Penelope Trunk is a nut case, but she’s a smart nut case.

Penelope Trunk has a blog, book and company called Brazen Careerist. I have never seen her in person or interviewed her on the phone.* I have no idea how she is as a CEO, mom, daughter or ex-wife.

But this I do know. While she name drops, over shares and brags in a subtle, indirect sort of way, she’s also one of the best bloggers around- maybe because of all those things. So if you blog, and especially if you blog about careers, tech or start ups, you have to read Penelope Trunk.

Why is she so good?

1. Penelope Trunk understands what makes people read blogs. Her blog is nominally about careers. In reality, she uses it to carry on about all sorts of work-related topics, including her adventures starting a company, recollections of jobs past and now that she’s divorced, forays into dating life. So even though her blog has a subject, it’s big enough to encompass a lot of things. That makes it fresh and interesting reading.

2. She’s not afraid to have an opinion, even if it goes against conventional wisdom – especially if it goes against conventional wisdom. If it seems like she’s taking a stand that’s contrary to popular thinking just to be contrary, well, she probably is. But she does it to make people think about a subject from a different perspective. That’s what good columnists, writers and bloggers do, get people to look at an issue from a different perspective in order to get them to act differently as a result.

3. She always links back to old blog posts, which is great for building traffic because it sends people to other pages on her site, which have links on them that lead to other pages and so and and so on. If you don’t link to your own material on your own blog you should. Then link to lots of other blogs, especially blogs that are bigger and more popular than yours, which if you do it enough, will lead to even more traffic.

4. She’s a good storyteller. Yes, she seems to have had nine lives and written about all of them, and shares too many details of her marriage, divorce and sex life. But people eat that kind of stuff up. She uses narrative devices like dialog and what-happened-next story structure, which sets her apart from blogs that ramble on without making a point or are written in a too dry, newspaper inverted pyramid style.

5. She loves lists. Even when she’s not doing a list blog, she writes posts in list form because she knows blog readers love lists. Thanks Penelope, I did this post as a list just for you.

6. She manages to work subjects into blog posts that get picked up in search engines – like sex. Take the post she wrote earlier this week on how to write a good blog post. It had absolutely nothing to do with sex, but she managed to squeeze in a reference in the very last word of the very last line – that’s brilliant.

All of that explains why Penelope Trunk is making money blogging while a lot of other bloggers don’t, and won’t – ever.

And it’s why even though I roll my eyes at the latest crazy thing Penelope Trunk writes, I keep reading.

Who are your must-read bloggers?

* While I’ve never interviewed her, I’ve mentioned her in a few previous blog posts like this one and this one and she’s left a couple comments.

If you’re a writer and you work online, you need to know how to write a lead, nut graph, headline, deck – and how to link. Linking means including live Web addresses or URLs in your story to information related to whatever it is you’re writing about. The art of the link is in putting your story into the context of other stories, blog posts or comments that have been written on the same subject. If you’re a blogger, it’s putting your opinion in the context of other opinions on the same subject. Or it’s giving weight to your opinion by backing it up with additional sources. But instead of citing all the sources, or the entire text of another source, you refer to a little bit of it and then link to the the rest.

In online news circles, there’s been an ongoing discussion of links as news and links as reporting. The creators of Publishing 2.0, a blog about how technology is transforming the news, are huge advocates of what I’ll call link journalism. They wrote definitive article art this called Reinventing Journalism On The Web: Links As News, Links As Reporting. They later wrote this piece explaining how a New York Times article on John McCain really missed the boat because the reporters didn’t take the opportunity to link to what else was out there on the same subject.

So what does all of this mean to freelance writers? You’re only as smart as your links. You don’t live in a vacuum. If your posts don’t have links, what does that say about your ability to do research on your topic?

It’s not hard to do Google searches and find something that relates to what you’re writing. But if you’re really good, you’ll be able to pick through the chaff to find the stuff that best underscores your point, or even helps make your point. Whatever you may think of Penelope Trunk, the contrarian career coach who blogs as the Brazen Careerist, she is a link master. Her blog posts are chock full of references to academic research supporting her sometimes wacky theories. And she never misses an opportunity to link back to her past posts. That’s smart because people click on the links to read them and that ups her overall Website visitor numbers.

The most popular post I’ve ever written for WordCount was on the best blogs for writers, which was essentially a list of links. But it wasn’t just any list. It was a list I’d culled from ideas a bunch of writers submitted that I carefully read through and then sorted according to the type of blog, and then edited down to the very best, and then wrote about. Even though I wrote it back in February, according to my stat counter, at least a handful of visitors read it every day. That’s proof of the power of the well-placed link.