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.

That’s just one lesson I learned since starting this blog a year ago. I still consider myself an advanced beginner, but I’ve picked up enough over the past 12 months to want to share. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Sex sells. Good headlines attract attention, whether they’re in a newspaper or a blog post.  That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned from Twitter, which limits users to messages of 140 characters, forcing them to be catchy and concise. Recently I’ve been channeling Cosmo to come up with blog post titles like Work smarter, not harder, Write like a pro and Beat the recession. Big caveat: once you’ve got people’s attention, though, you gotta give them something worth reading.

Mix it up. The best blogs offer a variety of types of posts, a blend of news, how to’s, first-person experiences, round ups based on other people’s opinions or experiences, Q & As, pointers to great material on other blogs, lists, “best of’s” and just enough off topic material to keep things interesting. Offering a variety of material keeps things from feeling stale – and gives a blog a personality.

When writing a new post, include links to old ones. A couple weeks back I wrote about my picks for top 10 digital media trends for 2008 and included a bunch of links to older posts.  Not surprising, many of the older posts I linked to got a nice a bump in page views. What was surprising, though, was the overall number of old posts were getting click throughs at the same time. So I counted – 104 of the 226 posts I wrote in 2008 had been viewed that week. That’s almost 50 percent. There is something to the long tail theory after all. One of the reasons is…

Evergreen topics have an incredibly long shelf life. My no. 1 most popular post of 2008 was a list of best blogs for writers I did last February. It still gets a couple click throughs a day. That’s something to remember when thinking of subjects for new posts. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel, just revise posts that worked well the first time. Especially if you’re committing to posting every day of the week. Which brings me to the next lesson learned.

More is better. I was contemplating cutting back to three times week from five times a week in 2009, following the advice of 4-Hour-Work Week author Tim Ferris to let posts percolate through the blogosphere to build momentum and readership. Now I don’t think I will. The guys at ProBlogger advocate posting multiple times a day on the theory that the more you write, the more traffic you get to your site. That’s holding true for me.

Need a break? Recycle. Twice this year when I’ve gone on vacation I’ve run “Best of” compilations of three to six posts related to a common theme. This post, Work smarter, not harder is a compilation of seven posts I did earlier in the year on some aspect of being more productive. It works: click throughs for that and other “Nest of” posts I did was exceptional. In fact, the weeks my “Best of” compilations ran my blog had some of its biggest traffic days ever.

It’s all about community. If you’re using a blog to build a brand, platform or business, you want people to know about it and the best way to do that is to circulate in your virtual community. Befriend bloggers writing about the same thing you do and leave comments on their blogs or write guests posts. Join blog rings. Use Twitter. Make it easy for people to interact with your blog by adding all of the RSS and subscription bells and whistles. Caution: there’s nothing worse a blogger whose only aim is self promotion. Be real, and give back.

The past year has served as something of a learning curve for me. Now it’s time to get serious. That hit home after I started using Twitter a couple weeks ago and have seen traffic to my blog increase as a result. I’m kicking myself for not putting some kind of income-generating mechanism in place before now – especially with the publishing industry going down the tubes and taking freelance writing opportunities with it. So I’m moving that to the top of my 09 to-do list, which means buying a domain name, porting the blog to a hosted service, finding a designer, figuring out what to sell, etc. Hmm, sounds like fodder for a bunch of new blog posts.

But enough about me. For any fellow bloggers, what have you learned over the past year?