Tag Archives: Crappy Blogger

How To Be A Crappy Blogger: Be Frequently Infrequent

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 3 Comments

The How To Be A Crappy Blogger series examines the mistakes and missteps that keep blogs like this from succeeding. Enjoy and learn from a look back at three years of unsuccessful blogging.

Back at the beginning, I let the writing lead the way. I was thrilled to be blogging and that excitement helped the posts come fast and furiously. This went on for just over a month. I didn’t have a posting schedule, but I was having no problem cranking out a few posts a week. Then I hit my first road bump; I can’t quite remember why now, but there is about a month-and-a-half gap. From then on out, I became yet another utterly inconsistent blogger.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. A blog is easy to start and hard to maintain. Much like a New Year’s resolution, everyone is enthusiastic when they decide want to eat better, quit smoking or exercise more. We rush right out, buy some healthy snacks, some nicorette or join a gym. Perhaps we even make it a month. Then we get busy, our resolve wavers and we realize that what seemed exciting at first look is really work.

Struggling isn’t a problem; that’s just the reality of attempting just about anything new. It’s what often happens next that is the problem. Instead of going back to the drawing board and deciding how to move forward, we settle into our infrequency. We crap rationalize with things like, “I’ll only write when I have something really important to say,” or “I’ll get back to blogging once I finish this project for work.” Rather than course correcting, the average blog dies a slow, painful and lingering demise. It’s a death march that not only disappoints your readers, it’s a public commitment that you’ve essentially neglected.

It’s cliché, but how you start things is how you finish them. Go in without a plan and things will not workout. If you expect that writing for your site will always be exciting then you are just setting yourself up for disappointment. You have to start by planning for the worst. You have to assume that the minute you put your site up is the minute you’re going to want to stop blogging. This ensures that you really, really want to do this and that you take the time to come up with a plan of attack.

Decide how often you are going to post and tell someone; hell tell everyone. Ask them to stay on your ass when you fall short. I post on this site five days a week. It was a challenge that I wanted to set for myself and I voiced it publicly to my readers (and asked my wife to ensure that I did). I wanted to see if I could actually get things done. Inconsistency has always been one of my greatest challenges throughout my life and this seemed like a great opportunity to finally do it right. I’ve been managing to make it happen since mid-April of last year, and I can assure you that it has not been without struggle (to be honest, I’m even a little behind the 8-ball with this week’s posts), but I didn’t start seeing growth in both my writing and my readership until I managed to become consistent.

It doesn’t have to be five days a week, but if you’re serious, I think you really have to commit to at least once a week. I’m certain that you will be able to throw plenty of examples of those who prove this theory wrong at me, but chances are, you aren’t them. Make a commitment to yourself and make a commitment to the people who spend their time with you. Determine a frequency that is right for you and then take time to plan out how you can deliver the required amount of writing (this is often where we get ourselves into trouble). If you’ve never done this before, go slow. Even if you’re extremely productive at the beginning, store your writing up. In fact, wait a month before launching your site and just write. Hold things back, because I promise, the day will come when you don’t want to do it. There will come a time when you go to the well and the well is dry. That doesn’t mean that it’s the end of your blog, it doesn’t mean that the passion won’t return, it just means that you’re like the rest of us and you’ll be prepared for that eventuality. There are days where you will fall short, just be ready and even the most inconsistent amongst us (hi!) can hit publish with consistency.

Once I got consistent, people bothered to stick around. If you look at the chart below, it’s hard to argue the value of showing up. Especially when you consider that things only started heading in the right direction when I got my act together back in mid-April of 2011, a time when I had 20 subscribers.

A Better Mess Feedburner

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Filed Under: Creativity

How To Be A Crappy Blogger: Go Goal Crazy

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 4 Comments

The How To Be A Crappy Blogger series examines the mistakes and missteps that keep blogs like this from succeeding. Enjoy and learn from a look back at three years of unsuccessful blogging.

When starting out, you have big dreams and big ambitions for your site. You’re going to become the next (Insert A-List blogger name here), you’re going to get a book deal or you’re going to be rich beyond your wildest dreams. Those dreams quickly turn into plans, because as “they” say, you won’t be successful if you don’t have goals. So you set your sights on a million page views a month, you tell yourself that you have three months to get a book deal or that you’ll make $10,000 in the first quarter of 2012. Sometimes things work out. Usually they don’t and this leads you to abandon your site, squash your ambitions and move on to the next thing.

Goals are important, but at the beginning excessive goal setting can be a distraction. As just about anyone who has ever written a business plan or worked in a startup knows, your reality and your planning often change the instant they meet the world. No matter how hard you plan, now matter how clear your target, the truth doesn’t really come out until it is challenged and changed by the real world. The same is true for blogging. Unless you have past experience, you’re in for something entirely new and until you know what you’re dealing with, goals are often just the reasons you inevitably quit.

While many will disagree, I don’t think those of you who are just starting out on your first site should have any goals at all, I think you should have intentions (and yes, you could easily argue that these are just less ambitious goals, but humor me.). You should know if you’re writing to drive awareness for your business, to get speaking gigs, to bring attention to your upcoming book, but you should avoid getting specific until you take some time to learn what you’re doing and what works. I just had a very interesting back and forth with Derek Halpern over this on Marcus Sheridan’s blog. It’s a worthwhile read and while I still disagree with him, he made some excellent counterpoints.

