I started the blog section of this website over a year ago, and after some sober self-analysis, I’ve identified 5 big mistakes that I’ve made so far.
My hope is that this post will be instructive for readers and that it creates some accountability for myself in applying what I’ve learned from these mistakes. Now, mistakes imply an intended outcome or goal. So what is the goal for this blog?
The goal is the same as that of most public writing efforts: to engage an audience. To engage an audience, you must first reach an audience, and to reach an audience you have to partake in certain activities, while avoiding others. Okay, that’s enough hesitation. Here are the 5 big blogging mistakes I’ve made this past year.
1. I’ve been inconsistent
Posting consistently is crucial for gaining an audience’s trust and attention. When people arrive on a blog and see it hasn’t been updated in a long time, they are left with the impression that the blogger is not active and not committed to staying engaged with the topic. It tells them there is no reason to come back, no reason to expect anything new.
On the other hand, posting consistently shows professionalism; it shows dedication to the subject and to the potential audience.
This is my most glaring mistake. I have not posted consistently—9 posts in over a year make that pretty clear.
Why?
It’s tempting to make excuses. Especially since they seem so valid. Running this site is third on my list of priorities after my full-time job and my second job as a college writing instructor. It does feel overwhelming at times. But the person who lands on the blog and hears crickets does not know or care about this being my third priority. For them, the site is engaging or it’s not.
I have also struggled with health issues: I learned recently that I have celiac disease.
Working through fatigue and brain fog has been difficult and frustrating to say the least, and even after changing my diet and being hyper vigilant about avoiding gluten, I still have days when my energy and concentration are poor. It’s my new normal, but I’m determined to not let it be an excuse.
I prefer to focus on what I can control. And what I can control are my writing habits…which leads me to my improvement plan.
Improvement plan.
I’ve got to turn blogging into more of a habit. I started using Trello to schedule content production and delivery, hoping that deadlines will force me to post more and solidify the habit.
I think I also need to loosen up. I’ve often had the feeling while writing that I’m trying too hard. Not every post and page needs to be (or even can be) some instructional gem. It’s okay, preferable at times, to write personal and reflective posts. Just get on and share my thoughts, you know, like on a good old-fashioned weblog. Doing so, I think, will help me solve the problem of not showing up consistently. It will also help me find myself through writing, and potentially make me more relatable.
2. I’ve kept myself isolated
So far I’ve been blogging on a lonely island, letting off weak, sporadic smoke signals as people fly over and sail past.
When you ignore audiences, trust that they will ignore you. And I’ve been doing quite a bit of ignoring. Where do I begin?
- I haven’t spent much time commenting on blog posts that I’ve read. I think I’ve left a whopping 3 comments in the past year. That’s not very generous. It means I haven’t tried to add value to almost all of the conversations I’ve come across online.
- I haven’t engaged on social media. In fact, I haven’t used social media at all to this point. Maybe because it seems daunting, maybe because I’m introverted—in any case, it’s an untenable approach. Without being active on social media, I hurt my ethos, I miss opportunities to build relationships, and I don’t give my content a chance to reach a wider audience, to gain even an ounce of rhetorical velocity.
- I haven’t asked for votes (links) to help with SEO. A site needs links to rank well in search engines; this allows more people to find your content. I’m quietly hoping that the site builds links on its own, but I also realize that it might be a good idea to politely ask for a link if the webmaster believes the resource would be useful to their audience. I’m super reluctant to try this, but if I believe my site is useful to others, why should I hesitate?
Improvement plan
I feel confident I can do better with the first two problem areas. Engaging with others’ work online does require time, but more than anything, for me, it requires a change of mindset. I don’t think it to burdensome to set a goal of responding to say 2-3 posts a week to start. Maybe my engagement goes up from there.
Using social media seems a bit more formidable. I don’t much use social media, and I hear it can be a huge time suck. This part requires a much more intentional rhetorical strategy, such as figuring out which platforms to use, what content to share, how often to post, and how much time to spend overall participating on these platforms.
My working plan is to focus on only three platforms (probably Facebook, Twitter, and maybe Pinterest). I’ll also be trying a social media management tool like Hootsuite to help me spend my time more efficiently. Thankfully, they have a free plan. Using such a program in combination with Feedly to curate content should allow me to maintain a more active presence without burning myself out.
As far as link-building, I may experiment with reaching out to other sites, but I’m kind of hoping links will build naturally over time.
