I challenge you to think of a popular blogger who lacks focus on their blog.

In the history of writing, everything has a focus. It's a contract you have with the reader. You stay within the bounds of the reader's expectations, and if you do that, you can write surprises that seem to stray from your topic, and the reader stays with you. Because surprises are fun. But if there's no contract because there is no focus, then there are no surprises. Every great piece of writing works this way.

Think about it: Canterbury Tales. The topic is getting to the end of the trip.  Or Moby Dick. Melville can write about everything—God, the American dream, fishing boats, marriage, mental illness—and he gets away with it because his topic is totally solid: Nailing the whale.

I challenge you to find a great piece of writing with no topic.

Even columnists stick to their focus. It’s part of the fun. When you audition for a print-based column, you submit ten sample columns to show that you can be interesting in a variety of ways while still sticking to the main topic. Because it’s hard to do.

You can write about any topic, but you have to link it to your focus. Look at my how-to posts. Most of them are only tangentially about how to do some career thing. Most of them are actually about something else. That’s why they are interesting.

Look my blog: Do you need me to tell you to use bullets instead of paragraphs on your resume? No. Do you need me to tell you to stand up when you do a phone interview? No. Because there are 400 other writers who will tell you that. So I need to do something else.

But I can only get you to read me if you come knowing what you expect. So I always relate what I’m writing to careers. Sometimes, it’s easy. I knew I wanted to write about my bed bug trauma. And I knew, quickly, that it was also about financial stress, which is, of course, a topic that’s fair-game in the career world.

Sometimes you just need a little patience: I knew for years that I wanted to write about abortion. I listen to Brick, by Ben Folds 5 all the time, and I love his contribution to the discussion about abortion. I wanted to make a contribution like his, but I couldn’t relate it to careers. Until I could. And then I wrote it.

Please do not tell me that you are just going to write whatever you want and you don’t care who reads it, or if anyone reads it. You are lying to yourself. Of course you care. We each have a limited amount of time in our lives, and blogging takes some of that time. Your blog is not your journal. Believe me. I know. I‘ve been keeping a journal since I was five. I have seventy-five volumes of handwritten journals, and it is totally different than blogging because it’s not public. The nature of a blog is that you are choosing to write publicly, so it is, by definition, for other people to read.

So, show some respect for people and pick a topic.

Also, show some respect for yourself. There are so many benefits you earn from blogging that do not require tons of pageviews. Here’s a list of them. Mostly, the list is driven by being known for what you are good at. But for that to work you need to know what you’re aiming for. What do you want people to know you for? Where do you want to go next? Answering those two questions is what will inform your blog topic and give you the focus for your blog.

Don’t tell me you can’t decide. Everyone knows where they want to go next. Even if it’s probably wrong, you know, right now, where you’re leaning. So write to that. Sure, it might change, but you need to commit to something, right now. Each day you have to wake up and do something. So you have to guess where to aim. We are all just guessing. Make your best guess and keep going in that direction until you find something else. And your blog is an expression of that commitment to yourself to have direction, even as you doubt it.

Here's some advice for everyone who is starting a company: Write your big press release first, before you do anything at all. And then work backwards. Map out the milestones you need to make the press release come true, and that tells you how to run the first stage of your startup.

To be clear: we did not do that. I mean, if we did, our press release would have had to say, “Ryan Paugh announces that he has just made it through two years of Ryan Healy and Penelope Trunk fighting tooth and nail over totally irrelevant details of building a social network that is a career management tool for the next generation workforce.”

Then Ryan Healy and I would rewrite that press release ten times because Tech Crunch announced that they are sick of people using the term "next generation" and Ryan doesn't want to use it but I think it's fine because it's in a different context. (LinkedIn is for gen x. Brazen Careerist is the job site for the next generation, demographically speaking. )

Then there would be a quote from Ryan Healy that says, "If I had known that we were going to expand from being a blog network to a full-blown social network then I would have never put up with the insane amount of rewriting that Penelope made me do to have a guest post on her blog."

I tried to write a normal launch blog post where I take a victory lap, but I think you know that I'm not the type. I do feel really, really proud of what we've done. Brazen Careerist is a site that lets you build your network the way it's supposed to happen: through genuine conversation.  Most of  you have watched me go through total hell to get this company off the ground. A lot of you wonder why I do it. The reason is that I truly believe that becoming an active participant in a professional community really will change your life.

I was really, really lonely. I was a new mom, and I had a failing marriage, and I moved to a city where I knew no one. I started blogging, and it was a lifeline to me. Not only did it provide fun, stimulating conversation, but it reminded me that I'm great at business, and I should be doing a business. Talking within the context of a community helped me find myself again, and the process of posting ideas helped me announce to the world what I am really good at, and sometimes—actually, most of the time—those things go hand in hand. (So it's no coincidence that the new launch of Brazen Careerist provides tools so that anyone can have this experience of defining yourself by posting your ideas.)

I convinced Ryan and Ryan to move to Madison to do a company with me. They knew from the beginning that the main goal for me with a startup was to have fun. And when they arrived in Madison, the thing that was most jarring to them was how weird and isolated I was. It's not how I seem on my blog. I know that. I mean, most people think I am weird on my blog but not that weird in person. The thing is that I'm actually more weird in person. So a lot of what our startup has been is all of us learning to adapt to each other (the company is basically a Penn State fraternity and me. Not kidding.)

