Blogging: Disciplined Intuition

There’s no denying that blogging can be be slightly difficult. Not difficult in the sense of finger-numbing, mind-numbing or soul-destroying hard work – just in the sense that trying to throw out your better than average guff on a regular basis can be a bit of a struggle after the initial buzz has worn off.

It’s a question of the need to post vs what to post quantity vs quality conundrum™.

Perhaps you have the very best of intentions to post something every day at 9.50 AM just before break and you might achieve it for the first few months as you have a million and one ideas to spark posts which will titillate and invigorate your reader. And it’s definitely reader singular or readers in single figures at the get-go.

But as the work piles up as you attend to your blog you reach a kind of double helix where the work needed finishing is on the upswing and the blogging, due to work excesses and idea stagnation, is on the downswing.

The key is to pace yourself. Blogging is a marathon as opposed to a sprint (although you can get extremely good results quickly) if you’re in it for the appreciable long haul. At some point, once the initial frenzy wears off, you have to become disciplined.

So why not discipline yourself from the start?

If you want to spend the first three months writing every single hour that God sends then good for you. But, there will come a time where that becomes impossible (unless you’ve employed someone to do it, of course). It might be two, three or nine months before you career into some form of blogger’s block or bouts of apathy start to well from your inner core. However, if you’ve disciplined yourself there’s no need to worry.

Blogging has been described as ‘an open email to anyone’ by Doc Searls, and it’s as good a description of posting to a blog you’ll ever come across. But, if you’re banging the quality content drum like the Duracell bunny, you can find yourself cogitating and agitating over even the slightest turn of phrase.

Just blog from the start as you think your time might allow during your busiest period. That might mean you’re writing once or twice a week, but you can always store posts up in your quieter times like some secret blogging squirrel.

Make sure you subscribe vis RSS to all the primary material for ease of access and set a bit of time each week/day/month to contribute to other blogs in the forms of comments.

Then again, you could always get a bunch of tried and tested experts in to handle all the set-up, coaching, initial linking and related whatnot that goes with starting a blog.

Blogging isn’t rocket science, but it can be awfully time consuming if you’re spending more time than is required on certain technical issues. It can be enormous fun if you’re that way inclined, but if you’re just intent on doing the actual writing then it makes a bit of sense to get somebody in to do the donkey work, no?

No prizes for guessing who that might be.

For more tips on blogging, be sure to check out our entire digital marketing blog!