Starting a blog? Start here.

I love it when people do my job for me. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger just posted a best-of series of links for beginning bloggers.

Written for first-time bloggers but not for dummies. ProBlogger remains high on my top 10 list of email/RSS resources for blogging and search optimization.

Here's a vital question the blogging guru asks right away:

"Does (your blog) topic excite you? Are you motivated enough to write about it for the long term? ... Be brutally honest about this because as I found, we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we are interested in a topic when we are not. ... If you’re not interested in your topic your potential readers will sense this and the chances of success will fall."

Almost always true. I have had the experience of starting a blog that's off-topic for me, only to find I've later become fascinated with the subject. (That blog covers the national debate over driving laws for cell phones and text messaging).

And then Rowse hits this major, major point:

"If you’re wanting to develop a serious blog and have aspirations for it to be used on a professional sort of level (whether as a business or corporate blog, as a blog to build your own profile or a blog to earn income from advertising) I’d recommend you go in the direction of a stand alone blog."

You may be a mere babe in the blogging world, but these are grownup decisions that can make or break any project.

By stand-alone blog the ProBlogger basically means WordPress, the self-hosted CMS system found at wordpress.org (not wordpress.com). Rowse goes on to recommend simple hosted platforms (such as Blogger or TypePad) for people who are in it for fun.

Once again, if you're serious, I urge you not to go with a one of these prefab blogging solutions. I made this error on my first blog, DVD Spin Doctor, which is on TypePad. This led to innumerable headaches, including serial problems with Google that forced me to do reverse-SEO on the site. Going with TypePad for a content-heavy blog with commercial aspirations was the biggest error I've made in this business (so far).

With self-hosted blogging, your URLs do not have some Net publishing company's name included. And you're not looking at a nightmare when you want to move the blog.

Here is a blog built on WordPress(.org), the home video review blog DVD Gift Guide. Try doing that on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress' separate prefab blogging platform.

Of course, I'm hosted on Blogger here, for this straightforward writing project. Aha! Is that the mask of hypocrisy we see? Nah. Having a presence on Blogger has helped me understand the platform and help clients. No biggie. The price is right. Probably will move it to WP at some point.

Back to ProBlogger's incredibly useful post. Rowse goes through almost all of the issues a first-time blogger should consider. I agree with pretty much all of it. Thanks, man.

Top 10 reasons to do top 10 lists

"The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of 'Ten Best,' " the writer and humorist H. Allen Smith observed way back when.

Here in the future, the Web and its social media sites prove Smith right minute-by-minute. An infinite number of top 5, top 10, top 20 lists are out there burning electrons.

Nowadays, these lists of no importance often are referred to as "link bait" -- the easiest path to getting noticed in the Blogosphere and on content-aggregating sites such as Digg.

And so we have "Top 10 Ways to Triple Your Google Traffic," "Top 5 Redneck Movie Villains," "20 Most Horrific Fashion Victims" ... the beat goes on.

Give top 10 lists a try on your blog -- almost any topic provides plenty of opportunities. Hit the right keywords and the Google traffic flows right in. Be sure to include both "Top" and "Best" in your headlines and title tags. Some traffic-minded web publishers break the lists onto multiple pages, with No. 1 at the end. Like those old Burma Shave highway signs. Annoying but effective.

Editors often spend time arguing the merits of these lists, unless they work at USA Today. But everyone in the media biz agrees there's one time when the lists reign supreme: the end of the year. Here's my friend Jonathan, a trainer, right on top of that with weight loss tips for the new year.

Like Christmas shopping ads, top 10 lists for the year keep appearing earlier and earlier. I actually saw a mainstream reviewer's list of last year's "best movies" in late October.

I'm plenty guilty, having done an annual list of the top DVDs since 2001, first for the Hollywood Reporter and then for my DVD blog. Check out the "Best DVDs of 2008." Google keeps sending readers to my 2007 list, but I hear they're really into archives these days. Jeeze.

Three years ago, I started up a top 10 for horror videos, in time for Halloween. Walk this way for the "Top 10 Horror Movie DVDs of 2008."

Next I'll probably add a top 10 for romance movies keyed to Valentine's Day. Insidious, these lists.

Of course, no one knows which are the best DVDs, movies, TV shows, whatever. We're all guessing and inflicting our opinions on the masses. The film Academy uses its rat's-nest voting system to produce the one and only Best Picture of the year, an even more ridiculous proposition than a top 10, no matter who's doing the voting.

I hate the Oscars, but grudgingly admit it's the way everybody keeps score. This year, the best picture hardware goes to "Slumdog Millionaire." Promise.

Hmm. How about "10 Times the Oscars Actually Got It Right"?