How to Be an A-List Blogger: One Simple Step
Generally speaking, it’s poor form to tell someone how to do something you haven’t done yourself.
For instance, I would never dream of sneaking into a medical school and teaching a class on colonoscopies. I have no idea how to insert a camera into someone’s anus and wiggle it around their large intestine. It would be very poor form, indeed, if I were to do that.
But this is the Internet not medical school; when has form ever mattered? Telling people how to do things you’ve never actually done is pretty much that status quo. So although I’ve never been an A-List Blogger, I feel confident that I can teach you how to become one by the end of this Scroll.
It’s really very simple.
All you have to do to become an A-List Blogger is be somebody that other people wish they could be.
That’s it. That’s all you have to do.
“What about writing?” you ask. “Don’t you have to be a great writer?”
No. You don’t. Spelling and basic grammar will help you out, but blogs aren’t about poetry or lyrical prose. That’s why they’re called blogs. Blahgs. Blaghahahahgs. Blobs, I once called them and it caught on for a few weeks. Nothing called a blog can be pretty.
Blogs are about information. And information doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to be clear. “It” being how awesome your life is.
I’m not making this shit up. Think about all the bloggers you know who have readerships the size of small big cities and who genuinely make a living off the money those readers give them for e-books with lots of white space between the very simple lines.
I used to want to be Everett Bogue. Back in the fall of 2010 when Far Beyond the Stars was alive and well. I was sitting at work one day, surfing the net for things to read while I pretended to work, and I came across this scruffy guy with shaggy hair who didn’t have to work anymore because he sold e-books online. I wanted his life. So I became a minimalist and started a blog and continued to be scruffy and have shaggy hair. I quit my job. Stupidest thing I ever did. I’m still paying for that mistake a year later financially. I was doing fine. Paying my bills. Digging out of debt. Up for a small raise. But I quit because I didn’t want to live my life; I wanted to live his.
This is the reason any blogger gets famous. They know how to make their life look better than yours. Ev Bogue would say this flat out. Still does. His Upgraded Minimalist Business guide is not for you if you “want to move to a suburb and get a mini-van.” All the cool kids are living out of bags, working from cafes anywhere in the world. If you’re not doing that, you’re not really living.
I’m not trying to pick on Ev in particular. I’m just being honest about the reason I started blogging. His spiel was convincing. He made his life look a thousand times better than mine. And I’m not judging him for it because that’s what bloggers do. That’s the work. When they ask you if you’re “doing the work” that’s what they’re talking about. Are you making your life look better than anyone else’s?
Are you somebody that strangers want to be?
You might be. It isn’t that hard to do considering how difficult daily life is for most people on this planet. Tell people you’re always Zen. Tell them you have time to do Yoga every day. Tell them you have a really organized desk. Tell them you don’t anything you can’t carry in a bag. Tell them you travel the world. Anything looks better than the life most people are living.
The Bible says thou shall not covet, but the Bloggers say “Yes, you shall. Otherwise we’ll have to go back to working minimum wage like you.”
Even minimalism – which purports to be about being happy with what you already have – plants these seeds of jealousy in the reader’s minds. But rather than things, they covet the lifestyle. They covet the freedom implied in living out of a bag. That was me. A year later, I regret my fling with minimalism. I miss a lot of the things I let go. Because I did it for the wrong reasons. Because I did it so I could feel like I was as cool and free as somebody else.
I paid $99 during a 72 hour Sale for a bunch of e-books that would teach me how to be a businessman. But I never wanted to be a businessman and I never read the books. I made it a couple of pages into Guillebeau’s guide before I fell asleep. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying it wasn’t for me. I don’t care about that stuff. I didn’t then, but I thought I had to if I wanted to be like them. And I wanted to be like them because they were better than me. They told me so all the time. “Quit your stupid job and work online like us! Be cool!”
I once went to an Art of Non-Conformity Meet-up where all I could do was laugh at all the people trying to be like each other. I don’t mean that in a mean way because I was there trying to be like them too. I just mean it was literally fucking hilarious. “You’re going to Chang Mai? Me too!” “Me too!” “Me too!” Everyone was trying so hard to be like somebody else they read about online that they had all become the same. I couldn’t tell anyone apart. Someone asked me if I was Everett Bogue. I might as well have said yes. I certainly wasn’t me.
A lot of A-List Bloggers out there will tell you that the secret to success is just being yourself. Of course, they tell you that! Because they need you to think that they’re just being themselves so you’ll want to be like them! That’s how they make their money! Their voice is saying “Be yourself” but if you read their lips they’re saying “Try to be like me!” Your desire to do so is their bread and butter, baby. There’s no way around it. Inciting you to covet is the great and noble work.
