Once upon a time, I thought I wanted to be a PR professional. I suited up and went for an interview at Humber College’s Public Relations program.
The first interview question was “did you bring a resume?” I realized I had failed the first PR interview test. I didn’t have all the necessary documentation with me. Bad PR girl. Bad.
I thought the next best thing would be to fax my resume over the moment I got home. Seemed like a good PR professional-type thing to do. Moments after I faxed it, I took a big gulp and realized that the resume I had sent looked like a dog’s breakfast–bullets everywhere, boo-boos galore.
I waved goodbye to my PR career (thank goodness).
The impulse to act quickly without sufficient contemplation doesn’t serve me well in print. But it turns out, it makes me a better blogger. My “just get it done” approach means that I actually publish blog posts. I don’t just think about them, I don’t write drafts and save them and contemplate. I hit the publish button and put the good-word “out there.”
Yes, sometimes I make grammatical errors or things don’t work quite the way I’d hoped. But, I believe my approach is better than any other because at least people get to read my posts. They live in the world.
And, I’ve come up with some tricks for how to be a prolific blogger without making myself, or Hypenotic look bad:
- Schedule time to blog: Make a commitment and block off the time in your calendar.
- It’s not extra: You can’t think of it as something you’ll get around to when you have some free time. Blogging is part of your job.
- Keep Notes: You’d be amazed how quickly a good idea for a blog post can evaporate from your memory bank. I’m convinced some of my best blog posts have been the victim of memory failure. Keep a notebook and jot down ideas as they come.
- Look Around: Inspiration is everywhere. The more stuff you expose yourself to, the more content you’ll come up with. That’s why magazines and movies are write-off’s, they’re there to inspire you. Even indirectly. At the very least, set up a really good google reader and update it regularly.
- Mix it Up: Not every post has to be a dissertation on a subject. Give yourself permission to write some really short blog posts.
- Hit Publish: Don’t overthink it. Don’t save it as a draft for further (and further) contemplation. Just publish your post. If you want to amend it, you can do that later. If you want to add to it, you can write another post as a variation of the same topic.
- Have Other People Read and Edit your Work: We have a policy around the office. I ask people to read my blog posts. If they see a boo-boo, I ask them to just go in and change it. They don’t need to point out my mistakes (who likes that anyway?). So, my work is perfected when I’m not even looking.
What tips do you have to getting down to the business of blogging?
