The Dennis the Peasant Blogging System™: Part One

Part One: What Do I Blog About?

The answer is simple: Politics.

The key to making money as a blogger is blogging about subjects which your potential audience simultaneously possesses the following:

1. Complete ignorance of the facts.
2. Very strong opinions.

Remember, you are not a United Way agency. Your job is to generate interest, not to educate or inform: Interest means traffic, and traffic means money.

And while you're remembering stuff, always remember these three simple rules:

1. Never blog about subjects that require real expertise.
2. Never blog about subjects that can be fact-checked.
3. Never blog about subjects that you can’t bluff your way through...

If you think about it for a minute, you can readily see the problems blogging about something that requires either formal training, experience and/or expertise. No matter how much you know about anything, there will always be somebody out there on the internet who knows more than you do. And since you’re blogging about that subject, guess where that somebody is going to end up? At your site. Then you start getting comments like this:

“If you hook up the Fizzlewhomper GX with a Double-Spliced Spleencord #6, you’ll blow off the right side of your face, you moron.”

And when you ask the guy Who the Hell He Is to say that you’ve got it wrong, it turns out he’s the one who designed the Fizzlewhomper GX in the first place. Your next stop? Back to the commercial loan desk at the bank, if you’re lucky. If you're not lucky, then you’re running Register 4 at WalMart.

You don’t need that sort of hassle.

Even if you try to blog on something that could pass for expertise, there are problems. For example, you decide to provide reviews on new cars – after all, you were the mechanic at a school bus depot for a couple of weeks once – and then find dealer salespersons are reluctant to let you test drive that new Mercedes Benz 6-series sport sedan when you pull up in your monkey-shit brown 1977 Chevy Chevette.

See what I mean?

That’s why the Dennis the Peasant Blogging System™ has the Three Magic Rules™ in the first place. If followed, the Three Magic Rules™ allow you to blog about exactly four subjects:

1. Your pathetic life.
2. The pathetic lives of your family. If they still talk to you, that is.
3. Economics.
4. Politics.

And I think you can see the problems with subjects 1 through 3.

1. If we could all make our pathetic lives interesting, we wouldn’t have to pay therapists, would we?
2. Ditto.
3. To really bullshit about Economics you need a Ph.D., and who has that sort of time needed to get one of those? Besides this is about making money, not getting educated...

You don’t blog about these subjects because no money comes in because no viewers come in... Unless your family is the Manson Family or something. And even then, if you blog about serial killing and mass murder you’re taking on NBC’s prime-time programming seven nights a week. That’s tough competition, there. And as for economics, when was the last time you said, Sorry guys, I can’t go to the strip club tonight, Alan Greenspan is going to be on O’Reilly...?

That leaves you with Subject Number 4: Politics.

The great thing about politics is that anybody can do it: You don’t need to be knowledgeable or have experience or be successful if you do have experience. Like I said: Anybody.Can.Do.It.

If you doubt me, just think about the career of Howard Dean. Here’s a guy who won one exactly one primary against The Biggest Stiff since Mike Dukakis and he’s now enough of an “expert” to be running the D.N.C..

Just think of the heights he could have reached had he managed to lose Vermont...

And speaking of Mike Dukakis, what about his former campaign manager, Susan Estrich? She ran one of the worst campaigns ever, is dumber than a potted plant, and sounds like Carol Channing... But who do the talk shows all run to at election time for “expert insight and analysis”?

That’s right, Susan Estrich.

What about Karl Rove? He can’t get half the Republicans in Congress to keep a straight face when Bush opens his mouth these days, and he’s considered to be a political genius...

I rest my case.

The other great thing about Politics as a subject is that anything can be given a political spin... And no matter how stupid that spin is, someone will take it seriously – because people who are into politics think politics is the important thing in the whole wide world. Or at least it's the most important thing in the world during work hours.

Think of it this way...

