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Why We Should Blog Often

Charles — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:21:06 +0000

It doesn’t take much to see how shamefully little I’ve been posting here, and I want to address this because I feel many of us suffer from the same blog starvation-atrophy affliction. Here’s the problem: we still think we’re in college English class. Yes, that one: dialectic thesis statements, multiple drafts, red ink editing, rewriting and other rigors of academic perfection. I’m now convinced there’s no such thing as a perfect blog post. We are not scholars pursuing an ‘A,’ but rather friends sharing interesting and relevant ideas. Blogging is simply written conversation with value—stuff people enjoy reading by choice.

Try a Secret Blogging Exercise

On January 1, I started tiny personal blog project on the side where I try to write at least 100 words per day. So far it’s been a very helpful exercise in breaking through my stiff scholastic style (except I have yet to apply it here at Wordful). One hundred words is just enough to share an idea without ever having to overthink or overwrite. You sit down, compose and publish, and you do it quickly. Words add up. Granted, blogging to yourself is pretty easy because you’re not concerned about who’s listening, but consider my results: 30 posts average per month on my private blog versus 2.3 average monthly posts on this blog. Give it a try. Quantity does count for something.

Take it From Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is a prolific writer with a relaxed, conversational style. I get his RSS feed in my inbox every day and on many days, he’s crafted more than one post for me to read. Granted, they’re not always the most hard-hitting, loaded-with-benefits posts like the ones Copyblogger strives for, but I find myself very a comfortable reader in his presence. I can tell Chris loves to write. In fact, he told me so in a great little audio seminar on the Third Tribe site. Chris’s premise is this: to succeed in blogging you need to remove all the tradition and formality from your practice and just start writing— whenever and wherever you can. ** If the truth sets us free, and writing is our truth, then we should be constantly writing in pursuit of freedom. Photo by suneko.

Why We Should Blog Often is written by Charles Bohannan for Wordful.com, a blog about digital publishing.

10 Lessons in Blogging Learned the Hard Way

Charles — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:31:36 +0000

Tomorrow marks the 1 year anniversary of the Wordful.com blog, and I’d like to share some meaningful lessons on what it means to blog. Since there was no way I could have known any of this when I started, consider it hard-earned wisdom. This is valuable stuff! Without further ado:

Blogging is not directly about making money. It’s about intellectual real estate and personal branding. If you want to make money online, you need to first build a business, then build a blog to help execute your business strategy.
Following the rules sucks. When I first started Wordful.com, I wanted to be a problogger (aka paid internet superstar). All the gurus told me I needed to follow their rules in order to “make it.” The problem is, the rules don’t leave much room for creative innovation. It’s good to know the rules (necessary, actually), but you’ll have to break away from them if you ever want to stand out.
I’m glad I stuck with it. There were a few times I was ready to give up on blogging. Maybe it was the loneliness or hopelessness or knowing that nobody cares. I saw many bloggers fall to the wayside over this past year — all their hard work simply abandoned at some months-old post. I’m still going!
You need a market. This was the toughest one for me to understand. If you want a group of people to listen to you, be loyal to you and give you their money, then you need to talk about things they want to hear. Things they find useful or entertaining or both. Learn to silence the “commercial vs. artistic” propaganda going on inside your head.
There is no magic formula. In the same vein as #2, there is no handbook or easy 12-step program to becoming a successful blogger. I don’t care what they tell you. The reason why is because blogging serves many purposes, and you can’t possibly expect to know what you’re doing with it until you’ve tested the waters.
Marketing is almost as important. Your content comes first, but the internet is not The Field of Dreams. It’s not as easy as “If you build it, they will come.” It should read: “If you build it and market it and be generous and stick with and it until you’re about ready to give up in defeat, they might come.”
Read the right stuff. Reading the blogs and books of experts in and out of your field gives relevance and context to your own ideas. It also builds a platform of knowledge from which you can pioneer new ideas. The only word of caution about reading is not to turn it into a full-time indulgence.
Love it or leave it. If blogging is not enjoyable, or at the very least rewarding, then go find something else to do. This is not to say blogging is not hard work, because it is. This post (my first one) took me over 5 hours to write.
Be well connected. This goes with the need to market yourself, but much deeper. Having an online presence–a personal brand–means building real relationships with real people. Yes—it’s all about human connectivity and the powerful social media tools we have at our disposal.
Write killer headlines until you’re famous. Assuming nobody cares about you–which they don’t–you have to rope people in to your blog somehow. A great headline makes a tantalizing promise which your content needs to deliver. It’s only when you’re famous can you write nebulous headlines and still have a growing fan base. By the way, Copyblogger is the Ivy League of headline writing.

