The Secret to Successful Blogging Revealed!

I realized something Wednesday night while reading Li Evan’s Women of Internet Marketing Part 12. There I was, reveling in another delicious edition of Li’s awesome series when I came across this quote from upcoming phenom Rhea Drysdale. Li had asked Rhea how she became involved in Loren Baker’s SEO Site Clinic and Rhea responded:

"…My suspicion is he felt pressure to include a young female contributor after it worked well for Bruce Clay and SEOmoz. I’ll be ecstatic if I can amount to half of what Lisa and Rebecca have already done for the industry."

That’s when it hit me.

First, Rhea’s been living in some sort of bizzaro bubble the past few months. The only thing I have "done" for this industry is make people seriously question Bruce Clay’s standards for hire.

Second, and this is HUGE, I finally discovered the key to having a successful blog in the search engine optimization space. Are you ready for it?

Okay. The secret to successful SEO blogging is hiring a cute girl to do your bidding. To attract an audience you need a young, snarky female, preferably dark-haired (time to conform, Rhea!), to amuse and bewilder the masses. Let them cover the industry, injecting the news with a healthy dose of sarcasm, and the predominantly male industry will Eat. It. Up. In return, you’ll get instant street cred, soften up that I’m-all-about-work persona, and you’ll be put on the V.I.P. list for all the hip Google parties.

It’s genius, right?

Now, don’t feel bad that you didn’t pick up on it sooner. When I first read Rhea’s comment, my first inclination was to laugh too. Imagine Loren Baker commissioning Rhea not for her smarts, but just so he could fill some sort of young pretty blogger quota. As if Rebecca and I were hired as a crazy marketing ploy. No way! I can’t speak for Rebecca, but I was hired because I’m borderline genius. [Borderline something, anyway. –Susan]

But then I thought about it. I pictured Bruce and Rand sitting cross-legged on the floor in their respective offices–Bruce fiddling with his cape and trying to keep his tights from bunching up; Rand playing with his transformers, giving them funny voices but being super secret about it so as to not alert Mystery Guest–both of them just sitting there thinking up ways to bring attention to their blogs.

"Create a stellar piece of linkbait?" Rand asked Megatron. Nah, too predictable.
"Work up another interactive Flash chart?" muttered Bruce to his framed picture of the Search Engine Relationship Chart. Nope.

And then it hit them! They needed a hip female to ‘man up’ their blog. That will bring the masses. That will bring the links!

So they did it. Rand hired Rebecca, and Bruce took me on a month later. And you saps fell in love with us. Ha!

Next thing you know, Jordan has us laughing at Marketing Pilgrim, Tamar has Chris Winfield under her spell, and Rhea is blinding the boys with her charm and stories about the disgusting things she’s done to tortoises. Forget Danny and Barry. Combined we are the IT girls of SEO blogging. The inner circle of female bloggers has brought a fun, fresh look to this often-too-techy industry. And we’re pretty too! Huzzah!

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The search engine optimization industry is made of up predominately male geeks intellects. What do male geeks intellects love? Intelligent women with a sense of humor, of course! Beauties who will give them the attention they never got in high school; girls they can stalk on all the social network sites. (Okay, that last one only applies to certain individuals, Michael.)

So the lesson here is, if you want your blog to be successful, forget about everything Rand said in his post on blogging earlier this week. He was just trying to throw you off track. If you want to break into the space, find a cute girl with opinions who is willing to insert her witty comments at inappropriate and unexpected times. It’s guaranteed to bring the blog love.

[I can’t believe we pay you for this…–Susan]

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.