I’ve been blogging for a little over two years now. I consider myself a blogger. I think if you have a blog and you update it at least once a month for a full year you are a blogger. That’s just my perspective.
Since I started blogging, not only has my blog gone through a variety of changes–from domain names and hosting to content and design–but I’ve personally been changed from the process of maintaining a blog. The way I think is altered, the way I perceive my world is altered.
There are hundreds of resources out there about the technical side of blogging from WordPress to Tumblr, themes to plug-ins, but I wanted to write a blog post about blogging from a similar perspective as a marathon runner might write about running, or a photographer might write about how they see the world.
As an aside, here are some great blogs that you can use as inspiration and as a resource: ProBlogger , CopyBlogger, Chris Brogan, Conversation Agent.
I want to be clear before I begin that there is nothing wrong with blogging however you blog, I don’t believe in there being a right and wrong in blogging. I just want to share my experience in hopes that it will help you with blogging.
Blogging isn’t as much about writing as it is perceiving and reflecting.
When I first started my blog, I was giving out tech tips. Not too long afterwards though I began to run out of material, after all I’m not really an IT guy. So I went out to the web and found other blogs with tech tips, sometimes as inspiration, and sometimes just to repost and attribute. Nothing wrong with any of that, it just didn’t feel like it fit me. Something was missing. I was missing: my personality, my ideas and opinions, my unique perspective.
I started posting some opinion pieces here and there, it began to feel better but it still wasn’t quite right. I was forcing it, the writing didn’t happen naturally. It didn’t start clicking until shortly after my first year of blogging. For me, blogging is not a linear process. I can’t sit down and say “ok, time to write now.” I couldn’t just turn it on. Things just came to me usually. I had to train myself to always have it on. I had to think like a blogger, at all times I had to be a blogger. It was this realization that triggered a new way of seeing the world and I felt my creativity unleashed. The task of blogging was transformed from a chore that strained my brain into a much easier process of sharing the world through the lens of my perspective.
I started noticing that a movie quote could inspire one of my favorite blog posts yet.
A train ride experience could be a post about customer experience.
I passed by some kids skateboarding and it made me think about making a video post about how creating exciting content can be compared to the act of watching someone land a kickflip.
What happened was a shift in the way that I was thinking. If ou find yourself getting stuck, stop and think for a minute if you are just writing or if you are looking at your world through a lens of a conversation you want to start.
Tomorrow’s post will be about finding your muse and I’ll give you the surprising secret of where I get many of my good ideas…