Last August, I wrote a post titled “Being a better writer” and I think it’s worth a read. It was written for a reader who is a young adult but I believe we can all benefit from improving our written skills. The value of conveying your thoughts into written form can change how people perceive you and greatly your job. If you’re working in a job that requires writing, you’ll go far with these skills. In the past 24 hours, I received 2 inquiries from readers asking for tips on my workflow and how I write so much. Blogging must be a full time job and one troll even commented on a past post asking me if I plan on doing actual work at my “job” one of these days.
Maybe for my superiors reading this, it might be confusing and there would be assumptions that I’m not doing any work. This couldn’t be further from the truth as I write at night and on my lunch break. Assuming I have nothing else to do that day other than go to work and eat 3 meals, I can easily write four blog posts 500-2000 words each with no issue, no proofreading and zero planning. I just write. This workflow is certainly no requisite for being a good blogger but it certainly helps. If writing is a chore, you’ll never keep it up and you’ll never build an audience. When writing is your past-time, things are much easier. We can only hope our hobbies become our profession and I hope to retire to a life of photography and writing. I would be so luck to have that opportunity to make money conveying moments in written work and in photos.
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I found this post directed at businesses who blog and the importance of blogging in 2011. It’s a great read for anyone who is or wants to start blogging. You may not care about your brand but repeat visitors do. My brand in a nutshell? Conveying that may be an exercise in narcissism but I’d like to try my best.
Adam Jackson is a technologist who has, for the past 14 years, invested time and money into technology and enjoys the latest gadgets. He is a farm boy from Florida and, although he lives on a cabin in New Hampshire, considers himself a resident of San Francisco (Sanfranciscan). The experiences of growing up on a farm, a beach town, a mountain in Alabama and losing himself in the fast paced tech world of San Francisco combined with travel around the world allows him to step in and outside of the bubble and offer perspective on technology trends. He also was allowed, at a young age, to teach eastern philosophy and martial arts to hundreds of kids and adults including men and women of the armed forces and police. His leadership and teaching skills are often expressed in motivational and introspective looks into how we live our life and how our society evolves as a whole. Finally, a passion for photography allows him to convey many of his experiences through vivid / candid photos and the combination of tech, photography, motivation, rants and balanced coverage of social media and tech make up a brand that is unique these days. He embraces this diverse brand despite the fact that his blog is a mashup of so many topics because it allows for a loyal following of an extremely diverse group of readers.
Honestly, that was far more challenging than I expected it to be.
My brand is very unique and I like that. My blog’s visitor count is always growing but never in the ways that it would if I blogged exclusively about social media, technology, photography or my motivational / societal rants that often hit me in the head and I have to share. The mix makes for a very diverse group of readers. Some people read for only one of my topics.
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I don’t recommend following my algorithm. I think you’ll find slow growth and 5 years of only having your mom read what you’re writing. It’s disappointing that this is how our society works. A blog such as Talking Points Memo (a liberal blog) can’t post an editorial in support of lifted gun laws or a supportive post about a republican candidate because readers would lash out and if the mix was truly 50/50, readers would stop reading. Liberals don’t want to hear Conservative viewpoints and the same goes the other way around. This is why Fox News and MSNBC operate less than a few channels apart and each have their own loyal following. The problem I have as a balanced individual is that I can’t watch either channel. Both Fox and MSNBC piss me off to no end just as I get upset when I read a tech blog and see written words about how screens everywhere and a Minority Report future is “the best thing that could happen to civilization” but a green-tech blog may, on the same day, have a blog post about recycling urine as drinking water.
Our society is based on extremes. Birds of a feather flock together because they’re too afraid to go out on their own.
The issue with my blogging algorithm is that I support guns and legalize marijuana, increased taxes (assuming they go to the right places) and a separation of church and state while being pro-choice. I believe in green living but I appreciate the ability to use energy how I please with little governemnt oversight. My view is down the middle as it is with most everything. My blog reflects that. I embrace a new iPhone while writing a rant about kids spending too much time with their faces buried in phones.
For this reason, my readers rarely grow and it’s a problem that would force most bloggers to give up. Why haven’t I stopped blogging?
