Yes, there will be a WordCount Blogathon in 2012. As in other years, it will take place in May.

If you’re not familiar with the blogathon, it’s a challenge to blog every day in May. In that respect, it’s similar to other community blogging challenges, such as NaBloPoMo (here’s a list of daily blogging challenges I compiled during the 2011 blogathon).

Bloggers – amateur, professional, whoever – who commit to blogging every day of the month are listed on the blogathon blog roll. If they make it the entire month, their names are entered in a drawing for writing and blogging-related prizes, which in years past have included books, tutoring, web design and other writing and blogging-related services.

The 2012 blogathon will include other features that have made past events so successful, including:

• A guest post exchange, a designated day for bloggers to swap posts with another blogger, preferably but not necessarily, another blogathon participant.
• Theme days, which aren’t mandatory but are helpful if you’re stuck for what to write about that day. Last year’s theme days included posts on favorite books and favorite places to write.
• Haiku days, also not mandatory, though the vast majority of bloggers who took part in previous blogathons did them because they’re short, easy to come up with and a week or two or daily blogging offer a much needed break!
• A members-only Google Group where bloggers can share links to their posts, get technical and other blogging questions answered.
• Live Twitter chats to kick off the blogathon, and to celebrate when it’s over.
• A weekly e-newsletter with blogathon updates.
• A blogathon badge to display on your blog.

Watch this space for registration, which will open some time in March.

Got a suggestion for how to make the 2012 blogathon even more wonderful? Leave it in a comment, or let me know at wordcountfreelance@gmail.com.

• The Editor Unleashed The Editor Unleashed Guide to Good Blogging - Good advice from the former editor of Writer’s Digest.
• The Huffington Post 13 tips for actually getting some writing done
• The Urban Muse I Said, He Said, We Said – Picking a point of view for your website.
• Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist Conflict of interest doesn’t apply to blogs (another reason newspapers are dead)
• Erik Sherman’s WriterBiz 6 lessons from using Twitter
• Blog Salad How to throw a Twitter party – Exceedingly detailed (and simple) instructions for using Twitter hashtags for “a conference, or a live guest lecture series, or just an exclusive conversation with a certain group or certain topic in mind.”
• Seth’s Blog Saying ‘no’ – To remind ourselves that sometimes turning down an assignment is the right thing to do.
• Bike with Jackie Embrace your supporters – Using social networks to give as much as you get.

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.

There’s no getting around the fact daily blogging is work. But there are ways to minimize the extra effort. Writing short, planning ahead, mixing up the types of blog posts you write, creating standing features that run the same day every week -  they’re all paths to daily blogging bliss.

It may be a slog, but there’s a silver lining to posting every day. If you want to broaden your freelance repertoire, learning how to blog is the first step toward pitching yourself for paid blogging gigs. Fees for paid blogging assignments are all over the map, so it’s good to know how to write different kinds of posts, how long it takes to write a post and the basics of driving traffic to a blog, so you can take all that into account when negotiating  rates.

Whether you’re taking part in this blog’s 2nd annual May blogathon, or if you just want to learn how be a better blogger, here are 5 sure-fire strategies for coming up with posts every day:

1. Plan ahead – Let me start by saying, this is the hardest for me to do. I know some bloggers who write a week’s worth of posts at a time, and others who chart out what they’re going to write several weeks ahead of time. I don’t do that very often, normally just to cover myself for vacations. But even planning a few days worth of posts – or even just the next day’s post -  is a start. Especially if it gives you time to think ahead about what you want to say and collect URLs that might related to the subject you’re writing about. However, there’s something to be said for the spontaneous blog post, especially if you’re fired up over something and need to write about it while the idea’s fresh. If you’ve banked a number of pre-written posts on evergreen topics, there’s no harm in slipping a spontaneous post into the front of the queue.

2. Write short – If you’re blogging for yourself, you can decide how much or little to include in a single blog post. Some days you might feel like writing 500 or 1,000 words reacting to a news event or on a subject that’s close to your heart. Other days, you may just want to share a news story or blog post someone else has written with your readers, so your post could consist of a link to the original with a paragraph or two of explanation or commentary. Here are some other suggestions for writing short.

