For those of you following us on Twitter, we were away at a wedding over the weekend for a friend of the family. We had a great time, despite the rain, and returned home feeling somewhat refreshed and ready for a new week – or so we thought. I had the most unproductive day today (well technically yesterday at the time of this post) and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t get into the groove.
When we returned on Sunday I immediately went to my white board and jotted down my goals and priorities for this week of blogging, which is becoming normal as the weeks pass, and I felt completely ready to conquer another list of tasks. Man was I ever unprepared. I spent the majority of today working on a new RSS/email subscribe form – which is something I didn’t want to spend more than an hour on – and questioning whether or not I liked our new WordPress theme. I can’t even count how many times I changed the theme on this blog today, and I don’t even know why I was tripping out. I wanted to write 2 posts today on top of Veronica’s Groundhog Theory post, and at various points throughout the day attempted to focus and write a “killer” article – that was not happening. I starting thinking about what you guys want to read and began getting caught up in the cycle of jotting down post ideas and titles without committing to any of them or following through. I felt so indecisive that I started to get frustrated at myself for being completely useless and wasting time “thinking” rather than “implementing” and everything hit the fan from there.
Man… blogging can be stressful. Not from the pressures or demands of your audience – at least not in the early stages – but the pressures from yourself. I have a tendency to set my goals super high and strive for greatness, so therefor I find myself to be disappointed on a semi-regular basis. This is not always good. When it comes to the premature stages of developing unique, useful content for your blog or website it’s important to write as much and as often as you can – but on the same note it’s just as crucial not to burn yourself out or focus too much on what you should be writing about. Instead, just write and everything will work itself out just like I’m doing at this very moment.
With the pressure to be different always sitting on your shoulders, it’s easy to forget to just be yourself – because that’s what makes you unique in the first place, right? This make money online niche can be stressful, so don’t be too hard on yourself and fixate on writing “top ten” articles and pillar style content because you will lose hair. Just write about what you know, what your doing, and what you love. If it doesn’t fit into an existing category on your site, then create a new one. Simple. As much as we read about writing great content and how important useful content is to Google and the search engines don’t forget to remind yourself of this one point – there are no rules when writing content for your blog.
It’s your blog, containing your thoughts, and there will always be people who feel the same as you. I feel much better now.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings 🙂
Cheers,
Elijah
Hey E
I’m glad I’m not the only one who hits creative blocks at times. I wondered whether you must be some kind of machine to be able to come up with great new content daily. Do you ever feel the pressure of “letting your blog and audience down?”
We had a house full of company all weekend, and I was away from my blog for days. I felt completely ill at ease. When I finally got to it, I had writers block. I’m glad it’s not just me.
T
Yeaaaaaah boyeeeeeeeee….just write! That’s whatsup man! People come to your blog to hear what you have to say…otherwise they’d go read an ebook or another blog.
The readers want you, it’s not that serious! Just write like you said and things will work out. My buddy Piss Biscuit calls this organic blogging…and I agree…and it’s how I like to roll.
Yeah, pillar articles are good…and yeah the lists are good, but not something you need to be doing everyday. The thing is, your blog is your place to experiment and find out what your readers want/like.
Once you know your audience it’s easier to write…just remember how you condition your readers is what they will expect. So if you blog for a year straight with nothing but lists, pillars…and how to articles….then don’t expect to come out gunz blazing with your personal articles..hahaha…they may not like it.
However…if you mix yourself into the equation from the jump..then they know it’s all good. I know I try to do this, and I think my readers genuinely never know what I’m gonna talk about…maybe it’s my kids, maybe feedburner is acting a fool….maybe some crackhead is trying to flip 5 sites in 24 hours…who knows!
I haven’t boxed myself in, so I can talk about whatever I want and the stress is pretty much non-existent well….there’s still the stress I put on myself, but you feel me.
Normal Joes last blog post..24 Hour Site Flipping Contest. Crackhead Style.
Haha, that crackhead video you did was off the hook. I was busting a gut laughing.
I was over at piss biscuit’s blog yesterday – what a great concept man, Organic Blogging. I’m going to marinate on that for a hot minute.
We gotta find our groove for sure.
Elijahs last blog post..From College To Cubicle – The Orthodox Blueprint
Yeah son, I think yall already got it though, yall organic like some tofu son! Glad you was feelin the vid…hit me with your chat identities…so we can run amuck on the IM clients 🙂
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