I didn't realize I had Asperger syndrome until Ryan and Ryan kept pointing out the weirdness I have. I realized they are the same things my son goes to therapy for. People ask me a lot to write about Asperger syndrome. I am hesitant because I am still working out how to deal with it. One thing I know, though, is that friends are very very hard. People like me because I'm smart and interesting, but I am hard to be friends with. I don't quite understand the process. A lot of times people will say, "You think your blog readers are your friends, but they're not."

This is probably true, but I don't get it. The blog has gotten me through one of the toughest times in my life. Today I have a great company, solid funding, a great household arrangement, and a good-for-me boyfriend. I didn't have this a year ago. I had a mess on my hands. And I was so so grateful to have a community on the blog to talk to. The community talks about work when I want to talk about work, and the community talks about personal stuff when that's what I'm thinking about.

So. Okay. I am scared to do something now. I am telling you thank you because this community feels like my friend, even though I know it is evidence of mental oddness that I think this. I know I am so lucky to have a community that is so smart and insightful that the comments section is exciting to read. I know that's rare on the Internet. So every day I feel lucky, and what I'm scared to do is ask you for more. But I'm doing that now.

I'm doing it because I think you know that the last eight years of my career has been dedicated to building the Brazen Careerist brand and the company around it. And now with this launch, we need a lot of people to try out the idea that you can control your career by building strong networks through conversation and talking about your ideas.

If everyone who subscribed to my blog signed up at brazencareerist.com, the launch would be deemed a huge success. So, I'm asking you to do that now. Go sign up.  And then let me know what you think. And thank you so much for sticking with me through hard times so that on this really exciting day you are here to share it with me.

But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it's just a list you don’t want to talk about. I’m not special—I don’t have more stuff that is difficult to talk about. I just have more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff.

This is why.

I'm going to start by telling you that I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. I was in a post-traumatic stress support group afterward. People were divided into groups of ten based on their experience at the site—how bad things were for you that day. I was in a group comprised mostly of people who narrowly escaped the building before it fell and, as they were running out of the building, were splattered by body parts from people who were jumping out of the building.

We had individual therapy as well. Here’s what my therapist said to me: “Your childhood was so terrible that your experience at the World Trade Center was nothing compared to what you experienced as a kid. Your post-traumatic stress therapy needs to focus on your childhood.”

That was the first time I really had a sense of how bad my childhood had been. I knew everyone in the world thought things at the World Trade Center were terrible. So this must mean that my childhood was really terrible.

I was 34.

When I was five, I knew something was not right. That’s when I started therapy. I was never totally sure why my parents were sending me.

When I was seven I knew something was not right because the neighbor came over to our house when my parents were smashing picture frames over each others’ head. The neighbor said to me and my little brother, “Come with me.”

Then my memories get blurry. The next thing I remember is my high school homeroom teacher. I skipped a day of school and then came to school with a black eye and a note from my dad that said I had been sick. She said that she was not accepting notes from my dad anymore. She said I could not come back to school the next time I miss a day unless I called the police.

I don’t remember what I thought when she said that. Except that I thought, “Does she know what’s going on at my house? How does she know? I never told her anything.”

I remember the next time my dad beat me up though. I called the police and they came. Like always. And my dad said nothing was wrong. Like always. And then the police started to leave. Like always.

But then I said, “Hold it. Wait. My teacher won’t let me back in school unless I get a note from you that says I called you.”

I don’t remember what else happened. I remember the police asking me if I want to leave. I remember my mom saying, “Yes. Please. Take her away. Please.”

I went to my grandma’s to live. I spent all of high school living at my grandma’s. The school social worker spent the rest of high school trying to convince me that my parents did something wrong. My grandma spent the rest of high school telling me that my parents were completely irresponsible. Except at family gatherings. When my parents were there, with my three brothers, and everyone pretended that everything was normal and that I did not live at my grandma’s.

I don’t remember very much. I went to college and spent my time trying to sort things out: abusive boyfriends, bulimia, anti-depressants, and cutting. Getting nearly straight-A’s for a lot of the time. I sorted very little out.

I went to a mental ward the summer of my senior year. My parents visited me. They told me they were happy I was in the mental ward. My extended family visited me and they did not mention my parents. No one talked about why I might be there. My parents were anxious and loud in the family meetings: Begging the doctors to keep me from going back to their house. But even the doctors could not quite figure out why I was there: I worked on my senior thesis, I was a model patient, and I started dating a doctor right after that.

After I graduated, I moved back to Chicago, where he lived and so did my parents. I couldn’t figure out how to support myself and there were so many opportunities for me to try nude modeling jobs. The doctor thought it was ridiculous. He thought I was too uptight to model. I said I probably was, but I wanted to try because it was such good money. I said they first test you out in a swimsuit.

He said, “Don’t you need some sample photos?”

I said, “Yeah. I have some,” and I pulled them out of my bag.

The doctor looked. He smiled. He said, “Who took them?”

I said, “My dad.”

The doctor flipped. He went nuts. He couldn’t believe it.

I was mostly surprised. I had no idea that my dad taking the photos was weird.

That I didn’t know it was weird made the doctor even more upset. I remember trying to figure out why I thought it was okay. Or why he thought it was not okay.

