How to Create an Unsuccessful Blog (and neither know nor care)

Your Name

Yes, your name is important. You might be a Louis Gray, Bwana McCall or Robert Scoble (just the first three names that popped to mind, honest), or you might be a Slippy Lane. Whatever your name, whoever you are, how you identify yourself on your blog is important. If you're a prominent (I will not use the term 'a' list here) blogger, you should be aware that anything you create will probably have a certain amount of success, even if it's complete junk, just because people will be curious to see what your next new thing is.

If you are a prominent blogger, you will need to use a nom de plume to create your new blog, or it will generate too much curiousity traffic. Non-prominent bloggers may need to use a new appellation if they have used their given names as their online identities (which seems to happen a lot more often these days)

For extra anonimity, just add a three digit number to the end of your appellation.

Once you've come up with your name, go sign up for email, a blog service and whatever other interwebby serviceoids interest you. Remember, anonymity and obscurity are your watchwords.

Some examples of obscure nicknames: foxylady308, bridgeluvr830, hotstuff083

Subject Matter

As always, in creating a blog, you should decide upon your blog's main subject matter and try to come up with a title and tagline that reflects your subject matter without being too obvious or generic. Your subject matter itself should be clearly defined and not too vague. Do a bit of research - do a Google blog search for keywords matching your chosen subject, check out the blogs that match (if any) and try to see what they are missing. A successful blog needs to fill a gap somewhere, just like a successful invention.

Having come up with a subject matter, title and tagline, discard them. You aren't trying to create a successful blog. You just want a place to post the stuff that's too big to be represented in it's entirety on friendfeed.

There is a simple rule for blog titles. It's your appellation followed by a single apostrophe, the letter 's', a space and the word 'Blog'. For example, "Bridgeluvr830's Blog".

Creating the Blog

Once you have a title, create your blog. Don't list it in any listings, don't set it to automatically ping anything, don't set up any traffic monitoring or analytics services, don't change the templates, don't do ANYTHING. Leave everything else at it's default settings.

Advertising your Blog

Are you kidding? Don't! Okay, you can tell immediate friends and family if you like, but with any luck, they won't visit it very often.

Using your Blog

The people you told about your blog, they're your target audience. If you have something to say about something, and it requires more space than your social networking doodad of choice, post it on your anonymous blog and tell the relevant people about it.



That's it. You should now have your very own unsuccessful blog site. If you suspect that your blog is drawing too much traffic, just delete it and create a new one, and this time, DON'T add any traffic monitoring!

If you manage to maintain your blog's obscurity, you could try adding a friendfeed identity for your assumed name, and feeding your blog into it. This makes keeping your obscurity a little more challenging, especially if you happen to comment (using your nom de plume) on some other peoples' stuff on friendfeed.

I've actually broken most of these rules, and STILL managed to keep my regular blog readership under the 100 user mark, so you all should be able to create your own unsuccessful blogs without too much more effort than it takes me.

(C)opyright December 2008


How to Create an Unsuccessful Blog by Simon "Slippy" Lane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.