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I blog for myself and only myself. I’m writing a note to the future me as a sort of time capsule to share what I did this day and how I felt about it. My writing is a refined personal journal with a secondary goal of educating anyone that comes across it so they can better understand me but also so they can pick up on a new perspective. I hope individuals from all walks of life read this and learn something or experience a different viewpoint than they would have if they had opened up their news reader to the same New York Times & Huffington Post articles. I believe any post I write will appeal to people who love and use technology and to people who aren’t really techie and don’t care enough to read a gadget blog or review.
if you blog selfishly, I believe you will continue doing it for many years but I also believe that, without a focus on the reader, it will be difficult to grow an audience. Whatever path you choose, you have to be completely happy with it because it may hit you a year from now that everyone that comes to your blog each day is expecting you to support “one nation under god” or “the fall of our society that relies too much on technology” when today you feel like writing about “how awesome Apple’s new iPad is” You’ll be caught catering to your audience and the blog will cease to be fun.
I’d rather have 2 readers than 50,000 if I’m able to say whatever I want in this post screen and I do..I say whatever I want and am pretty sure I lose readers with each post but that’s a part of growth. You lose a few fans and gain a few more and this cycle continues.
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Find time each day to write something. It doesn’t matter what you write and how much you write. You don’t even have to click that publish button. Write a letter to your future self or explain why this mouse is better than the other or share a photo that you took. Don’t snap an iPhone picture, apply some stupid filter to it with one of this piece of crap iPhone apps like Instagram and actually take out your point & shoot, frame the shot and shoot it then sync with iPhoto, process it in Photoshop and send to Flickr then take the time to embed that photo on your blog and explain the emotion you felt when shooting it….THEN share with Twitter.
Trust me; this process will bring you so much joy and happiness and you can scroll through blog posts many years from now and remember what it felt to shoot that picture and it’s not lost to some tweet that literally no one will see after 20 minutes because it’s too far down the stream. Your image is clicked a dozen times and forgotten. On a blog, it will live forever. Think about that next time you decide to half ass a picture or tweet and think, “could this make a better and more impactful moment if I blogged it?”
Write for 1 hour each day.
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Finding content for your blog will happen more and more easily. “How do you decide what to write about?” is the most common inquiry I get. The fact that I write about so many topics is alarming to people. This isn’t Engadget where I simply post of press releases with pictures of new products or TechCrunch where I get tips about new companies and new features and write a post. This blog is absolutely my own editorial discretion where I’m the editor in chief and sole writer. How I manage to write nearly 10,000 words per work is alarming even to me.
The analogy I give to these inquiries is you have to think of it like a comedian. He always has his notepad and is always writing down joke ideas. Sure, it’s annoying that a photographer always has his camera and asks you “stop the car, I see a shot” but that’s his passion. His brain works like a camera lens or the comedian’s brain sees the laugh out loud in every moment of his life (visual or audible).
Writers have this same problem. I call it a problem because you can’t control it. 50% of my drives to and from work, I spend talking out loud an entire blog post. I sit in my car, something comes to my head and I write the entire post in my head and speak it aloud and I arrive at work forgetting what I was even talking about or “blogging” about out loud. I’ve tried recording these but it just doesn’t sound the same when I transcribe it. It least 80% of the posts that hit me in the head never get put on this blog. I would need 8 hours a day to blog each topic that I come up with and many more hours to refine those posts, tag them with photos and supply additional research and links (additional reading or subject matter).
Your brain will become like this to over time.
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tl;dr – Too long ; Didn’t read. Any over wordy thread or long drawn out story that people don’t want to really read, but reply to anyway.
I get this a lot from friends. This post will surpass 2,000 words. and many people take longer to read my posts than it takes me to write them. This post took 25 minutes to write on my lunch break and I still have half an hour to eat a sandwich and catch up on news before going back to work.
Don’t do this. I was the kid who got every essay back from teachers in school with “-10 points. Too long. Get to the point.” Yes, I lost letter grades due to writing TOO much on writing assignments. Teachers hated me. They’d agree that I was a great writer but would say that I talk way too much.
Here, I don’t have limitations other than the fact that very few people read my entire posts. Adding photos to posts has helped my readership a bit but at the bottom I can write things like “I miss San Francisco and wish I could still do my job there because I really wanna go back ASAP” and know that less than 5% of people deciding to read this post ever got to this point. I take advantage of that way too often.
I’d recommend that you keep word count to a minimum. I mention it a lot in my posts but it’s not a goal. I don’t pride myself on being so long-winded, it just happens. I’m sorry for that.
Write until your’e done writing. I don’t refine or take away from my posts as I should but you certainly should.
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Well, this one took almost 30 minutes to write and tag and add photos. I hope you enjoyed this. Good luck on your blogging!