If you can incite people to covet your life, you will most likely make it big.
But if you can’t, you will most likely fail.
If people read about you and think “Oh, this person is just like me right now!” instead of “Oh! This person is everything I dream of being!” then you are most likely going to fail. If your only goal is to create an A-List Blog, that is. But if you want to make new friends, you’ll probably succeed. If you want to develop your craft as a writer by sharing your words with the public, then you’ll probably succeed. If you want to touch people through your stories, then you’ll probably succeed.
You’ll probably never make a shit-ton of money or have enough subscribers to brag about it on your front page. But you’ll probably succeed.
I can so relate. Back in 2004-2007 I was all over the internet. Wheeling and dealing. Life was great. I was making six figures off the internet. My lifestyle was stellar. I lived in hotels. I hated it. I wouldn’t wish that life and lie on anyone.
A List anything is a pain in the rumpski. Better to honestly live the life you were called into than try to live someone else’s life.
Wow I love this article.
This is what I wanted to write when I quit my blog next month (you heard it here first!). But you went & wrote it first & much better than I could’ve said it. I’ve realized my life is pretty nice as is & I need to be more thankful instead of whining. Can we re-sell all those ebooks? I’m looking to declutter & pay off some debt…
It’s funny, man, how the ego works.
On my first read-through, I felt a little insulted — almost like you were calling out everyone who *did* want to travel and live as minimally as possible. Once I’d had a moment to actually reread what you wrote, though, I realized you summed it all up pretty nicely: “Because I did it for the wrong reasons. Because I did it so I could feel like I was as cool and free as somebody else.”
I know the feeling. I had the Everett-envy pretty hard when I first started, since I associated what he was doing (honestly? I thought he was writing pure crap and getting paid to do it) with the kind of lifestyle I wanted to live. I do want to travel. I do want to live the kind of life these A-list bloggers are lifting up before us. I’m doing everything I’m doing, accordingly, so I can try and live that life, but I guess this is where I deviate — I still want all of the things you listed at the end.
I want to make friends. I want to help people. I want to become a better writer as I go along, so that I can do the first two things even better than before.
I guess I want it all. That sounds like some ugly mix of naiveté and narcissism, I know. But I know too that it’s *okay* to want all of the things mentioned above — just so long as you pursue them because you *want* to, and not because someone has convinced you that you should.
We’ll see where I end up. Thanks for the thought-provoking scroll. I hope you’re doing well, sir.
Yes. Exactly.
And I think you deviate because your desire to help people comes across as genuine. You’ve done some really cool things in the last two years. You’ve become someone that people want to be. (Definitely someone people want to look like with their shirt off.) But you never set yourself up as LOOK AT ME. LOOK WHAT I’VE DONE SO FAR. ISN’T IT SO MUCH BETTER THAN WHAT YOU’VE DONE?!!!?!!? IT IS. HAHAHAHAHA IT IS. That’s the vibe from a lot of popular bloggers and I’m not calling them out for it as much as I’m calling us out for falling for it. For letting anyone make us feel like our lives are shit unless they’re set up just like some “cool” person’s. For shelling out hard-earned money for their shitty books so they can just brag even more about their passive income.
There’s nothing wrong with it wanting it all. If I woke up in the morning with 100,000 subscribers, I wouldn’t tell them to go away, lol. But only if I could have them and still just be me. Not my idea of what a cool person should be based on what others have told me it is.
Can I get an (secular humanist) amen up in here?! Seriously, I was about to write something similar, so thank you for writing it much more coherently and eloquently than I’d ever be able to. After reading more and more about how to make a blog successful, I’m really seeing how so many bloggers I considered “authentic” are anything but. I feel like the internet has been so deceptive in getting people to think they are not conforming or hearing new ideas, when in actuality, they are just being scammed a new way. I could go on about the skeezyness of the Blogosphere, but I digress…
As for the non-conformist thing-BRILLIANT. I was a born non-conformist (seriously…I have an inherent urge to go opposite of everyone else every.single.fucking.time…I’m “difficult” lol), so I always chuckle when all of the non-conforming groups are basically just conforming to a new group. If you think about it, everyone is a conformist and non-conformist in some way. I just wish more people would realize this before bandwagon-jumping.
Anywho, thank you for making me feel human and your authenticity.
Fantastic! There is one particular blog that I have been following for a bit and it is huge. After about a two months of daily reading I started to think that there is no way this stuff could be all true. It has to be embellished to some extent, her kids say too many “perfect” things. I don’t know, something is just “off” with it all. After reading your post, it makes complete sense. The blogs I most enjoy are small little blogs by people who are making their way through their lives. I used to think I wanted the big blog, but I am quite happy with the group of people I have met through my blog and have no desire to be anything other than myself.