3. I have’t created content using a variety of mediums
For being someone who enjoys reading about (and teaching) multimodal composition, I haven’t really practiced what I preach. I do curate videos, but so far, the content I’ve created has been mostly written text. I haven’t made videos, I haven’t created a podcast, I haven’t created infographics, no Slideshares, no viral images, you get the idea.
Publishing in different mediums would not only be a great learning experience, but it would also extend my reach to different audiences (some audiences prefer audio content, some might prefer video). The site as a whole would be much more engaging.
Improvement plan
Now, I know it’s not possible at this point to consistently create for a bunch of different mediums, but it is possible to start small. The easiest step forward probably involves repurposing existing content, turning written posts into short videos or Slideshares or infographics. Infographics seems like a good next step for creating more visual content, before giving video a go.
For video, I’ve been looking at Adobe Spark, hoping that this tool will be good for easing myself into it, and I have a few ideas for trying some talking-head videos later on. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
4. I haven’t identified my target audience
It’s crucial to you know your audience when writing. I think that part of my struggle to create consistently could be related to my difficulty in imagining who is (or who will be) reading and using this site.
I won’t elaborate on this problem here, since I wrote about it in my previous post.
Improvement Plan
As I alluded to in the prior post, I will keep writing until, through language, I start to create a self that I am happy with. This self will both imply and construct an audience.
Besides just writing to learn my audience, I think I also need to conduct audience analysis on who I think that audience might be. Trying to solve Problem 2 will help me here as well. As I start to engage more with others online, I will begin to learn who they are, and who I am. I’ll have a better idea of what conversations are important to them and how those concerns align with my own interests and competencies.
I’ve never joined a Facebook group, so one specific action plan I have is to find at least a couple of groups to join in the next week or so. Start modestly.
5. I’ve been doing too much reading
At a certain point, you have to put the book down and start writing. Yes, it’s important to read widely, to know as much as you can about your discipline or niche, but reading can too easily become a safe zone, a perfect excuse for not writing. You feel so productive when you’re reading; you’re progressing toward something, developing your knowledge. While reading, ideas bounce around in your head, connections you make, objections you raise, the inner conversation you have with the text. This is all great, but leaving that conversation in your head is all too warm and comfortable. Engaging in that conversation publicly is so much scarier. You’d better know your stuff. No wonder it becomes hard to put the book down.
I’ve fallen for this on numerous occasions, thinking that I had to read a few more articles before I published a post. Once I even nearly re-read an entire book because I was insecure about an article I was writing. Don’t get me wrong, research is important. But research shouldn’t be excuse to not write, and that’s what I’ve been letting it do.
Another condition involving too much reading is analysis paralysis. This is when you feel stuck because your’re faced with so many options on what to write about, you see so many possible positions to take on an issue or topic that you freeze.
Like research, analysis is a good thing, but not when it prevents you from actually writing. At some point you have to take a position, even if you feel its imperfect or that you might be left open to critiques (feedback is a good thing).
Improvement Plan
What I need is a shift in mindset.
Again, it’s great to be informed, but here’s the thing: it’s impossible to read every thing there is on a topic. Besides, we’re talking about blog posts, not treatises or dissertations. Blog posts should be helpful to readers, but they can also be great places for testing ideas. So going forward, I’ll loosen up a bit, and I’ll try to have more courage to honestly state my positions and test ideas.
What’s gone well?
It’s not all been bad. While I haven’t been consistent in the blog section, I have gotten quite a bit done in the other sections. I’ve posted over 80 articles on the site so far, and I’ve curated over 100 videos. So I shouldn’t feel terrible about my blogging inconsistency. Creating that other content has been time-consuming.
Thankfully, I’ve learned some things that have allowed me to publish more articles in less time, freeing me up to focus more on blogging.
One big lesson I’ve learned is that there’s value not just in creating original content, but also in curating content. Curation saves time for readers, who like most of us are nearly drowning in the content flood. Curation is a life vest that lets us focus on the content that floats above the rest. This saves us time, since we are not the ones filtering the crap.
The biggest eye opener was when I realized that sharing openly-licensed written work is just another type of curation, a way making things more convenient for visitors, who can consume good articles from different sites while visiting just one. This has also helped me create a fuller site in less time, as I said. Even though it is still time consuming to search for open source content (not to mention the reformatting, editing, revising, and remixing), it is still a bit faster (and sometime more enjoyable) than writing articles on every topic from scratch.
So going forward, I’ll continue to mix curation with content creation to make this site a better resource for writers. That’s the plan.