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.