A blogging experiment

I consider blogging to be a very efficient way to help the community while promoting my own personal brand (which is important not for my oversized ego, but because I’m an independent consultant, and more visibility means more and better contracts). Many successful bloggers blog often, sometimes several times a day. I’ve never been able to sustain a frequency of more than a post per week myself so far, but for about a week, I’ve been trying something different. I’ve decided that I would write something every day, whether it’s a post for one of my blogs, a page for a book, training material, or some personal notes. The idea is to make writing a part of my everyday routine.

I think the idea of incorporating activities such as exercise, social media activity, reading, or writing into one’s daily routine is key to getting things done instead of growing a TODO list. I shower every day without difficulty, so I figured, how difficult would it be to write every day too? I’ve tried to find the right time in the day to do each of those things. Exercise is done in the morning after driving the kids to school, reading is before going to sleep and in the morning if I feel procrastinaty, and writing is at the end of the day. I haven’t found a good place for social media, but I need to.

Writing at the end of the day is something I really like, because it’s a good way to find inspiration and give a conclusion to my activities. When I sit down to write, I can review what I’ve done that day, and find something interesting about it. It can be a design decision, a curious bug, an idea, anything out of the ordinary. I can write about that, and schedule it to be published the next morning. I keep the posts as short as I can, and I don’t bother with illustrations, to keep the time I spend reasonable, and to maximize the content to noise ratio.

Let’s see how that goes… Any feedback on this is very welcome. Do you impose yourself similar routine activities? If you’re a blogger, what frequency are you comfortable with and why?

3 Comments

  • Bertrand - I think it totally depends on the branding you want to establish. If you run a technical blog, pushing too much non-tech content drives people away. OTOH, an occasional personal post can actually be benficial. I'm like you in that it's hard for me to get out more than occasional blog content and I think that's because our content tends to be detailed and fairly long. Long posts don't write themselves in a half an hour so necessarily there needs to be more time between. More abstract thought probably isn't as time intensive...

    Be curious how this turns out for you. I'll be watching :-)

  • Thanks Rick, it means a lot to me that you'd answer this, as I've been considering your blog to be a great example of a successful technical blog, although I don't think I'm any good myself at the long post genre (which is why I keep them short: that's what I think I'm best at). I was wondering about the reduced frequency of your blogging in fact, and wanted to ask you about it. I do avoid non-technical posts, and this one is an exception. I maintain a separate blog for that (vulu.net). Thanks for watching, and for writing in!

  • The most popular posts I've made over the years were almost always something mostly non-technical, like career stuff. That could just be an indicator that nobody cared about the technical stuff I wrote about. :)

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