Great thoughts – thanks for posting them!
I love your honesty, Chase.
While I’m not interested in A-listers or ever wanted to have a “free” lifestyle like you say they claim to have, I deeply agree with your realizations and conclusions. I’m sorry you had to reach them this way, though.
Wanting to be like anyone else is generally a sign that something’s not right with your self-perception, and the worst thing you could do is seek guidance or direction outside of yourself. I wish you strength and courage for the future, and the peace of mind necessary to forgive yourself and move on.
Thanks very much for this, Chase. Awesome expression of things I’ve felt for a while, too.
Last November, I got heavy bored with the Internet, including my own blog, Catfish Parade. It seemed like everybody was saying the same things and selling new versions of the same products, and I just got sick of feeling like there was some secret they had that I didn’t.
I actually hated writing on Catfish Parade by that time. Even though lots of people were cheering me on, it wasn’t me, wasn’t my voice. I was pretending to be “them,” like I was living a great life that everybody else should. I felt like a fraud. (However, I am starting Catfish Parade back up soon, just with a more authentic approach. I’m excited by it now.)
The blogosphere is a very emotional place. The successful folks there are able to manipulate those emotions—unfortunately, though, the emotions they most often choose to manipulate are jealousy and inadequacy. Because those make folks pull out their wallets.
This post pretty much sums up why I shut down my blog. I felt like in some ways I was just spewing random opinions out into the internet with the expectation that readers should think like me and be like me. If I ever get back into blogging, I want to make sure I am only telling from experience or through research and logical reasoning– not the kind of marketing language you so often see. I think the blogger I respect the most right now is Sam Harris– because he writes with a scientific and philosophical approach rather than writing from a clouted ego like you mentioned so many bloggers fall in the trap of doing.
Thanks for getting this message out there, Chase, and good to read one of your posts again.
Dude, I love this post. First, it’s so spot on – and the whole a-list blogging thing feels so kind of 2008 to me. Total echo chamber of positive advice, now frequently dressed up in lingoish street speak or bad words or whatever the branding is. And I say this with all due respect to many of these bloggers – who I either know, or who at one point influenced me. But in a way the whole thing has started to feel a bit like a movie you loved once and rented five times and now the fortieth time you see it you’re like, huh, wait why do I love this movie again?
Ev Bogue is a particularly intriguing one because the one thing people seem to forget in all the (sort of) Bogue-bashing is that Everett actually never said I’m fucking awesome and look at me – he actually wrote about how painful his life was and the shit he was dealing with and how he was personally overcoming it. It happens that Ev is a really fucking good writer and was willing to be very open about his solutions to his problems, and the seduction of his writing and open-ness inspired a shit-ton of people to wanna be like Ev. But, really he’s just a guy figuring shit out.
I’ve been on a kind of internet break (at least in terms of blogs and such) for the last six months or so – and really, who noticed?
love from NYC
I noticed actually.
I agree that Ev used to write some really powerful, heart-felt stuff. I did genuinely enjoy his writing, and I still figure he’s probably a good guy though his writing no longer resonates with me. Here’s the funny thing: I stopped really enjoying his work once he started practicing non-violent communication. Meaning, once he stopped being so in your face about his ideas. When he started writing from a gentler, more questioning place I got bored. I like violent communication I guess, lol. So you know, the truth is I’m not really calling the big bloggers out as much I’m calling people like myself out for getting caught up in it. The seeds of discontent are already in us, but these bloggers profit from it by watering that seed under the guise of self-improvement. And I don’t know that they MEAN to do this. It’s just how the game gets played. They only profit because we hate ourselves so much and want them to fix it for us.
Hi Chase, I always look forward to your posts, more than any of those with the small city of subscriber list bloggers. The things you say always resonate with the things I believe. I wrote something similar on my blog a few months ago from a slightly different angle. I wrote:
“As a psychologist I’ve never been one for self-help pop psychology books and I have an uneasy feeling growing about the gazillions of ‘self-help’ blogs out there. Do we really need all this help? Absent but implicit (if not explicit) in the self-help genre is the message that we’re not quite good enough and that we need to improve and change. It’s healthy to want to change for the better but it can be a vicious cycle if we are unwittingly being invited into feeling less because of this.
Making passive income is something we’d all like, being fitter is something more or less universal, reaching dreams and goals is something most of us aspire too. From an evolutionary biological psychological viewpoint it is part of what makes us human and what makes us the most creative and adaptable species on the planet.”