3. Mix it up – Unless your blog is set up to be something very specific – a recipe a day, a daily journal entry, all photos -you don’t have to write the same kind of blog post every time. In fact, mixing it up is a good way to get readers to keep coming back to see what you’re going to do next. In a typical blog, you could include:

• Commentary – Your POV on current events.
• Lists – Readers love ‘em.
• How tos – Learned something new? Share.
• Best ofs – A handful of older blog posts on a certain topic. I’ve use this to cover for vacations.
• Interviews – Some of my best-read posts are Q&As I do with other writers on a variety of writing related topics.
• Links – Lists of links to posts on blogs you read on the same subject as your own.
• Announcements – Tell the world when your articles, books or other work appear.
• Reviews – TV shows, movies, books, music, electronics, software, services – anything related to your blog’s theme.

4. Create standing features – A standing feature is a certain type of post that runs on a regular basis. On WordCount, I have two standing features, a weekly recap of highlights from the online media business that runs on Fridays, and a Q&A with freelance writers that runs on an irregular basis but about every 2 to 3 weeks. Standing features give a blog a sense of regularity, and readers come to expect and appreciate them them – and that’s what brings traffic back to your blog.

5. Pre-publish – As writers, we have deadlines. So some days are harder to devote to blogging than others. Blog software that let’s you pre-publish posts is made for those times. Write whatever posts you need to get ahead and use the publish feature to schedule when they’ll appear. This is also a great way to avoid blogging on the weekends, because really, nobody should work on the weekend, especially if you’re not getting paid for it.

Got your own secrets for writing one or more blog posts a day? Please share.

1. Timeliness – Writing about timely subjects, such as the story of Roxana Saberi, the freelance broadcast journalist who’s just be convicted of espionage in Iran. I blogged about her situation last month and each time there’s been a development in her case I’ve seen daily traffic spike to four and five times the usual amount.

2. History - My blog’s now 16 months old and people who write about the same subjects – freelancing and digital media – have discovered it, link to it, leave comments on it, etc. I do likewise on their blogs. All of that has added to traffic, though not as much as #1.

3. Consistency - When I first started blogging I was a very inconsistent poster. Then I did a month-long blogathon and posted every day, which gave me a nice bump. After that I blogged M-F for the better part of 8 or 9 months, until earlier this year when I had so much writing work going on I dropped back to MWF. That’s been enough to keep people coming back and traffic increasing.

4. Standing features – Awhile back I started running a recap every Friday of highlights of the week’s news and developments in freelancing and digital media. Now my readers look forward to it – I know because they tell me. I also run Q&As with freelancers on a regular basis. I know other writing bloggers have had equally good results with the standing features they run.

5. Guest posts – Writing guests posts for other bloggers introduces you to potential new readers of your own blog. Likewise, when you ask someone to write a guest post on your blog, hopefully their regular readers will follow them over for the day, discover your stuff and become regulars.

6. SEO – Using tags and keywords helps move your posts up in searches on Google, Yahoo, etc., and that brings more people to your Website. Putting pictures in your posts – and labeling them – is another way to show up on top of search results. Some of my most well-trafficked blog posts got those click throughs because of the pictures I used to illustrate them. Is that cheating? Not really. People may click through for the image, but if you’re lucky they’ll stick around to read the blog post too.

7. Web rings – I’m a very part-time member of a Web ring of freelance writers who help promote each others’ work on social bookmarking services like Digg and StumpleUpon. The few times I’ve asked people to promote blog posts it’s pushed traffic up significantly. If you’re interested in this type of thing, though, you have to be prepared to give as much as you receive, which means spending some small portion of your day Digging and Stumbling other people’s blog posts.

8. Twitter – One of the things I use Twitter for is to promote my blog posts, and it’s not a surprise that traffic to my blog started to really take off right around the same time I joined. When I write a new blog post I tweet about it and include a link. When people follow me, I DM them to say hi and introduce myself, and include a link to my blog. When I see a question about something I’ve blogged about, I’ll answer, and include a link to my blog. That sounds like a lot of promotion it really isn’t, because I also tweet about a bunch of other things. I did an analysis once and figured out that I included links to my blog in only 1 of 10 tweets, and I’d estimate it’s an even smaller ratio now.

9. Links – If you link out to source material that’s related to what you’re writing about and your readers click on those links, pretty soon the owner of that blog is going to come investigate where the traffic is coming from. When that happens, you could take the opportunity to leave a comment on their blog or send them an email – in other words, get acquainted. After that happens, you might offer to exchange links, you put their blog in your blog roll and they do likewise. That drives traffic up for both of you.

10. Good content and good writing - Have something interesting to say, and say it in a compelling way. You can use all the tricks in the SEO book, link like mad and use every social bookmarking trick there is, but if your ideas and writing don’t sing, people will stop in once and never come back.

There are other things too – keeping posts short, lists, sexy headlines, etc., but these are the top 10.

What’s driven traffic to your blog?