I was 22.

I didn’t tell anyone about the pictures. I started having nightmares about having sex with my parents. I started not being able to sleep. I didn’t tell anyone though. Because I thought I was crazy.

Then my dad visited me a few years later, when I lived in Los Angeles. He wanted to go camping. I went. I was so nervous about being alone with him that I read almost all of One Hundred Years of Solitude before I went into the tent.

Then he took off his clothes, down to his underwear, and snuggled up next to me, with his arms around me and his penis up against my back.

Then I knew.

Or I thought I knew.

I slept outside the tent. I didn’t talk the rest of the time. I don’t think he even noticed.

I know the street in Los Angeles we were parked on when I finally asked, “Dad, did you do sexually inappropriate things with me when I was younger?”

He said, “Yes.”

I had no memory of what, exactly, he did. I still have no memory of it. And I was scared to ask him more. I asked my mom the same question. She gave me the same answer.

Both parents have said they were sorry. But that is not my point. My point is that my childhood was ruined by secrets.

In hindsight, so many people kept the secret: my family, the police, teachers before my freshman year. Decades later, when I asked my high school friends what they thought of me in high school, two of them told me that everyone thought I was nuts coming to school beaten up so often.

I’m not kidding when I say that I thought I was keeping that a secret.

So what I’m telling you here is that I’m scared of secrets. I’m more scared of keeping things a secret than I am of letting people know that I’m having trouble. People can’t believe how I’m willing to write about my life here. But what I can’t believe is how much better my life could have been if it had not been full of secrets.

So today, when I have a natural instinct to keep something a secret, I think to myself, “Why? Why don’t I want people to know?” Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I’m trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I’m doing is fine to tell people.

That’s why I can write about what I write about on this blog.

And when you think you cannot tell someone something about yourself, ask yourself, “Really, why not?”

Every time I write about a person or a company it’s a conflict of interest. Because I want to be on their radar. It’s good for me. And the same is true for every other intelligent blogger because that inherent conflict of interest underlies why blogging is so valuable for someone’s career.

The reality is that readers are not hurt by the conflict of interest. Readers are hurt by bad content. But only once. Because if readers hate the content, they leave. (I know this to be true because of all the people who leave comments on my blog that say “This post sucks. I’m unsubscribing.”)

Mainstream media is mostly about money, so they reveal every time they have a financial conflict of interest. But bloggers are more about influence than money. So they have conflict of interest all over their blog, with every post. For example, every time you link to someone, you are hoping for some sort of acknowledgment, or some sort of good karma. Do you need to acknowledge that so as to protect your readers? Of course not.

Here’s how it really works: Guy Kawasaki keeps such close track of favors exchanged that I think he must have it on a spreadsheet. When I link to him, he definitely notices, and he definitely helps me in exchange. So, should I list the conflict of interest every time I link to him? And every time I say I love Alltop?

No. Because if I tell you I love Alltop, and you go there and it’s stupid, you will think I’m stupid. (Note: What Alltop is good for is finding out what sort of blogs exist in a given category. Amazingly, there is no other efficient way to do this.)

And what about my blog post about oral sex? I’ve gotten way more oral sex since I wrote that. Mostly because I realized from my research and from the comments section that men who don’t do oral sex are losers. So I stay away from them. Should I disclose that I had side benefits from that post? Should I disclose that I have benefitted beyond the benefit of just educating the public? No. Who cares? Insanity. But honestly, getting more oral sex far outweighs any financial gain I could have gotten from any given post.

And that is saying something. Because I’ve made a lot of money selling posts. For example, when I wrote a post about PayScale, I was getting paid $5000 a month to talk about them. (I considered not revealing the true value of the contract, but then I thought: Well, PayScale is the poster child for transparent salaries, so how can they complain?)

But readers don’t need to know that I was paid to write the post. Readers should just want the post to be useful and interesting and all the other things you want from any post. Who cares how I get paid as long as I write well? The post got about 100 comments, and it got picked up on 20/20 and in the New York Times. That means it’s a good post. In fact, it probably means that PayScale has good ideas and that’s why I chose to work with them. You should just trust me to take money from smart companies—if I take money from stupid companies then I’ll write stupid posts.

Here’s another reason bloggers shouldn’t talk about who sponsors them: It’s boring! Here’s my post about telling you that LinkedIn sponsors my blog. Here’s my post about how to use LinkedIn if you’re a journalist. You know what? The second post did way better than the first one. There are tons of incoming links to the journalism post, and I got three big speaking gigs at journalism conferences, which made LinkedIn happy (they wanted journalists to use LinkedIn and then write about it.) And it made me happy because it gave me a platform for telling journalists they should sell their columns to the highest bidders because bloggers are doing it.

So we don’t need stupid rules about conflict of interest for people who are putting themselves on the line. That rule is for old media, where writers were putting only the brand of the newspaper on the line. In old media most journalists were no-names, writing under big (newspaper) names. So if they wrote something moronic, so that they could increase the value of a stock they held, or, maybe, get more oral sex, they would put only the newspaper brand at risk. Not their own.

Which means that the arcane conflict of interest rules are to protect the newspaper, not the readers. And this, by the way, is why newspapers are going down: because they are more about themselves, and their hierarchies, and rules and structures, than they are about what their readers want. Readers should not care about the business dealings of the writers or their publishers. Readers just want good content.

