I’ve got to be honest, when I first heard about blogging, I immediately thought it was just a silly fad that would pass rapidly. I mean what’s the value of writing short posts of no importance and spill our life on a digital diary?
I remember clearly it was early 2000, while working on an remote office in Carlstadt, NJ, when I first heard about Blogger, the new tool to start a “web log”. The web was in a crazy evolutionary mode, with lots of ideas and companies that made no sense getting a lot of press coverage.
Now, as I see the Word count in my Wordpress 2.6 installation, I’m in a state of rediscovery of the joy of blogging. It is hard stuff. I’ve had 3 failed attempts at it and all of them were related to a number of factors that I outline below.
Don’t blog if you don’t feel like doing it
One of the pitfalls of blogging is starting it for the wrong reasons. “Everyone that’s somebody does it”. “I want to increase my site’s ranking”. “I want to amass thousands of posts to show people how intelligent I am”. These are not good reasons to start a blog, and that’s why we see so many of them that feel fake or just made up.
There’s got to be a burning feeling inside of you. You want to tell the world a unique point of view of your experiences in your career or personal life. Those are the really good blogs.
Don’t blog if you are not going to do it every day
Fred Wilson, one of my favorite bloggers, has a great post about the announcement by several influential writers to slow down or completely stop blogging (including Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis).
In one section of the post, he quotes Calacanis:
In the early days of blogging Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to win at blogging: “show up every day.”
Don’t think about starting a weekly or monthly blog. So many things happen so quickly, that what you wanted to say at one moment of time might be outdated (or completely false) by the time you publish your thoughts. Plus the idea of blogs is to be sort of a realtime log of what you’re experiencing and feeling.
Don’t blog if you are going to say the same thing everyone else is saying
In the era of copy and paste it’s very, very easy to just regurgitate other people’s thinking. You aren’t bringing any value to yourself or anyone around you doing it. Unless you are taking a completely opposite point of view or know much more about the original poster’s subject, we’re all better off just reading the original. And please link back to the original post and credit the blogger.
Don’t blog if you don’t have a concise theme
This is a hard one. Blogging can be a string of non-important posts: “today I shaved my teeth and went to work”. You’ve got to do better than that. Pick a narrow focus (the narrower the better) and stick to it. That’s unless you’re Tom Cruise or Prince. Then people do want to know everything you do.
I can’t share in words the joy I feel when a total stranger tells me that he really liked something I wrote. There’s something about helping another human being be better that really makes it worthwhile.
And as they say… fourth time is the charm.
Do you have any other rules for blogging?