Do any of you have something to add to this? We’d all love to hear it in the comments below.

10 Lessons in Blogging Learned the Hard Way is written by Charles Bohannan for Wordful.com, a blog about digital publishing.

The Easy Way to Simplify Blogging

Charles — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:50:22 +0000

For those of you who think blogging is too much work, you’re almost right. Growing a successful blog requires about 30 different disciplines, all of which can take a good 10,000 hours to master. So where to begin?

The most simple trick to blogging efficiency is to prioritize your work. This means you need to identify and concentrate on what matters most with your blog. And for everyone, the answer should always be the same:

Your Content Matters Most

Ask any top blogger or social media guru what the most important aspect of content marketing is and they’ll unanimously tell you it’s your content. I’m here to tell you the same thing: content matters most. Content is what truly defines your blog and who you are. It’s not the keywords, the RSS, the CSS, the SEO or even the design — it’s the great ideas, personality and expression behind each and every one of your posts. [Ask yourself: what good are countless miles of train tracks, train stations and classy rail cars without the train?] I recommend you focus 80% of your all blogging efforts on content production, which means you should be thinking about, writing, editing and publishing content. This advice may seem commonplace and obvious, but it’s extremely important. Putting 80% of your time and energy into being a content producer means you have to momentarily shut out everything that defines you as a content consumer: an open browser, an email check, a tweet or whatever it is that gives non-essential padding to your daily routine. If you can develop the discipline to produce content without distractions, you are a huge step ahead of the internet majority. But to do this you have shift your stance from reader to writer, listener to speaker, follower to leader.

Everything Else is Incidental

So where does the remaining 20% of your blogging efforts go? It goes towards the “other stuff,” which in turns supports the presentation, delivery and marketing of your content: technical support, promotion, optimization, education and monetization. Each of these 5 categories contain at least 5 sub-categories, such as social media, advertising, sales, hosting, etc. As you notice, these are all complex and respectable disciplines in their own right, so it’s easy lose precious time trying to figure all of them out. No doubt — these 20% tasks are very important, but you should contract out the stuff you have no mastery of to specialists who can do the work proficiently. The stuff you can handle on your own (such as social media) should be done in small, manageable packets of time. Let’s Sum It Up Your content is fundamental and everything that supports your content is incidental. 80% of blogging is content production, which means you think, write, edit and publish. Thinking generates ideas, writing gives life to ideas, editing refines your writing and publishing releases and shares it with the world. This is the heart of your work. The other 20% of blogging is everything that supports the other 80%. This includes non-content producing activities that help package, deliver and market your content.

Photo by byrne7124.

The Easy Way to Simplify Blogging is written by Charles Bohannan for Wordful.com, a blog about digital publishing.

How to Survive Your First Six Months of Blogging

Charles — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:01:30 +0000

flickr image by wili_hybrid

I started blogging exactly six months ago on October 1st, 2008. And let me be honest: the time did not fly by! Those six months were some of the most challenging times I’ve ever endured and I’m glad it’s over. Now that I’m “out of the cave,” I feel more confident than ever about my blogging future. But enough about me… The reason why the first six months are hard for any serious blogger is because it’s time you spend mostly with yourself as a newbie. You are essentially learning how to articulate your ideas into coherent blog posts, then realizing very few people will read them. You also have to learn the ropes of blogging. This involves a bunch of reading, information filtering, theme and plug-in searching and staying on top of what other bloggers are saying. If you’re not careful, this stage can kill you! The early stages of blogging are frustrating and lonely, but very important to your progress. Think of those first six months as a naturally-occurring process–like growing from a newborn to a young adult, with each month representing about three years of growth. You start from crawling and babbling to walking and talking to thinking your own ideas to finally establishing your identity in the world.

