It’s probably an understatement to say that most blogging advice out there is generic, regurgitated, and very rarely anything new. Everything you need to know about becoming a successful blogger is available already if you know where to look; the next step is taking action on what you learn.

Most of the advice that is being shared, and incessantly repeated, is dated. It’s aimed at a blogosphere where there weren’t millions of blogs in each niche, all working hard to grow an audience. I call this advice aimed at the Oldsphere, whereas you need to be focusing on the Newsphere. Things changed, and you need to know how to deal with them.

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One of the first lessons that newspaper journalists are taught is to structure their content so that the most important information is first, with the importance decreasing as you read through the piece. Pick up any newspaper around you and you’ll see that the first few sentences contain the most crucial elements of the event.

This not only creates impact, but also allows editors to simply snip off the bottom paragraph of a story if they need space for other articles. As the final paragraph is the least important, their editing does not affect the article too much. I’ve already shared how I personally became a much better writer (though I don’t rate myself that highly) and now I want to get into the specifics of how to create compelling content.

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Many bloggers end up having a love-hate relationship with StumbleUpon. They love the amount of traffic that the service – which now boasts over 10 million members – can send, but they hate the conversion rate on that traffic. ViperChill received 12,040 visitors from StumbleUpon in May, yet their average time on site was just 26 seconds (overall site average is 2 minutes and 24 seconds) and they each viewed around 1.22 pages.

Simply put, compared to other traffic sources, StumbleUpon is terrible. However, because the service sends so much traffic, even leveraging just a small percentage can see a decent increase in your comment count and subscriber numbers. Today I’m going to give an in-depth guide to the service and then give my tactics for getting the most out of it.

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A question I receive time and time again is “Once you’ve published a blog post, how do you promote it?” and right now my response is simply “I share links to it on Facebook and Twitter.” That’s it. And I don’t even do this manually; the process is automated thanks to RSS feeds.

Of course, I’m able to do this because I’ve managed to grow the audience to a considerable size here at ViperChill. If you’re trying to get a new blog off the ground, it’s advised that you put in quite a lot more work. Even though I do such little promotion, many posts get hundreds of retweets and comments. The reasons why are quite simple.

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Any time that you take and apply blogging advice from me, you’re trusting someone who has created a number of blogs that failed miserably. But, even though I said I wouldn’t trust someone with marriage advice who has been divorced three times (they couldn’t learn after the second one?) I think the best people to trust are those who have made mistakes, learned from them, and then went on to success.

I built a celebrity blog which I sold after a month because I couldn’t care less about how Paris Hilton spends her time. I ran a DJ blog which I later let die due to other interests and I even ran ViperChill for a year (a long time ago) without getting one single comment or feed subscriber. I’ve made most of the blogging mistakes you can think of.

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Any blogging advice besides telling someone to choose a niche they love, write engaging content, network in your niche and stay consistent, is secondary. With those fundamentals alone you can go very far. There really aren’t any “secrets” that people are holding back from you, but there are things to learn that will make you more effective with these fundamentals.

I’m going to focus on the fundamental of networking and reveal a tactic so underused that it may as well be a secret. I’ve seen so few examples of this that I wonder actually how many people know about it. Today I want to blow the doors open and share something that all of you can use to grow your blog and become a niche leader with much more ease.

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It’s no secret that one-man blogs can make a lot of money. Steve Pavlina makes over $100,000 per month with his; Darren Rowse had an estimated $300,000+ month when he launched his last eBook and my friend Al’s site, Coolest Gadgets, was having $60,000 months way back in 2007.

In a sea of over 100 million blogs, these guys are the exception. It’s certainly not easy or quick to build a blog to reach these income levels. If it were, they wouldn’t be called the exceptions. Many bloggers will tell you that there’s no “one size fits all” strategy when it comes to building a huge blog. Well, I’m going to leave the personal sites alone, and possibly prove those people wrong by examining the Technorati Top 10.

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I have a confession to make. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been a little worried about my creative output for ViperChill. More specifically, I’ve feared that I would run out of blog post ideas. The simple reason for this is because I cover topics in so much depth that I don’t ever really need to write about them again.

You can find blogs that will give you a few link building tips each week and then I go ahead and write 15 in one post. You will find blogs with tips here and there on Wordpress SEO, and I go and write what I think is the only guide you’ll ever need. Thanks to a very productive hour I spent last week, I’m now no longer worried in the slightest.

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