I do worry what is written between the lines of all these blogs – the unwritten words are usually saying ‘you are less than’, we get invited into comparative thinking, taking our minds away from what we actually do have. You explained it so well from your personal experience. I’m not saying we don’t hope to be better and give up, but we probably need to do this from an authentic place with a strong foundation of ‘I’m okay just how I am’, ‘I am good enough’. This is a favourite topic of mine and one I wish we were talking about more, because it is true, when we are vulnerable we are at risk of being scammed, losing and life becoming worse.
I love this analysis.
yAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!
Love this post, and feel that you’re spot-on re Ev and many others. My life is such a fuckup on so many levels that all I can do is write from the point of view of somebody plowing through the mess. I can’t sustain the whole life-is-blessed, I am serene and free meme, and I’m way old enough to know it’s a crock of shit, anyway.
That being said, I don’t regret going minimalist because nothing I got rid of was worth keeping, and it really did give me the freed-up context in which to focus on writing and other good things. I never did aspire to Ev’s type of minimalism, but rather a less bourgeois and more streamlined and mindful lifestyle.
The manipulation needed to achieve A-Levelness never sat well with me, and by the time I found my blogging voice, I was ready to move on and develop as a writer, not a professional blogger. Maybe someday I can shift my blog’s domain from minimalist woman to meg wolfe, as the writing side of things grows.
But, damn, Chase, this was a terrific post
I really love this post.
I do have one question though. How do you reconcile such spot-on cynicism with an apparent enjoyment of, or at least complacency with a lot of the people in the (ugh) blogosphere who do this sort of thing.
For example, you write for on occasion and contributed to the theminimalists.com. Your story was, the clear standout, included in one of their writers books.
As I’ve been noticing more and more over the last few months, sites like that embody exactly what you’re talking about. Playing to societal discontent either intentionally or not, usually in order to sell rehashed subscriptions or e-books.
Anyways, sorry for the rant. You’re an excellent writer and I think that’s one of the most insightful posts I’ve ever happened across.
Thanks for all the kind words about my work.
That’s a good question you ask. I am cynical about blogging, but I keep doing it. I started out hoping to get rich quick on flimsy e-books, but I got over that fast. Now I blog because I want to keep my name out there, to get people interested in reading my fiction. Even cynics have to eat. So if a fancy-shmancy blogger wants me to write guest post (though they probably won’t if they read this, lol) I’m not going to turn down the chance to get my words read. And if someone asks me to write a short story for their book, I’m definitely not going to turn them down. If I want to be a writer for a living, I need people to know about my words. I’m not interested in waiting around for an agent or a publisher to give me a chance, so blogging is a great way to get people interested in my work in a grass-roots sort of way. This means that yes, there is a certain complicity with people who do this sort of thing though I’ve distanced myself from anyone I felt was truly reprehensible. I’d like to be able to magically make my mark without kissing any butts, but I live in America where there’s always a game to be played if you want any level of success. Bootstraps don’t exist.
In specific regards to my relationship with The Minimalists, the answer is simple. They’re my friends. We started blogging around the same time and Josh and I had the pleasure of meeting early on. We bonded over our mutual preference for writing fiction. I’ve met Ryan since then and he’s great too. They’re actually very cynical about a lot of these same things and I think they tries to avoid them as best as they can. Yeah, they’re playing the game and doing quite well. But they aren’t taking part in over-hyped 72 hour sales or asking people to pay a day’s wages for an e-book with less than 50 pages and 20,000 words. They’re not constantly bragging about what they did today or calling people zombies for not living the same way as them. They push a certain lifestyle, but it doesn’t take the form of “Look how awesome our lives are; don’t you wish you could be like us? Here’s a book to tell you how?” I also really respect them for telling people NOT to quit their jobs until they’ve prepared. I think they’re good guys, even if they did make the A-List.
I’ve noticed the same things about theminimalists and zenhabits. They went from insightful and helpful articles about dealing with life to buy my book, subscribe to my newsletter, sign up for my online seminar. I stopped reading both, because they stopped saying anything worth reading.
I really appreciate this. It’s so easy to start competing with other people in the blogging world. But you’re right. It’s amazing how many friends in far-off places you can meet by blogging. Friends and community last forever. Professional minimalism is a temporary job, not a career.
Great post. I love your thoughtful essays and I’m looking forward to more!
