Things I’ve learned after two years of blogging

3rd August 2009, 09:42 pm

This is one of those meta blogging posts where the author (me) reflects on things they’ve learned or experienced during the past year. Hopefully this may be useful to you. The Idea Injection Method summary of this post is: year two can be a lot harder than year one and your past sins will come back to haunt you, but persistence counts.

Image by Annie Mole

Work doesn’t get easier just because you get better at doing the work. This statement applies to me as much as anyone. With this thought in mind, I implore any new blogger, with his or her head full of dreams of writing original content as a path to success, to take the time to read and absorb Hugh MacLeod’s How to be Creative blog post. Hugh’s post, which has new life in the form of the recently released Ignore Everybody (which I haven’t read) has a lot of important insights to prepare you for what comes as you continue to work on churning out new material.

Combining some of Hugh’s insights, along with other people’s, with my own experience, I’ll focus on several key points:

Blogging goals, stamina, and being original
Networking and community
The future

Blogging goals, stamina, and being original

Mark Evans wrote a blog post well over a year ago about the difficulties of creating original content (Why Original Blog Thought Is So Difficult) and it is so very true. He listed five major reasons why it is difficult, summarized below:

1. Writing original thought-provoking blog content is a challenge. It takes time, thought and effort.

2. Many bloggers just want to be part of the conversation before it moves on, so they essentially “echo” what other people are talking about.

3. Writing original content often provides a low return on investment because many readers are looking for information about the news of the day, even if it’s just the same content written a bit differently.

4. Lack of steady access to people and new ideas that often spawn original blog posts.

5. Vanity and envy (sometimes the best way to get social media attention or feed aggregation results is to stick to the day’s hot topic or the older chestnuts that continue to provide fodder for discusssion)

I’ve experienced all five reasons at different times during the past two years. I’d like to think that I’ve worked my way through reasons 2, 3, and 5 and I’m far less self-promoting than I was a year ago (and I was a mild self-promoter at the worst of times). Number four… well, Mark Evans has a point to a certain extent, but the reality is that there are enough free tools out there to scan the Web frequently, efficiently, and effectively in the search for new material. These tools aren’t that good at being able to break news, since they are by nature reactive, but it doesn’t take a huge amount of skill and knowledge to research enough material to write most blog posts.

To do it day in, day out, to write blog posts of value, interest, or at least entertaining prose, on a daily basis (or even most days of the week)… that only comes from extreme dedication and a lot of talent, especially if you’re a solo writer. My posting volume has dropped tremendously during the past six months as the blogging “honeymoon” phase ended and it became more mechanical (procedural, actually). Unless you’re so interested in some topic that you can barely stand to sleep because of the down time that sleep enforces, you’re going to encounter peaks and valleys in your available time, energy, and love of your material.

Hugh MacLeod warns about the need to pace yourself in creative work if you intend to be around for the long term and he’s right, especially if your creative work is not the primary focus of your days or nights. I continue to be amazed how guys like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel, Steven Hodson and other folks continue to crank out so much material that I find interesting, useful, and entertaining on a daily basis.

In my own case, I used to focus Broadcasting Brain on technology, social media, etc. I’ve taken other stabs at creativity, innovation, writing and blogging in general, business, marketing, and so on. The key difficulty that keeps surfacing, at least from my perspective, is that I don’t have a lot of practical knowledge in most of these fields. I feel less and less comfortable with attempting to write with authority on many of these topics for that reason. Speculative posts, which many of my posts are, can be an interesting diversion, but if you’re going to read about business, marketing, social media, and techology, you’re better off reading the blogs that I mentioned earlier in this post. They are hyper-informed and they are living in their fields daily. By the same token, I’ve created a pretty solid wall between my professional life and my blogging, so I guess I’ve boxed myself in a bit that way, but that’s my choice.

I still think original content is vitally important to being a successful blogger or content creator (as opposed to someone who essentially sells ad space or fronts a Web business) but if you have the choice of reading an amateur’s work or a pro’s work (and much of that is freely available these days), where are you going to spend your time?

My conclusion: original content is hard to do consistenly and frequently. You’re probably not helping yourself if you try to eak out your niche of space in already crowded territory: do we really need any more new blogs on social media, technology, or marketing? Unless you bring tons of useful experience to the table, it might not be worth your while trying to climb up (or lean into) the blogging dip.

I’m quite aware that the opinion in the previous paragraph is not like the laws of physics: exceptions appear regularly and new voices tend to rise above the roar of the crowd over time. Just don’t underestimate how hard that can be.