1. Focus on something you can control.
You might have noticed that my blog posts are very frequent right now. It’s a way to cope with the funding drama. I have so much control over my blog. And if I obsess over the traffic statistics then I have that crack-head feeling of immediate feedback, and it feels good, and even if half the people are telling me how much they hate me: Traffic is traffic.

Another part of the out-of-funding routine is fighting with Ryan. When I am totally focused on running the company, and I’m not worried about payroll, then things go smoothly and Ryan and I have great conversations about the future of social media and the future of resumes and where we fit.

When we run out of money, Ryan and I focus on our cycle of miscommunication: I say something rude that I don’t know is rude. Ryan gets defensive because he isn’t able to say, “That’s rude. Please don’t talk like that.” I have no idea why he is defensive, he just sounds like he’s up in arms about nothing to me, because if I knew I had been rude in the first place, I would not have been, so of course I don’t know. And when he is up in arms, I yell back. And then he says that I am impossible to deal with because I’m rude and I yell.

So we did that fight routine last week at least twice. I lost count. But I know that the first time, Ryan said, “You know what? Sometimes I hate you so much I have to restrain myself from punching you.”

My jaw dropped. I did not expect him to say that. And then I said, “I feel the same way about you.”

The second time, Ryan Paugh yelled out from his office, “Shut up! Both of you shut up!” And we did. (Though I think Ryan Paugh felt like it was hopeless that we might actually stop, so he took a walk to the coffee shop.)

2. Take time to talk about what's still going well.
So today I sort of kept to myself except that I had to go meet a board member to talk about the funding. The board member, Erik, is so fun to visit because he has this huge, stable company, and this gorgeous lair where he has an office and a secretary and a shiny deep-brown meeting table that my papers slide across while we figure out how to keep my company running. Erik is a great board member for a lot of reasons, but maybe the most important is that he’s so stable. Brazen Careerist needs a lot of things, but really, it needs stability.

But before I go into the board meeting, I remember that I have been named one of the top 30 women running Internet companies.

I call Ryan Healy. He says, “What is that site? I’ve never heard of them.”

I have not heard of them either. But the women on the list are amazing. Arianna Huffington, Caterina Fake, Michelle Malkin. I am happy to be there.

There is one more good thing about today. Flowers. Another bouquet. From a blog reader. I think he might be in love with me. But whatever. He leaves great comments, and now he sent flowers, and the flowers make me happy. They make me want to sit at my desk and write one more blog post.

3. Accept help, but continue to exhibit your strengths.
After my meeting, it’s 2:30 p.m. — Violin time. I leave to do school pickup, and Business Week calls. It’s a conundrum. Should I talk to Business Week and be late? Or should I risk that Business Week uses a different source because I was unavailable?

I take the call. I try to summarize all my ideas about intergenerational offices in five minutes, and I try to hide sort of out of the way of my son’s view, but he sees me. The rest of the call is about me getting off the call.

I buy my son his favorite after-school snack: Gatorade and KitKats. I tell myself it’s an example of optimistic spending that only a top-30 entrepreneur would do.

We go to the violin lesson and I want to tell you I love violin, but I don’t. I love the idea of the Suzuki program for violin. It teaches self-discipline, and perseverance, and working well in a group. I love that my son is getting all this, and he’s so proud and works so hard, and I love the teacher.

But look. I’m out of money in my company and that’s really all I have to think about for the half-hour they practice for his group recital. I am getting anxious about maybe not getting funding and I’m biting my nails.

Not biting sort-of-casually biting. But biting like I would imagine a serial killer does when he is trying to distract himself from thinking about the badness. Like, biting with way too much enthusiasm. And on top of this, I really really like my son’s violin teacher and I worry that she is going to see me biting like a crazy person and not want to be my son’s teacher.

And then I don’t have to worry about the biting anymore, because he is unfocused and too squirmy, so I scream at him: “Put the violin under your arm and take a bow!”

Has that ever been yelled at a child? It’s not normal. I know. And I know he is just anxious for his recital. The violin teacher gets very nice after that. To compensate for me being a psycho: This is how we are a team.

There is an hour break before the dress rehearsal. We go to the bagel shop for a snack. I have already prepared myself mentally for this snack. Normally, if I am having a bad day, I will have four bagels. But then I would be fat. Really. Four bagels can do that to you. They are like sponges in your stomach. So I told myself no bagels. Not even one, which would be okay, if I could actually eat only one.

To cope, I check my email. There is a note about me talking to CBS. I call them while my son is in the bathroom. They want to do a story about how Gen Y and Gen X don’t get along.

I tell the guy from CBS that I manage five people in their 20s and they would all be happy to talk about why I’m annoying. The CBS guy is shocked. I give him Ryan Healy’s phone number. Things go very well, of course. I know what I can count on Ryan for.

4. Hold things together, of course. But be okay if you can't.
After my son has eaten two bagels, he is not chatty. So I look through my purse for something to do. I find the form for signing him up for classes to help him stay organized. By the time I am done filling it out we are late for the rehearsal and he tells me that I am unorganized.

I help him get his recital clothes on in the bagel bathroom, and we are not the last people to arrive. We wait. I take my son to get his violin tuned and his teacher says, “Black bottom.”

