Multi Millionaire Blogger Michael Arrington Shares His Success Advice

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was running a $10 million business that had over 9.2 Million visitors per month. How did Michael Arrington manage this you may ask? Well, we have some advice from the man himself on how to create and run a well known Multi Million dollar website in the blogosphere. 

Success Advice From A Multi Millionaire Blogger

• Break stories. It will give you +1 point, and everyone else who links to it -1 point.

• Sleep until 9 AM every day. Arrington says his sleep used to be out of whack and it messed up his life. He’s under doctor’s orders to start his day at 9:00 AM. He recommends others do this too to keep their sanity.

• Follow up on rumors and respect your sources.  Talk with reputable people to get a story straight, and then respect what they ask of you in return. If you need to hold a story to keep their trust, do it. People won’t tell you things if they don’t trust you.

• Don’t develop relationships with people you don’t like. Entrepreneurs are Arrington’s rockstars.  This makes developing relationships with them (and getting information from them) much easier. He never develops relationships with people he doesn’t actually like.

• Get information via texts, phone calls…and skype? The video quality is great, he says, and it makes the source feel like they’re in the room with you.

• PR people are lame. Usually, Arrington isn’t a fan of them. He’d rather chat directly with the CEO and save chit chat for people he actually knows and cares about.

• Update your content/product frequently. Then read customer feedback. Arrington typically posts content several times per week and enjoys reading the comments.  He uses reader feedback as his reward system. Commenters are like fans! And their opinions help develop your product.

• Have parties. For Arrington, parties are how he meets sources, and they get people to interact with his brand.

• You’re going to have enemies.  This has been a difficult concept for Arrington to grasp.  Having public enemies made him recluse for a while, which then made him seem arrogant.  It escalated to where Arrington had a death threat and someone spit on him at a conference. After taking a month long break from writing, Arrington learned an important lesson: he’s not as important as he thought he was.  And neither are most CEOs.  The teams they hire should be, and probably are, very capable with or without them.

• It’s hard to be a coach and a player.  Arrington says he’s not good at managing people. He’d rather be writing than coaching others about their stories. If you’re this type of person, hire people who are stronger managers to help wrangle your staff.

• Work late at night. There aren’t as many interruptions.  You can get a lot done, then fall asleep happy.