Networking and community

I never really intended to be a blogger two years ago. I was more interested in social news, social bookmarking, and trying to make a little bit of money. I used to spend a lot of time on Digg and StumbleUpon. I started blogging as a means to create links to some of my content that I was posted on other websites. Somewhere along the way I started to blog some original content as well and eventually the blogging overtook the other stuff.

I made a number of contacts originally through Digg and StumbleUpon, mainly through reciprocity: I’d promote some of their stuff, they’d promote some of mine. These can literally be challenges, games, etc. in search of prestige and bragging rights, not unlike reason 5 articulated by Mark Evans.

Here’s the thing, though: in the desire to gain a foothold in the areas of social news and social bookmarking, I helped to vote, promote, or otherwise support a fair amount of content that I really didn’t care about. Using FriendFeed really helped to drive this point home, where you have the ability to include virtually any RSS feed into your FriendFeed stream.

Over the long term, I felt I wasn’t getting enough value and enjoyment from actually using sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to keep using them consistently and to try to improve my authority or ranking on those services. I was well on the way to cutting down my Digg activity this time last year and it ended completely this year. The same has eventually proven true for StumbleUpon as well. I still use Twitter a lot these days and I occasionally share links to my own content, but it’s mainly another blog for me, one that I publish in very small but frequent spurts.

Here’s the interesting thing, though: blogging and social networking are basically joined at the hip. Blogging is a way to express yourself and create connections with other people. Social networking, like flesh-and-blood networking, is all about being found, noticed, and finding and noticing other people. Unless you hide your blog from search engines (the world, really), you’re putting your content out there to be seen, even if it’s only for a handful of people. Most of us have bigger ambitions.

My experience, and that other many other bloggers, shows that networking is a critical part of building an audience. Be honest: we blog, at least in part, for an audience even if our intentions are as pure as Ivory Soap.

Here’s another truth: building an audience, social networking, etc. can be a huge job. It can be interesting, educational, and fun. It can also eat up a lot of your time. There can be a lot of temptation to try to build up that huge Twitter following (I know!) and to reciprocate every social guesture.

I still use Twitter an awful lot but I don’t use the other services. I’ve seen a significant decline in my blog traffic stats. StumbleUpon in particular used to send most of the traffic that my blog received and I don’t receive very much of that these days because I haven’t been an active participant (reciprocator) on StumbleUpon for months.

I don’t really care. In my experience, as per other people’s experience, social news and bookmarking traffic is fleeting, unfocused, and has little long term value. I really don’t know how many blog subscribers or regular readers I ever got from this activity, but I don’t think I got very many in this manner. The main thing that kind of traffic does is burn up bandwidth. Shrug. So be it. Over time I came to believe that my blog stats were artificially inflated though StumbleUpon traffic, so I feel better about it even if the numbers have dropped as a result. Again, so be it.

I still enjoy connecting with other people via social media but it’s more of an end unto itself.

The future

If this post seems negative compared to last year’s anniversary blog post, I’d say that’s an accurate read. I set myself some lofty goals this year, but I haven’t really worked that hard at meeting them. A lot of my optimism has been tried by the grind of blogging, more knowledge and experience, the changes in social networking, and different demands on my time than a year ago.

Unless my life changes drastically, I don’t see myself ever maintaining anything like a daily blogging schedule – I’m just not going to put that much time and effort into one activity at the expense of others. At this point, I don’t see blogging becoming a major source of income or a career path. I see blogging as a form of self-expression and something that has to be balanced against other needs.

While blogging is a rewarding activity that helps you to develop skills, I think it can ultimately be restrictive. Blogging is but one form of writing (or communication, really), one that focuses on high impact, fast force feeding of information. Sure, there are exceptions, but by and large blogging, like news writing, focuses on giving you the critical details first and then provides supporting information as a follow up.

There’s more to writing than blogging. My original writing dreams were around writing fiction: short stories, television scripts, and novels. Over time, things like articles and essays, maybe even book length non-fiction became appealing challenges. A lot of those ambitions haven fallen by the wayside during the past year. I don’t want them to stay unfilled forever, at least not all of them.

Blogging is still an important part of my life these days. Long term, though, I’d rather not be remembered just as a blogger, but as a good writer. There’s got to be room for both. I hope to keep both going in the years ahead.

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For a look at last year’s blog aniversary post, please check out A year has passed since I wrote my note.