I say, “Huh?” Then I say, “Oh. Shit. I can’t believe it.”

There are 100 kids ready to play their violins and only one of those kids is wearing khaki bottoms: My son.

Luckily, the violin teacher reads my blog, so this is not a huge surprise to her. And we acknowledge that I do have a second chance to get it right since this is only the dress rehearsal.

I almost cry. But I tell myself that if I’m not going to cry about running out of money in two days, then I'm not going to cry about khaki pants. I tell myself to focus on being a top-30 entrepreneur: Success does not come in a linear fashion.

My son and I wait for the teacher to call his group. And I am trying hard to not get blood on his shirt. Because his shirt is actually the proper shirt to be wearing, and my fingers are actually bleeding from aggressive bites.

So I am really overwhelmed now, between the violins and the fashion faux-pas and the blood, and then an investor calls. Yes. In the middle of violin even though I am certain that every investor I talk to knows that I am with the kids in the afternoon because they all bitch about it in a subtle way like, “Oh, that’s great,” with body language like, “She is fucked.”

So I ignore the investor's call because on my death bed I don’t want to remember the day I took a call during my kid’s dress rehearsal.

The teacher calls groups to the stage by the piece of music they are playing: "Allegro! Gavotte! Song of the Wind!" It looks like The Price is Right for the cultural elite, and the kids are walking up, nodding to their teacher as they go.

Each kid has a teacher there, except for my son, who has two. Because this program is really about the parent teaching the child and the teacher teaching the parent and the child and parent bonding through music. And that ended for us the time I got so frustrated that I broke my son’s bow. Well, actually, the fourth time. So now we have two teachers. And when investors want to know why my salary is not the same as all those god-forsaken 22-year-old guys that Y Combinator funds, I want to say, “You try running a startup and teaching your kid violin. Violin lessons cost way more when you are running a startup.”

Okay. So there are 100 kids together on the stage playing. And it’s stunning to see.

For a minute I forget that I am running a company that is running out of money.

All the parents in the audience are motionless; those tiny violins all together sound like a chorus of angels.

My son comes back to me in the audience when he’s done. I say, “I’m so proud of you for working so hard.”

He says, “Are you proud of me for playing perfect notes?”

I say, “No. You don’t need to be perfect. You need to just keep trying every day to be your best. And you are doing that. You should be happy for yourself.”

And he says, “You are trying to be your best every day, too, Mommy. You don’t need to have everything be right. You should be happy for yourself.”

I cry.

So here are the rules I use for writing a blog post. These will either help you to write better, or these rules will help you understand the specific reason you hate my posts on the days you hate them.

1. Start strong.
Most first drafts of writing function as a way for the writer to find the subject. This means that maybe first 20% of a first draft can usually be cut. Whenever I hear Weezer’s Buddy Holly, it reminds me what a strong opening feels like. It’s a boom, and it’s confident. And it says, here’s a good part, right now.

2. Be short.
Do you know why people love Seth Godin's blog so much? Because he writes short. But watch out: you have nowhere to hide if you’re writing short. If something is short, it must be good. And even if Seth doesn’t soar every time, it’s fun to know he’s aiming so high – fun to be a part of that.

The hardest thing about being short is that it’s scary. You have to risk that your one idea will really resonate. (You can see this playing out in a resume as well, by the way. A two-page shows less confidence. The resume says, “I don’t trust that the first page is good enough, so here’s one more page.” A one-page resume says, “I have such good stuff here that you don’t need to see any more of my history to want to interview me.”)

3. Have a genuine connection.
Newspaper columnists are oblivious to how many people actually read their stuff, because newspaper management is oblivious to how many people read a particular article. That’s off-line media. But today a blogger can tell right away when she is writing something readers care about. The ability to tell fundamentally changes the relationship between writer and reader. The writer is more connected to her individual readers instead of being isolated in some glass box called journalism.

Here’s how to start a genuine connection: In the 80s, it was fashionable for literary narrators to write directly to you, the reader. That genre is a primer for how to be a blogger – using the high quality of literature and the street-level parlance of the second person. Some of the best are Jay McInerny’s novel, Story of My Life (bonus – based on the NYC club-hopping years of the woman John Edwards recently had an affair with.) and Lorrie Moore’s book of short stories, Self-Help (my favorite is How to Be a Writer. The best part of teaching creative writing at Boston University was that I could make all my students read it.)

But the best example is the opening of the inscrutable book by Italo Calvino: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax.”

4. Be passionate.
Passion is rare. It’s something we are all attracted to, but it’s something few people can muster. That’s why most people are bad in bed, and it’s why most people are bad bloggers. Unleashing passion is scary. You don’t know where it will go. So instead, most people try to sort of keep themselves under control. This is boring. You instinctively know it’s boring, because you remember who was fun in bed.

A post with passion can actually overcome the curse of a boring topic or a lack of insight, and poor structure on top of all that. For example, here is a rant from the blog, Barstool Sports. I love this rant because it’s funny and emphatic and quirky. Most passion ends up being quirky, by the way, because when you’re passionate you are letting yourself be totally you.

