Many, many people keep blogs. Few, few people read them. Even this blog, which is part of a surprisingly successful business, has a readership that struggles to stay in single figures.

My new blog, on the other hand, is astonishingly successful. If I have fewer than 30 000 uniques in a day then I feel bad; the record so far is around 130K. I’ve been linked from boingboing, neatorama, gawker, all the cool well-edited places. I’ve been #1 on digg and #1 on reddit. Possibly at the same time, I’m not sure because I am constantly distracted by how awesome my blog is.

Success of this magnitude obligates me to convey some part of the genius involved to you, the less-successful bloggers. Here are my secrets.

1. Be stunningly well-connected

I network with creative types in London and New York. I eat in restaurants that you have only seen as backdrops in Sex And The City. I wear $200 shirts and drive a Jaguar. I’ve kind of lost track of the point I was making, but you can also be well-connected through sites like Metafilter. Metafilter is essentially the internet for grownups and is surprisingly effective at getting the word out to people who like linking to new things. You have to pay to join, which keeps the riff-raff out.

2. Have an amazing idea

Good ideas are ideas that people will want to steal. In fact, if no one tries to steal your idea within two weeks you should accept that your idea is worthless and abandon it. Amazing ideas are ideas that are immediately obvious in retrospect. It’s important to note that your blog should not be about you, or any aspect of you or what you do, unless you are Britney Spears or her mother.

Most people are capable of coming up with at least one amazing idea in their lifetime. Even you.

3. Explain the idea in two words

If your idea takes up more than two words then it isn’t really amazing. Here are a bunch of great ideas that you will understand immediately:

• dogs-pooping
• alcoholic-recipes
• lardy-policemen
• obvious-hairpiece
• retarded-attorneys

Each idea is pretty much summed up in two words. It’s actually fairly hard to think up a bad idea in only two words; bad ideas take four or five words.

4.Stick to the script

Suppose your idea is “hopelessparking”. You blog some pictures of terrible parking where people take up two spaces, try to fit huge SUVs into compact spots, or, I don’t know, block other cars in for no reason. You make a nicely compelling story that registers with people. You start to develop a community and people start to send you hilarious pictures of terrible parking they’ve seen. Your blog starts to have in-jokes in the comments. A warmth permeates each new post.

The important thing now is to stay on target. Don’t start running stories about, for example, unreasonable parking tickets, or valet parking disasters. Your new bad-parking-obsessed community will rebel and your identity and meaning will be diluted. Your readers care about your project, probably more than you do.

5. Care about your idea

Creative people drop an idea when another idea takes its place. This is important because, to some extent, the things that apply to creative people also apply to you. The way to assure success is to develop ideas that you are attached to in more than a superficial way; if you start a blog about the front of cars looking like faces because its an idea that you’ve always cherished, you will have a winner of a site. If you do something just because you think it will be popular, you will not be successful.

6. Be regular

Successful blogs have a cycle such that a regular visitor has a reasonable chance of finding something new once a day. As your blog matures you’ll find it gets easier to post, so you can have a successful blog with around half an hour of effort every day.

7. Appeal to drunk people

This isn’t really important, it’s just that drunk people, like AOL users, tend to click ads more.

8. Bear in mind that this may be the most significant thing you do

If, like me, you regularly read the obituaries in the New York Times, The Guardian or The (London) Times, you will be aware that the aspect which makes a life expired worthy of newsprint is usually something that, at the time, probably seemed insignificant.

In a long life of being merely exceptional, I honestly expect my obituary – in whatever paper of record exists circa 2100 – to focus on one small part of my life that is regarded as phenomenal, such as my awesome blog.

This is entirely unfair. People who have selflessly spent their entire lives improving the lot of their fellow man, overcoming disadvantages, expanding the frontiers of knowledge, or otherwise being boring, very rarely make it to the obituaries. Yes, it’s a shame that the world is unfair, but the important thing to remember, as ever, is that the world should be unfair in your favor.