Keeping the Blogging Fires Burning
Bryce from A Bite of Sanity asked me about how one might continue to care about blogging once the fires have dimmed a bit. I’m not sure of Bryce’s specific circumstances, but I will tell you about how I keep up such a prolific schedule of blogging and give you some tips on how to keep it moving.
Write for Your Audience
I write every post as if I’m telling you something that I hope will be useful. If I were writing just to please myself, that’s easier to stop doing. I write with you in mind, and that keeps me motivated to give you more quality and a certain level of quantity, too.
Writers are Readers
Read constantly. I blaze through over 1000 blog posts a day. I don’t read them all, but I process about 1000. How? Quickly. I skim through, find points that interest me, and then REALLY read the ones that matter to me. Along the way, I hit Shift-S in Google Reader and share them on my feed with you.
The point is, the more I read, the more I’m exposed to good ideas. Ditto with podcasts. I heard four blog posts in the most recent episode of This Week in Tech.
Keep a Text File of Topics
I’m stumped from time to time on what to write next, and then, at other times, I can churn out 100 blog topics for a single post (most comments and trackbacks to date on that post, by the way). But having a text file I can open and peruse gives me plenty of material to choose from. Mix this with my first point about writing for the people who matter to me, and I’m fairly well-managed.
See What Mainstream Magazines Do
Disclosure: I’m stealing this tip from Brian Clark at Copyblogger. He does these posts where he dissects an issue of a popular mainstream mag and then shares how you might translate those article titles into blogging topics.
If It’s Because You’re Feeling Unheard
That’s another matter altogether. One way to get heard is to be relevant. I say this to people all the time when they complain that no one reads their blog. Relevant to whom is an important point, by the way. What matters to me isn’t what matters to others. But if you find the people who you think will love your stuff, keep writing ( podcasting, whatevering) to THAT group, because they’re like minded.
And other ways to be heard are to encourage the conversation in other places, including reposting your RSS feed to your various social networks (the old “use networks like Facebook as outposts” trick), and inviting people in to comment and/or guest post.
Keeping it Burning For Me
For me, I’m fueled by comments. Not just “hey, great post,” but comments (or even better are blog posts that reference something I wrote and expand on it) are what drive me. My wife calls me up sometimes at work and says, “Wow! 23!” And I never know what she means, but then, she’s talking about some blog post. Ask Liz Strauss about comments. She knows her number.
And besides, I have to blog. I have too many ideas to just let them stay in my head. And after I complete the Social Media 100, you’ll see where I go next with all this stuff. I think you’ll like it. I hope you will. Because it’s going to be another evolution of what keeps my own blogging fires burning.
Photo credit, Lainey’s Repertoire
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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