5. Have one good piece of research.
At the Boston Globe, I was required to do research. And I loved what I learned from interviewing people. For my book contract I was supposed to have research on every page. I thought that was over the top, but I really needed the money, so I agreed to it. Then I turned in my manuscript, and it was rejected. Then I learned to use research consistently in my writing. And you know what? It’s not just that I was a better writer, but I had more fun writing. I learned more.

Another thing to think about when using research is that it’s a little present to the reader. The gift of a blog post is, first and foremost, your perspective. Because information is a commodity but your perspective is not. A fun piece of research ads zing to the post. It’s like going to a good party where you meet someone interesting, and leaving, at the end, with a phone number and the bonus of a nice goodie bag.

So here’s the goodie bag. I’ve been saving it for months: The smell of pizza makes men want to have sex.

Writing about a co-worker is similar to writing about a sex partner: you know a lot about the person, both good and bad. So you could ruin your relationship by writing about them. So you have to get good at writing about co-workers without pissing them off.

As someone who writes about co-workers, boyfriends and family members all the time, I have a few tips for doing it in a way that keeps your writing interesting without getting you into trouble.

Negotiate before you write
Readers always complain that I’m ruining my relationships by blogging about them. (The record-breaker number of these complaints is on this post about my ex-husband.) But I know a bit about this terrain: I sold a novel in my 20s that included all my sex partners. And in graduate school for creative writing, I wrote my master’s thesis on my sex life, in real time. (Stop Googling: It’s under a pen name. Remember? I'm the queen of pen names.)

Anyway, from that experience, and from writing a column about my workplace for three years in the 90s, I have a lot of practice negotiating with people before I write about them.

With a boyfriend, or a close co-worker, I explain to them that they will always have veto rights, so they don't have to worry about what they do or say with me. They are always surprised, and they are always relieved.

The truth is that any writing is just one person’s very skewed version of the story. So what they read about themselves is always jarring at first, and then the person ends up not minding. I have found this to be true in most cases.

Also, once you know you're negotiating, then you have more latitude. Sometimes people will say, "Don't write this," before they tell me something. I always say okay. Because of course I want to know what comes next. And I can negotiate later if it is interesting enough to write about.

Let people edit what you write about them
You must write it all out first before you show them anything. They will feel out of control at first when they realize it’s not their version of the story. But they feel more control when you tell them to edit. Usually, the person does not change anything. Or they ask me for one, tiny adjustment.

For example, in the post where I am screaming at the 25 year old for not going down on me, he asked me to change “and you don’t know how to do oral sex” to “you don’t do oral sex,” because, he reasoned, how could I know?

Know what can’t be said
My brother works at Microsoft. Everything is off limits unless he’s forwarding me a press release. Another brother of mine worked at McKinsey, and he’d have great dirt on the higher-ups of the world, but everything was off limits.

Dissing where I live — Madison, WI — gets me in trouble. Not that I don’t do it. I do. For example, the public schools here stink. And I refer people to national rankings, and people tell me the rankings don’t matter. But really, public schools are a function of money. Madison is not a city bathed in wealth. This should not be controversial. But apparently it is.

So I’ll hide it in a post about blogging, which few Madison people will read. They mostly read the sex stuff, I think.

Anyway, you’ll find quirky, sensitive spots that each person has. Stay away from those. Even if you know you have great insight.

Surround yourself with confident people.
Ryan Healy was only 24 years old when he was writing the Twentysomething posts and being attacked weekly. After that, I knew he could handle anything.

It’s not a function of age or experience. It’s a function of self-confidence and personality type. Very sensitive people are tough to write about because they will take anything you write much too personally.

So, the higher up in the organization someone is, the more likely they will be okay with you writing about them.

Part of that is self-confidence. It takes a lot of self-confidence to get to the top of anything. And part of this is being comfortable with oneself. People at the top usually know where their weaknesses are and they can laugh at themselves. Also, they have perspective, because they’re putting out fires each week. And they know your blog is not a real fire.

I have written about all three of my board members, and I have written about all my investors. None of them cared. Really.

Remember that people exaggerate their own importance
Unlike Ryan Healy, another of my co-workers, Ryan Paugh, does actually care what people think of him. (Which might be the biggest difference between the two of them.) So I waited longer to put Ryan Paugh in the blog. But when I did, it was about a rash in his groin.

I showed it to him beforehand, of course. And he said, “Why’d you have to put that in?”

“Because it’s funny.”

“Whatever.“

At that point, Ryan Paugh had learned enough to know that other people don’t care. They might care for a second and then they forget about it.

But most people don’t understand this. Most people think every detail of their life is really scintillating, and everyone is analyzing every word about them. Write about people who get it.

Don’t blog anonymously.
I wrote anonymously for three years. I was doing startups, and writing on the side, and had no idea how big my column was. I knew they had moved it from online to print, but the pay was so bad, relative to software startups in the dotcom 90s that I had no idea I was writing a big column.

I also had no idea that my whole company was subscribing. People thought it might be me, because of a column I wrote about going to the E3 conference. But I really gave myself away with a column that announced our CEO was bi-polar and a column that documented my boss sexually harassing me.

Blogging anonymously is bad for a lot of reasons, but especially because it is a way to not be careful. If you are anonymous, you will not follow any of these rules. Because blogging is work, and following these rules is more work. But you eventually will be found out. It’s how the world works. I mean, if your blog is at all successful, you’ll be found out, and if your blog sucks, why are you doing it anyway? If you are not anonymous, you will always be careful.