I don’t know if I am a good blogger, but I am happy. I stopped going to tweetups and hanging around with so many travel bloggers because I noticed a lot of copy-catting within the group, a lot of piggybacking of ideas and opinions. I am infinitely more curious about what’s going on under all that. When you go home at night and are standing alone in your kitchen (or if you’re a location-independent entrepreneur, when you close your eyes just before you sleep) what thoughts do you carry? Forget what you did or didn’t do, what you wrote or said, who you talked to, etc. What thoughts do you carry? I guess this is why I could never get into travel blogging or blogging on a larger level. I want to encourage people to figure things out for themselves, not do what I do.
Thanks for a great post!
Sorry, Chase, the last reply was supposed to be for you! I do appreciate that you’ve shared your experience with the downside of minimalism. I was really annoyed after reading The Minimalists’ books, because not everyone can quit their job and turn their passions into a career that can put food on the table. Our society needs garbage men and people who assemble refrigerators for a living. Does anyone grow up wanting to do either of those things? Probably not. But I see more honor in the garbage man’s work than in the work of people whose “calling” is to stand up and say, “look, be like me! But don’t, because then you’ll cut into my e-book profits. But get rid of everything and you’ll magically be happy!”
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This wave of backlash has been brewing for a while. I think there was a definite blogging frontier; like any gold rush the first people to stake a claim made it look all too easy to those who came afterward. The bloggers who got in from 2005-2008 were early enough that they didn’t have to be particularly good, just follow the model and claim their piece. Those who got in from 2009-present were told they could do the same, but it got increasingly competitive+redundant.
Aside from how easy/difficult or helpful/unrealistic it might be, I think a lot of blogs also suffer from a conflict of interest. You summed it up nicely. The marketing posture that’s good for sales may not be good for spreading an idea or lifestyle. The result is people who want one getting the other and not being happy.
I’m pulling the plug on all affiliate links for exactly this reason. I guess this is a sneak preview… the announcement of my new policy will be made in the next week or two on Rogue Priest.
At the heart of it though I do think a deeper question needs to be asked. Is it really accurate to say that all these inspirational bloggers are trying to get people to want to live like them?
Or do some of them actually, genuinely live a lifestyle that most of us would be happier living?
It’s easy to say it was all hocus-pocus if you try to break in and can’t. But that’s a very real question – and depending on the answer, the lifestyle design rush may still have something left to teach us.
Congratulations on going anti-affiliate. I tried it once and then backtracked almost immediately because I didn’t like the taste. For me, it’s not taking money for work I didn’t do. Why do I deserve 50% of someone’s work just for posting a link? And why would they deserve that much of mine? Yes, it spreads the words, but in order for the author to make a profit on that model the prices had to be jacked up to ridiculous heights. So everyone was getting ripped off even if they thought they were being given a break by the availability of affiliate sales. It was an ingenious but disingenous scam. If I like something someone writes, I’ll link to it because I care about it not because I want to make a buck. The affiliate model just leads to too many people posting links for shitty work that offers a big cut.
As for whether these A-List bloggers intentionally set out to get people to want to be them, I think the answer is no. That wasn’t really the accusation I wanted to make. I think the fault lies equally with the bloggers who oversold their own awesomeness and with the people who hated their own lives enough to fall for these ridiculous prices. Fool us once, shame on them. Fool us twice, shame on us, right? I’m sure many of them are genuinely living lifestyles we’d rather be living, but there’s a fine line between selling that lifestyle and selling ourselves. And I think most of the people who made it really big crossed that line and lost their humility because it seems you’d have to do that to charge the way some of these people do.
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i completely fucking agree. that is all.
that’s why i don’t blog anymore, even if i try i realize i have this yearning to just sound cool rather than just fucking write well.
whew.
good job, chase!
Yep. Nobody wants to hear about the people who are living normal but fulfilling lives, they want to hear about the exceptional ones, the ones who are leading a life different than their own, ones who they can oogle at. It’s all just another form of celebrity worship. Why do people follow celebrities? Because they all secretly want to be them. Bloggers are the same. If you can live a life that someone else wants, and convince them that they want it and that you’re awesome and glamorous and all that jazz, you will succeed.
This has been something of a thorn in my side throughout my 12 years as a blogger. I do lead an interesting life. I travel a lot, sail tall ships (pirate ships, basically), fly a biplane in my spare time, spend my weekends as a historical reenactor, drive a vintage sidecar motorcycle, grow much of my own food while living in an apartment, and work as a photojournalist. By all accounts, I should be wicked popular as a blogger. But, because I am honest about the hardships I go through to have my life, and am not good at “being desirable”, I only have a few regular readers. It drives me nuts.
I think its hilarious how there is so much conformity in “non-conformity”. I always tried to alienate myself from the association because of that. I would call myself a non-conformist but.. I don’t want to conform to non-conformity!