Accept Yourself

Accepting yourself is by far the most challenging part about blogging. When you start out, the first thing you’ll likely feel is a sense of inferiority to the more experienced–call them elite–bloggers. It feels as if they’re perched high on the sunny mountain top while you’re somewhere deep in the shadows of the valley. When you first start writing, your posts may feel awkward and choppy to you. Many times you’ll feel like you’re just repeating what everyone else is saying. That’s perfectly okay. Remember–you’re learning how to walk here! If you just keep writing, your ideas will start to flow. Feeling inferior will cause you to either hide behind other bloggers’ ideas by blindly supporting them (aka the perpetual happy commenter) or completely reject everything about them. Likely you’ll do both. Rejecting the ideas of other bloggers is actually healthy, at least at first. This indicates you believe in your ideas and–while you haven’t yet fully developed them–you have faith in their truth and their value. Think of this as your rebellious teenage years — when you resisted the rules and wisdom of adults in order to gain an understanding of yourself and your relation to others. When you do finally accept yourself as different and original among other bloggers, you no longer have to reject them. You can now join them as an intellectual equal — you with your ideas and they with theirs. It’s a marvellous and liberating feeling. At this point your writing will start to become stronger and more comfortable to you. While other bloggers will still have more authority, followers and money than you, you can at least claim true ownership to your ideas. This sense of personal authenticity sets the stage for your upward progress. And it’s much better than being just an ordinary fan. I went through this stage big time with Brian Clark’s Copyblogger. We both focus on writing and web content. I constantly measured everything I did against what he did and tried my best to be different. It felt like I was up against a giant. After time, I finally found the difference: Brian focuses on copywriting I focus on editorial strategy. Neither of us is more dominant than the other — we’re complementary. So now I owe Brian some thanks for providing me with the resistance to form my own ideas (mahalo (thanks) Brian if you’re reading this). If you want to read more about accepting yourself, I write some more about it in this post.

Learn to Balance Thought and Action

Another huge skill you’ll need to learn as a newbie blogger is the ability balance thought and action. All this means is you must take action upon whatever it is you’re thinking or learning about. It won’t be easy, due to content gluttony, which is as harmful to your productivity as food gluttony is to your body. I’ve said before there is far too much content to consume, even really helpful content. You simply cannot grow by spending your entire time learning about something and then not doing it. For example, if you want to learn how to blog, do just that and no more (at least for now). Find a few trusted resources and stick with them. There’s no need to read every article and blog post on everything ever written on how to blog. (By the way — if you’re willing to pay, Blog Mastermind is an excellent and affordable blog mentoring program). I recommend a 2:1 ratio of learning to action for the first three months of blogging. After three months, ease it down to a 1:1 ratio, so you end up putting in equal amounts of learning to action. As you mature beyond six months the ratio will naturally start to favor action to learning (but never stop learning!).

Carry A Notebook

Your notebook will be your most reliable and trusted method of catching your ideas before they slip away. Get one and carry it with you everywhere and use it. End of story.

Be An Editor

I consider myself an editor before a writer (and marketer) and you should, too. Editors not only write, but they ensure the overall quality and effectiveness of their publication. So the first step is to treat your blog as a publication — a dynamic collection of useful ideas rather than a linear series of posts and articles. In his book On WritingOn Writing, Stephen King tells us to write first with the door closed and second with the door open. This means your first draft is where you let it all out without caring who reads it. The second draft–the edit–is when you refine your writing for your audience. Confession: During my first six months, I suffered from obsessively editing while writing my first draft. Writing a single paragraph sometimes took me hours and a post would take a week! I did not produce much and my morale went down. Lesson: Don’t do this! In blogging, the time between first and final drafts need not be long. Ideally you should write a draft and come back to it the next day. The time away (including sleep) will refresh your perspective and help you tighten your content. If you’re a beginning editor, just focus on copy editing — fixing spelling errors, syntax and sentence structure. The best English grammar guide in the universe is of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. The Elements of Style, Fourth EditionGrab yourself a copy now. When you copy edit, your writing will become clean and smooth and people will notice it. Once you become a good copy editor, you can then move up the ranks to Editor-in-Chief of your blog. I won’t get into the details of that just yet, but let’s just say top ranking editors carry a lot of power in the world.

Embrace Your Readers

Your readers are the lifeline to your sanity and success. They are the people who will become your community and support you as you grow and thrive. They will become your customers and most passionate spokespeople. The more energy you put into nurturing your readers, the more they will put into nurturing you. When you start blogging, you might feel crazy writing post after post with not so much as a single pageview, let alone a comment. But know this–not being heard is no different than when you were learning how to speak and your parents couldn’t understand what you were trying to say. Eventually they heard and understood you, right? I guarantee after consistent posting, you will start to attract comments. I wrote 13 posts before my first comment. The comments will be fleeting and sparse, but will they will nevertheless energize you because someone is actually listening! And here’s what you do: respond to every one of them. Talk to your commenters and engage with their ideas. Let them know you’re listening to them, too. Blogging is a two way conversation. As the great Gary Vaynerchuk says, your community starts at 1.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that like anything in life — great success requires great risk. Your willingness to endure difficulty means you are not someone who settles for the easy or even the middle path. The first six months are usually harsh and tough, but with the right mindset, discipline and faith, you can do it! Aloha.

How to Survive Your First Six Months of Blogging is written by Charles Bohannan for Wordful.com, a blog about digital publishing.

The Easy Way to Simplify Blogging