Surround yourself with people you like.
You will never hear me hating a co-worker I’m writing about. It’s too dangerous. I could end up being too mean for public consumption. I could end up telling him stuff he didn’t already know. You don’t have as much control over what you’re writing if you write about a co-worker you hate. So I only write about hating non-coworkers.

For example, I rip on Ryan Healy all the time. We are always fighting. But I adore him. I feel lucky to work with him, and one of the reasons I’m lucky is that he lets me write about him. Whatever I want.

This is true of boyfriends, too. I don’t date men who suck, so I am able to write about them in ways they like. Usually, if I can make them laugh they’ll let me write anything. So maybe the best advice I have for you when it comes to blogging about co-workers is to leave them laughing.

1. Big bloggers come from big media.
Usually I'm the first person to rip on print media as outdated and a dead-end career. But here's something that maybe you don't realize: Most big bloggers today have a strong background writing for print. For example: Erik Schoenfeld (TechCrunch), Owen Thomas (Valleywag), and I all wrote for Business 2.0 magazine at the same time. Ten years ago. Which means we had a ton of national media experience before we started blogging. Anya Kamenetz (Yahoo Finance) wrote for the Village Voice and had a very serious book published—before she started blogging.

2. Sure, there are exceptions. But you're probably not one of them.
Let's look at some people who have big blogs who didn't come from big media. Heather Armstrong at Dooce. She's a good one. Here's what she has that you don't: She's a talented writer and a talented designer. She's married to a developer who does all her tech stuff for free. And she has an amazing story to tell. She has the ability to translate her genius across many media—photography, memoir, twitter, and so on. She is a marvel. And you are not. None of us is. That's why she is making so much money from her blog.

3. Even if you can do it, supporting yourself with a blog is crazy hard.
Most people had to do their day job and experiment with their blog and figure out what works and then do two, pretty much full-time jobs, and then quit their day job when their blog earned enough money. JD Roth did this at Get Rich Slowly. I did this with my blog (and nearly fell apart). Most people who do this do not have kids. Because if you have kids and a job you already have two full-time jobs, so you cannot add another. Blogging to support yourself is a complete full-time job. Read Gina Trapani's post about how she is taking a break from blogging because it’s so life-consuming.

4. You probably have to be controversial to make money blogging.
Yes, there are some topics that do not require controversy: Productivity tools, for example. I think it's safe to say, though, that that market is pretty saturated. You will have to find a good niche for yourself in order to stand out from the crowd. So you will have to be different, and the bloggers who are different have surprising things to say. And if you have surprising opinions, you'll have people who tell you you're an idiot. And if you are making good money from your blog, you'll have hundreds of people telling you how you're an idiot. Do you want that? Really? Will you be able to write another controversial opinion the next day or will you be too nervous?

5. You can make more money flipping burgers.
If you want to get your opinions out into the world, or you want to write a diary about your life, whatever—do that. But why do you have to make money at it? Most of you would probably like to write a bit, to get new opportunities, and then leverage the blog to do something fun. Most of you do not want to write blog posts optimized for advertisers. Really.

6. Please shut up about your book deal.
Books are not cash cows. They are time sinks. And they are marketing tools for something else. Like a consulting business or a speaking career or a blog. And people who are great speakers are seldom great writers, and vice versa. So don't tell me you are doing a blog to get a book deal: Dead end. And don't tell me it's not a dead end because you'll turn that into a speaking career. Show me someone that has worked for. Don't tell me about Seth Godin. He had huge books before he started blogging. Not the other way around.

7. Blog for better reasons than money.
There are a lot of reasons to blog, but for the most part, money is not one of them. In the book, Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, Stephane Grenier asked forty bloggers what their definition of blogging success is. He talked with people like Seth Godin, Neil Patel, Ramit Sethi, and me. We all make a living online, and we all have big blogs, but almost no one in the book said money was the definition of success.

Bloggers defined success as things that mattered in their life: influence, connections, friendships, the ability to lead a conversation that matters to people. Some talked about a blog leading to other business opportunities.

8. Banner advertising is the mafia.
I have not had banner advertising on my site because I am so adamant that people should not blog to earn money—I don't want to encourage anyone. I did take one ad. For Career Bags. I'm going to tell you something: The amount they paid for that ad was insignificant to me. But they let me do a lot of shopping on the site for free. Which was a huge treat. Shopping was fun. And I think about how much I love my blog every time I put my laptop into my Casauri bag.

I would never say that about a banner ad. But I am about to capitulate and sign a contract with Federated Media, the by-far-biggest company for online ad sales. Federated is sort of doing me a favor. I mean, I have about 400,000 page views a month, which I think is less traffic than any of their other clients. I'm grateful to be part of Federated because I do, in fact, need to make money from my blog. But what I have done to get here—work two jobs at once while raising kids, sell equity in my blog and then almost go out of business, and spend about four hours on each post—you probably wouldn't want to go through all that just to make money on banner ads. You probably have a way more efficient mechanism for earning money and you can blog on the side.

This seems like a good time to tell you the advice my writing teacher gave our who class in graduate school: Writing for a living is a very, very hard life. If you can do anything else for a living, you should.

