Today I’m right at the halfway point of my month-long “blog everyday” experiment, and I can’t help but declare how difficult this is.
Here’s are some deep but off-the-cuff thoughts on what it feels like to blog every day:
The Not So Good
1. My post quality has declined.
By far this is the toughest reality. I used to give myself a week or even more to craft a post, and I dared not publish it until I was sure it was decent.
But now that I MUST publish everyday, I find myself scrambling ideas to throw together, which isn’t good. I don’t like to rush writing, and I feel like I’m back in the newsroom with a story deadline looming every day. It’s been edgy.
But then again, I’m likely to be improving my content by writing every day.
2. I’m can’t stop writing about the same subject matter. This is actually kind of comical. I keep writing about blogging and writing and writing and blogging when there’s so much more that Wordful represents. How many more posts about blogging and writing can you take?
3. Subscriber Counts are Flat.
You’d think that I’d get more subscribers with more content but they’ve stayed about the same. My next experiment will definitely involve marketing this blog!
The Really Good
4. I’m doing it!
Despite the challenges, I am publishing 5 days a week as I intended. It feels great to actually be accomplishing this. It certainly can’t be harmful, right?
5. I’ve loosened up and I’m more personal.
This is huge, actually. I feel so much better just being myself here. Beginning bloggers feel the need to sound a certain way to get attention, which is totally unecessary.
In fact, just last week I wrote a post about Chris Brogan’s writing advantage which is just him being himself on his blog. [He then came by and complimented it.]
6. Writing is becoming much easier. Ha ha—the perfect comeback to me whining that “my writing is rushed.”
I’m really starting to appreciate writing faster, because it means that eventually I’ll be proficient enough to whip out a quality post in one sitting. Then maybe another, shorter sitting for editing (which is where the magic happens).
7. I’m forced to be more creative.
No longer do I feel so limited by the typical 300-700 word blog post with the Flickr creative commons image on top, the super catchy headline and the authoritative voice. That’s a very classic blog style and yes, it’s very powerful—but Wordful doesn’t need to be that way to be awesome.
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So there you have it. The good outweighs the bad. Stay tuned for more posts here on Wordful. Thanks for reading, and please subscribe at top if you haven’t yet.
Photo by nattu.
Andrew Cooper
I am now starting on my third year of everyday blogging, not having missed a day since 1 Sep 2008. Quality is an issue, one you learn to deal with. Only one or two posts per week are substantive articles. The remainder are what I privately call quickies, an example would be my “Postcard from” series with a bit of my photography and a single paragraph. At least living and working where I do, and my personal rule to carry a camera at all times, creates a constant stream of interesting photos.
Developing a specialty is another way to create a lot of useful blog posts, for DarkerView it is posting on all of the sky events for the year. Eclipses, meteor showers, conjunctions, etc., create 100-150 posts for the year, mostly written the year before and scheduled to post on particular dates. With all of the details and times adjusted for the local audience the blog becomes a useful resource for local readers interested in astronomy.
Charles
Andrew — very awesome to hear from you given your experience with impeccably consistent blogging. Congratulations for not missing a day!
Yeah the quality issue gets to me but to me that means striving for high quality under pressure, which is worthwhile challenge. I’m up for it. Your advice on two substantial posts per week is very helpful, with smaller posts in between. That’s a good framing tool.
I look forward to hearing more from you soon. Aloha and Mahalo.
Bamboo Forest - Tick Tock Timer
Cool beans. Looking forward to your experiment in promotion. I will help with some tweets.
This was a good post. Short, concise and interesting.
Length is often overrated.
Raphael
First time stopping by again in a while Charles….but certainly must say I admire some of your well thought out posts.
I agree…I’ve been blogging now on my site for almost 5 years. And I’ve noticed the quality of my own posts declining as well. Try as I might, it’s hard not to keep saying the same things or getting into a rut where everything is just a boring drone. And ironically I find that the more I’ve tried to think-out my posts in recent years, the less fun it was to read…whereas back in the day when I routinely plugged away at any observations I had the posts were much more interesting.
Charles
HI Raph — so cool to hear from you.
Yeah this daily blogging is honestly wearing on me. I feel just how you describe—punching into my writing like a timeclock and producing something, even if I’m clearly not happy with it.
But of course there’s two sides to this: I’m doing something, which is not doing nothing. I’m hoping for an outcome better than when I started, which is higher quality posts more often.
We shall see. About 1 1/2 weeks left…