Blogging challenges change over time. Friday night into Saturday morning used to be my blogging marathon time while in the corporate world. Blogging was my fun creative outlet, and I knew there wouldn’t be time during the week to write. What a motivator! Now, knowing a Thursday post can get written Wednesday afternoon, the motivation to stay up until 3 a.m. writing isn’t there, presenting a challenge to Friday night blogging now.
When blogging, every idea has to get past the “Do I care enough about this to write 300 words on it” filter. Sometimes, the filter seems pretty high. That’s when it becomes a challenge to write and you have to adjust the settings.
Sometimes adjusting the filter means throwing out every idea you’re struggling with (because they all seem like crap) and starting over. Other times, it may take hanging on to a crap idea, forcing yourself to write to some level of completion, then stepping back to see what you have.
Some people get around writing challenges completely by stealing content. Just now a pingback appeared on a social media productivity blog post from December. A real estate person in Dallas copied it word-for-word, running it as one of the first 6 posts on her blog. Pathetic. But at least she kept all the links to the post in place. Not all plagiarizers do that.
Copying isn't creating though. You have to be willing to push away from the side of the intellectual capital pool & shape your own ideas.
Scared you’ll need a writer’s lifeline though when going into the deep water? One lifeline somebody mentioned recently is that blog posts should only be 80% complete so they’ll generate more comments. Wow, if 80% done is the standard, I might have enough potential posts in my blogging sketchbook right now for the rest of the year!
Another variation on the settling for 80% mantra is writing 140 characters instead of 140 words, then generating enough related tweets to build to 140 words. With a good run, you may get to 280 words.
Need evidence this idea works?
HELLO! How do you think this blog post started life?