There’s this Left Coast Bimbo named Laurie David who blogs over at Huffington Post. Evidently she’s married to somebody in Hollywood or something. Now Laurie considers herself to be very serious about the environment... She's an activist. And as she's more active than she is smart, she writes a post like this:

Turin, Italy spent years preparing for the 2006 Olympics -- but all that preparation couldn't offset global warming and its impact on the Winter Games. It's been unseasonably warm in Turin, something that is readily apparent in all those sweeping shots of no-covered Alps the TV cameras keep showing us. Indeed, artificial snow-making canons have been working overtime in an effort to make up for the lack of the real thing.

But the fake snow is a poor substitute -- it makes the slopes icier than normal, hence the increased number of skiing accidents this year. Even the Games' opening ceremony felt the heat. At the last minute, performers in one of the big dance numbers had to switch from ice skates to rollerblades.

Watching Matt Lauer conduct interviews outside the Olympic Stadium clad in little more than a light sweater -- no jacket, no gloves, no scarf -- I can' t help but feel a preemptive pang of nostalgia for a global tradition sadly marked for extinction.

Sure it’s laugh-out-loud stupid - but that’s not the point. You're going to write a lot of laugh-out-loud stupid stuff yourself. The point is that Laurie's post doesn’t have a point. You read it and go, Yeah, whatever, Laurie. And that’s why Laurie David is posting at Huffington rather than making cold, hard cash at her own site. Let’s face it, the environment, in and of itself, doesn’t sell. You have to give it an angle...

Now, take that same crappy post and add one sentence – one single sentence consisting of three words – and you’re ready to get linked at Daily KOS, Eschaton and Crooks and Liars. Here it is:

I blame Bush.

See what I mean? Now it’s interesting, thought-provoking, and controversial. Markos proclaims you a Hero, Malkin calls you a Turd, and people race from one site to your site to another site and back to yours... And all the while you sit back and watch the site traffic money-minting machine work overtime.

You can do this, and in my next post, I’ll show you how...

Comments

[dsquared]

About a day late and a dollar short as always, I had an idea about what Dubai Ports World could have done. It would have been the simplest thing on earth to set up a US subsidiary called "Dubai Ports World (US)" Ltd and floated a minority stake on the NYSE. Sarbanes-Oxley would then have kicked in and not only would the operations have been completely transparent but the record-keeping obligations would have allayed the concerns of people like me who did worry a bit about the accessibility of the shipping records to anti-terrorism spooks. Not only that, but there would then be a nice 'n' easy package for the US government to expropriate any time it started getting really paranoid about things.

In all honesty, if I were the US government I would have made this (that all US port management operations have to be run through a domestically incorporated subsidiary) a requirement long ago. It's what they do for banks. Still, l'esprit d'escalier and all that.

[salvage]

What if my pathetic family is in politics?

[Cameron]

DtP,

I hope you're going to give some tips how to successfully parlay ignorant blogs into ignorant speaking engagements,ignorant newspaper columns, and ignorant books. Or did you already subcontract that to Jonah Goldberg?

[DennisThePeasant]

Salvage-

The answer will require the purchase of my system.

Cameron-

We discuss how to blog on autopilot while hanging around the rear enterance to the Fox News studios in a later post. Same with working the college circuit...

[dittybopper]

Susan Estrich sounds like Carol Channing? If you close your eyes she sounds like Charles Rangle.

[DennisThePeasant]

dittybopper-

If you keep your eyes open, she looks like Charlie Rangle.

[PeterUK]

Pah! The Peasants system is outdated,this is the 21st century,who needs THREE stinkin' words? With my system you only need TWO words,Yes folks buy one word and get one FREE!
"BUSH LIED!"
There are even little orange dots supplied FREE! to stick on the keys.Comes with full diagram.

[richard mcenroe]

PeterUK — But your system has a pretty restrictive sell-by date...

[Tim Worstall]

Richard: didn’t you learn anything in Business 101. Product obsolescence. Sigh.
We get to sell the new system in 2.5 years.

[richard mcenroe]

"Snowmaking canons"?

So that was the Vatican's contribution. Beats luging nuns...

[Moco Loco]

I've always thought that Susan Estrich did the voice for Lambchop, the sock puppet, on the old "Shari Lewis Show".

[PeterUK]

Richard,
Upgrades are available for a small fee,plus I will take the old words as a trade in.