Stop

No, seriously, you don’t.

Let me tell you a story.

I was wandering the halls of Friendfeed (think a giant forum of Social Media geeks) and I came across an interesting post. Someone really wanted to get into blogging, but they couldn’t come up with an idea that could hold their interest for long enough to do it.

It’s a story I hear a lot — the writer can come up with about ten points that they need to write about, ten perfect posts that they want to see etched onto the Internet forever, but once those posts are finished — they really have no idea what they want to put to the page anymore. What happens then is that they go from posting once a day to once a week, then to once a month and before you know it there is another dead blog floating out in the ether of Interspace.

What happened here?

It’s one thing to want to be creative, it’s quite another to have an outlet for that creativity. Natural content producers often work backwards. They decide they need to do something, anything and go in search of that thing instead of finding a problem that needs to be solved and building the solution.

Next time –

Instead of deciding you need to blog, ask yourself why you want to write. Maybe what you really want to do is write a book, or maybe you should develop a seminar or a whitepaper. Just because blogging is the new black, doesn’t mean that all writing needs to be pigeonholed into it.

Instead of deciding you have to “get into Web 2.0,” ask yourself what your goals are. Maybe a more traditional business model is more up your alley or maybe there is one specific aspect of business (programming, marketing, PR) that really lights your fire and you should focus your attention there.

Stop believing that your only outlets are those that lie along trend lines, and stop believing that following the latest trend is more important than following your goals.

Going back to the blogging example, here’s (paraphrased) what I had to say in the thread that spurred this post –

Blogging is hard and stupid. In your head you probably have a ton of stuff to say about one or two things — that’s what you should blog about. Until you find those things, even money says that most of your blogging attempts will be aborted (and that’s a good thing).

Don’t blog because you think you have to, blog because something, some concept, is clawing at the back of your eyes and you need to say something about it before it kills you.

If you’re not sure why you want to write, maybe you shouldn’t be right this second? Blogging isn’t a default state. I’ve written more blog posts than I like to think about and probably 400-500 more that I’ve forgotten about and the only thing that ties them together is that I wrote them because I really thought I had something to say. Whether I was right or not, history decides. The point is that if you’re struggling to find a reason to blog — you’re working backwards.

Find something worth “blogging” about then find the format most appropriate to express that thing.

You might be surprised to discover that your “blog” wasn’t really a blog at all.

(Images)

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