone’s name on Google. There’s an aging lobbyist for Morocco who will stoop low to hurt Western Sahara, so I helped make sure a search for his name and specialty on Google associates him with all sorts of perfidy.
Some people are concerned they won’t have time, but if they can find time to tie their shoes they have the time to blog—it requires that little time investment. You can take over a niche just by posting a lot at first, then cutting back to twice a week. After that, if you’ve done your job picking a niche right, your readers will have nowhere to go.
Between posts and comments, blogs become hubs for communities. If you do it right, it’ll be easier and more useful than toiling away at an internship.
Think of it like hosting a party. As long as you bring the drinks and play music, everyone who gets drunk or hooks up at a party thinks well of you.
