Blogging

How do you have a pop­u­lar blog? The answer looks sim­ple to me, and is the answer to a sim­il­iar ques­tion: How do you get peo­ple to be inter­ested in what you?

Be inter­est­ing. That’s it.

It’s a sim­ple answer, but it’s not easy. You can break it fur­ther down; be inter­est­ing by doing inter­est­ing things or writ­ing about things in an inter­est­ing way. Prefer­ably both.

Do Inter­est­ing Things

Nobody wants to read about bor­ing things. Chris Guille­beau trav­els the world and writes about it on his blog The Art of Non­con­for­mity.

Write Inter­est­ingly

Not every­one of us can travel the world, but that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to a bor­ing blog. Frank Chimero writes about design and cre­ativ­ity, and he writes about them so beau­ti­fully his blog is a delight to read.

Do Inter­est­ing Things x Write Interestingly

The most inter­est­ing blog­gers are the ones who do both. They do inter­est­ing things and write about them in inter­est­ing ways. David duChemin is a pho­tog­ra­pher who trav­els the world, and he writes about pho­tog­ra­phy and liv­ing with pas­sion. It’s an unex­pected mix, but it sure is an inter­est­ing one.

The com­bi­na­tion of doing inter­est­ing things and writ­ing about them in inter­est­ing ways helps make a blog pop­u­lar, but to aim for pop­u­lar­ity as the goal first would most cer­tainly be unin­ter­est­ing. Instead, aim to do inter­est­ing things and write about them interestingly.

1. How do you make peo­ple inter­ested? Do inter­est­ing things. A friend of mine writes about mak­ing nat­ural reme­dies. Another is writ­ing about his exper­i­ments with apart­ment block gar­den­ing. Both are amaz­ing. As Ben­jamin Franklin once said: “Either write some­thing worth read­ing or do some­thing worth writing.”

2. Keep going. Great new blogs get started all the time. Unfor­tu­nately for the world they fiz­zle out after the first few months.

3. Define suc­cess on your own terms. Just what the hell does a madly suc­cess­ful blog mean any­way? Mil­lions of read­ers a day? Bil­lions of sales rev­enue? It’s hard to work towards a goal when you have no idea what the goal is. Who do you write for, and what would you con­tinue writ­ing for if nei­ther money nor fame was an issue?

It’s never been eas­ier to start a blog. So why is it so hard to have a wildly suc­cess­ful one?

To cob­ble the bard; “the fault, dear reader, is not in our blogs, but in our­selves.” It’s easy to start a blog. It’s hard to develop a unique voice and remark­able insight (a phrase I learned from Seth Godin’s book Linch­pin: Are You Indis­pens­able?). With­out either, you’re just another voice in the crowd. With both, you become indispensable.

To ask how to gain a unique voice and remark­able insight is miss­ing the boat: If there was a step-by-step for­mula any­one could fol­low, the end result would be a crowd nei­ther unique nor remark­able. To have both requires per­sonal thought and expe­ri­ence at the very least, both of which you can nei­ther skip the time and effort on to gain. Whichever your blog’s area of exper­tise, it’s as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the con­text of creativity:

Cre­ativ­ity is just con­nect­ing things. When you ask cre­ative peo­ple how they did some­thing, they feel a lit­tle guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw some­thing. It seemed obvi­ous to them after a while. That’s because they were able to con­nect expe­ri­ences they’ve had and syn­the­size new things. And the rea­son they were able to do that was that they’ve had more expe­ri­ences or they have thought more about their expe­ri­ences than other people.

Or as Ben­jamin Franklin suc­cinctly summed up: “Either write some­thing worth read­ing or do some­thing worth writing.”

Hav­ing some fun look­ing through what I wrote in 21 for the year of 2009. There aren’t a lot of posts, 44 in total for the entire 12 months (post­ing fre­quency was an issue, heh) but there are some in here that I’m pretty happy with.

Traces of Life Coaches Blog remained, with per­sonal growth posts like The 3 Declut­ter­ing Boxes in Jan­u­ary. I ven­tured into more poetic and per­sonal writ­ing like East Coast Night in Feb­ru­ary, which was some­thing I wanted to do more of. I’m proud of the Mar­tial Arts is Deal­ing with Self-Defense Fail­ure post I pub­lished in March, I spent a lot of time mak­ing it as good as I could and it encap­su­lates a lot of what I think about mar­tial arts and self-defense train­ing today.

The 2 Ulti­mate Secrets to Blog­ging Like a Rock Star (Hint: it’s Not What You Want to Hear) in April was awe­some, if I do say so myself. This was another post I spent a lot of time craft­ing, and I love how it com­bines snark with some seri­ous thoughts about blog­ging well.

Lessons Learned at 30 was writ­ten in May, the month of my birth­day in the year I turned the big three-oh. It was writ­ten in a rather reflec­tive mood, imag­in­ing what advice I would give if I had the chance to speak to a younger me. I look for­ward to writ­ing Lessons Learned at 40 a decade later, I won­der what I’ll have to say then.

Blog as Self-Discovery

December 29, 2009

in Blogging

I’ve been writ­ing here in 21 for about a year before I dis­cov­ered a direc­tion I’m com­fort­able with going for the next year or so, and that’s about liv­ing the cre­ative life.

It seems obvi­ous in ret­ro­spect – I’m a full-time writer who’s also been a full-time 3D artist, who stud­ied dig­i­tal media design in school and loves cre­ative arts like graphic design and pho­tog­ra­phy. Big duh.

But I always thought of them as sep­a­rate things (well, they are). Sub­dued by the belief that only peo­ple who spe­cial­ize are seri­ous pro­fes­sion­als, I thought of myself as a wannabe Jack-of-all-trades goof­ball, instead of real­iz­ing that the one denom­i­na­tor that links all of them up is the act of creativity.

So there it is. I dig the cre­ative act and I want to write more about it. Thing is, I don’t think I would have been able to fig­ure that far out if I hadn’t been writ­ing about ran­dom top­ics at 21. The act of writ­ing, think­ing and look­ing back at what I’ve writ­ten has been as much a jour­ney of self-discovery as it has been an act of self-expression.

And that’s one unfor­tu­nate aspect, I think, of some of the blogs out there that are try­ing to make it too hard, too fast. They spe­cial­ize too early and then lock them­selves in, with­out allow­ing them­selves the chance to grow, explore and change.