So the idea that blogging will help you get rich: Forget it. Your chances of that are so slim, while your chances of gaining the other benefits of blogging are very high. So blog, yes, and do it to reach real goals, just not financial goals.

Austin, TX, SXSW, Sunday, March 15, 10:00 a.m.

I’m on a panel with Robert Scoble (social media stud), Mike Maples (venture capitalist), Kaiser Kuo (China marketing maven), and John Metcalf (community builder). We are talking about how to decide where to have a startup. Well, I think that’s what we’re talking about. It’s an odd panel for that topic. But then, that’s what makes SXSW so interesting. Also, if you’re going to be there, and I like you, we should meet up. So email me: penelope@penelopetrunk.com.

New York City, 2009 Sales & Marketing Symposium, March 25, 10:30 a.m.

I am giving a talk on generation Y. The audience is mostly not generation Y. So I will be hearing questions like, “What should I do about the fact that my direct report has naked breasts on Facebook?” And I will be giving answers like, “You’ll feel better about the situation if you stop trolling for naked pictures of her online.” Use code BRA252009 for a 20% discount.

Madison, WI, Wisconsin Women in Government, March 31, 11:30 a.m.

I’ll be talking about how to manage your career. The other two events listed here are pretty expensive, but this one is free. Which, perhaps, hearkens back to why I moved to Wisconsin in the first place: It’s very cheap to live here. It’s not just that orange juice is cheaper here than in NYC, but so are conferences. Everything. Okay. So you can reserve a spot for yourself by sending an RSVP to info@wiscwomeningovernment.org.

Every Thursday, My New Radio Show! 1pm EST (but this week it’s 1:30)

Also, I am going to have a weekly radio show. I did my first one last week. This week the show starts at 1:30 eastern time. All other weeks, the show will start at 1pm eastern. It’s a call-in show. You can call in and ask me any question. I’m looking forward to that part. Here’s the number: 1-866-916-3423. Here’s the recorded version.

I have written a lot about how anti-aging information is essential for managing one's career. Aging is not equal in the workplace. Women are penalized much more heavily than men. So women can gain power in the world through knowledge of the tools for looking younger.

But mainstream media is reluctant to recommend that women turn to a resource like RealSelf. Those reporters don’t like the reality of the world they live in, so they don’t write about it.

That’s why public relations professionals should scrap the traditional pitch to mainstream media — saying that is almost cutting edge, except that Obama’s team beat me to it:

Time magazine has great analysis on why Obama’s campaign team was so effective. “Incoming press secretary Robert Gibbs pointedly told the New York Times magazine that Obama never sat down with the Washington Post Editorial Board. You could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo [Iowa} and understand that people weren’t reading the Washington Post… Obama posts weekly addresses on YouTube, and Gibbs answers questions via video on change.gov.”

But the big problem with PR pitches to print media is that there are too many failure paths. There is nothing to click. You have to make a note to yourself, while reading the paper, to go check out something online. And then you write a link that is prone to typos and then you can’t lose the note. All this means a newspaper pitch is unlikely to go viral.

Pete Blackshaw, from Consumergeneratedmedia.com, says, “PR is not the owner of the story. There are still some PR people who are great at convincing the mainstream media to pick up their client’s story. But today, the story, if it goes anywhere, will grow through consumers, online.”

The good news is that finally, there’s a social media tool that people expect to see pitches on. No longer do PR types have to annoy bloggers to the point that bloggers create blacklists. Now publicity mavens have a spot of their own, and, big news, the bloggers love trolling Twitter for good pitches.

Here’s how it works: The online influencers are on Twitter. They send traffic to blogs and Facebook and StumbleUpon. And those people email their friends, in community-wide missives, and that’s how something becomes viral.

The only catch is that PR folks need to get good at pitching in 140 characters.

And sure you can do it without Twitter. But in this situation, Twitter is hard to beat.

“Brands will adopt Twitter for everything from media/influencer outreach to consumer service to crisis communities. But more than any push channel, Twitter will give consumers—advocates and critics—unprecedented access to corporate personnel, and vice versa,” says Scott Monty, author of the Social Media Marketing Blog.

But even the best viral campaigns are not as effective as real conversations. Companies will participate in the conversation instead of paying people to control it. “The consumers who love the company and help vet the storyline will also be keen to help the company succeed – promoting that storyline in … guided content,” according to Todd Defren, who blogs at pr-squared.com.

This is happening now. We’re in a recession. So it makes sense that instead of paying expensive PR agencies to work their magic on outdated media gatekeepers you save the money. Instead, train passionate employees and customers to have authentic conversations about the brand.

Here is a great example: When bombs went off in Mumbai last November, American Express immediately went through their databases to find any customers who might be there. American Express called each customer to see if they needed cash, housing or help getting a way out of the city.

I didn’t find this out from the news. The gatekeepers of the media world wouldn’t print this. They’d think it was too much like PR.

I heard it from my mom, who works at AmEx. And it didn’t feel like PR at all: She was genuinely proud to work for a company that would do that so she wanted people to know.

And I’m telling you because I don’t care if something sounds like PR or not. I care if I got a chill when I heard the story. And I did.

Note to AmEx: This is your new PR. Compliments of all of us. Because we’re all in this business of PR now.

(For a great overview of social media and PR, read interviews by Peter Kim in Social Media Predictions 2009.)