As I said there, setting unrealistic goals is a surefire way to crush your desire to keep going. Without the right experience and knowledge, you’re often setting yourself up for failure. You’re better off starting your blog because of an interest (or better yet an obsession) as this will keep you going as you struggle to build that elusive early audience. See where your writing takes you, discover what kind of an reader it attracts1 and figure out what works. Once you have that familiarity, once you know yourself as a blogger and begin to understand what your site is capable of, then, and only then, can you set ambitious goals. On the flip side, don’t wait too long either. It’s another post for another day, but it took me two and a half years to get serious about what I was doing here and trust me, that hurt just as much.

Start with intentions for your site, test them against the real world, learn what you’re doing and then set yourself some intimidating goals. It may take a bit longer, but it’s far more likely to get a new blogger where they want to go.

If you’re just starting out, let me know how/if you are approaching goals. Been at it a while? What was your approach at the onset?

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  1. It’s often not the audience you expect. [↩]
Filed Under: Creativity

How To Be A Crappy Blogger: Just Jump In

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 15 Comments

The How To Be A Crappy Blogger series examines the mistakes and missteps that keep blogs like this from succeeding. Enjoy and learn from a look back at three years of unsuccessful blogging.

When you first decide that you want to blog, there’s this immediacy that comes over you. You have something you want to say or land on a topic you want to examine and the excitement just drives you forward. It drives you to register a domain, set-up a site and start writing that very day. You feel great, you feel passionate, but you aren’t ready.

This is pretty much exactly what I did and boy did it set me out on the wrong foot. While my kickoff took a week of pestering Danny Brown rather than a day, I still rushed into it. I was raring to go, had been reading other blogs and just wanted to get moving. That energy was unlike anything I had felt and it worked… for a while. But inevitably reality caught up to me. I hadn’t done my homework. I hadn’t though things through and I wasn’t ready to sustain the site when that initial passion started wearing off.

When your moment comes, when you’re raring to go, get started! Just don’t start blogging. Start planning. Start writing. Start doing everything you need to prepare. Take at least two weeks and get a feeling for how much content you create. If you’re already a practicing writer, you shouldn’t find it all that difficult to determine how many usable words you’ll manage to create in a week. If like me, you hadn’t written consistently in years, you need to take a few weeks to get to know your habits. This will not only help you get ahead on your content, but it should help you determine the frequency with which you should post (and don’t you worry, we will certainly be getting to frequency in this series). Keep in mind that you’re still on that “new blog” high and you’re production is bound to slow down. Over time, as blogging becomes more of a habit, that pace will begin to pick up, but there is often a significant slow down after that initial burst.

Go beyond getting to know your writing habits and make yourself a roadmap. If this is your first blog or if you’ve never quite found traction in your previous attempts, plan out your first three months’ worth of posts. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just take a calendar and start writing your post ideas on it. Rather than wondering what to write, you’ll already have the titles (or at least the general ideas) ready to roll. Looking ahead like this will also force you to see if you can come up with enough topics to keep things interesting.

If you really want to do this, prepare for the long haul. Forgo pouring all of that energy into your site and put it into the planning. Jumping in and putting myself out there showed commitment, but I paid for my impatience by constantly having to scramble for ideas and by attempting to write more than I was ready to produce. I didn’t know myself as a blogger at all and rather than learning my lessons in private, I was quickly frustrating my readers with disjointed and infrequent content. This turned out to not only scare readers away, but it quickly quelled my own passion for the project.

If you want to start, start now; just plan instead of publish. I know you’re anxious to get going, but if your goal is to still be blogging a year from now, realize that it doesn’t matter if you start hitting publish tomorrow.

New to blogging and just getting started? Are you at it a while, but perhaps started out on the wrong foot? Share your stories in the comments below and hopefully we can all learn from each others missteps.

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Filed Under: Creativity

Introducing The How To Be A Crappy Blogger Series

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 14 Comments

They say to write what you know, to take your experience and do your best to help others with it. Well, if there is one thing I know, it’s how to suck at blogging. While things are picking up, it’s taken three years for things to start heading in the right direction. In truth, my illustrious blogging career is littered with missteps and outright mistakes and considering the goal of this site is to help people get better, it’s time I come clean about everything I’ve done wrong along the way.

As we enter a new year, I’m betting that several of you are just getting started on your own blog or possibly rededicating yourself to your writing. I wanted to start this series with the hope of helping you by sharing as many of my own mistakes as possible. I will also be looking to drag a few friends over to the site to share some of their own challenges as they got their own blogs off the ground.

Starting a blog is just about the easiest thing you can do; setting up your own self-hosted site is now easier than ever. So easy, in fact, that we are almost always stacking the deck against ourselves when we jump in. Blogging is easy, blogging well is hard, and succeeding with a blog is improbable at best. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take you in directions you never expected. It will force you to learn new skills and new things about yourself. Worst of all, you’re going to have to accept the fact that no matter how many posts like this you read, you’re going to make plenty of your own mistakes and you’re going to make them publicly.

So tune in tomorrow as I jump into my first mistake… just jumping in. And if you’re feeling generous, give a guy some courage and tell me some of your missteps as you started on your own attempts at blogging in the comments below.

Filed Under: Creativity