Excuse the bullshit title, I’m just a little bit sad right now that my RSS feed is filled with “19 ways to do this” and “7 tricks of the other”. Are we ever going to move beyond this tripe or is this the confirmed future of the web?

Anyway, the point of this post, if there is any, is to reveal to you the secret of getting traffic to your blog and of adding twitter followers. Ready? Here it is:

There is no further secret that I’ve been able to figure out.

Take, for example, my recent post on How To Be A Good Participant On A Panel. It’s brilliant. Go read it. I’ll wait.

That post got tweeted a number of times, including by Dave McClure, one of the most interesting guys in the startup world, and it got a link from Simon Willison, whose link blog is the single best resource for finding all things of interest in the web/tech world.

I am pleased.

Now let me tell you about that blog post. It took about 45 seconds to write, and I came very close to not publishing it. It is, after all, just a little puff of air.

I have at other times written important, interesting, thought provoking masterpieces and even made some effort to get them noticed. Yet, as often as not, they fail to garner any interest.

My Become an Assassin post, however, still gets quite a bit of traffic (from people who actually want to become assassins).

Go figure.

Which is to say, there is no figuring it. When it comes to blogging or tweeting, the best policy is to not worry about it and just write whatever interests you, no matter how earth shattering or inconsequential it is. Resist the urge to censor yourself; just push publish.