I’ve had this site for years, but up until recently, I only occasionally wrote new posts. I’d build them up into these huge projects in my head. So much that it was hard to ever start, let alone complete any of my ideas.
And yet those articles were quite important to my visibility, particularly in the Marketo community. I wrote in-depth guides on topics hardly anyone was talking about then. Even today, the majority of the the traffic that makes it to this site is to some of those early protips articles.
This gave me some great validation on the work I was doing, but also caused me to get in my head about what was worthy of posting . Another challenge I recognized was the open ended nature of my posting. Because I had no real “due date” for an article, I could spend forever perfecting it. And as a result, I hardly published anything. About 7 months ago I decided to go in completely the other direction. Instead of an open ended writing schedule, I’d follow a much more rigid plan. Instead of focusing on perfection I’d focus on repetition and hitting publish, flaws and all. And instead of binding myself to one niche topic, I’d give myself more creative license.
And that’s what I’ve done, five days a week, for the past seven plus months. I still suffer from perfectionism, but with this new process, I don’t get have the luxury of obsessing over it any more. I definitely publish stuff I’m not happy with. But I’m amazed how often I put together an article in a day or two that really feels like it’s up to my standards.
Of course, the catch with this new strategy is that most of my audience has left. I’m not writing much about technical Marketo stuff these days, as my focus now is more around building teams and strategy than finding automation hacks. I still love a good technical article and maybe I’ll still share some of that occasionally, but increasingly this site is an outlet for me to develop ideas on paper.
The three takeaways I’ve had after building this habit are:
- Writing is a skill that develops over repetition and doing the work. I am a stronger writer than I was when I started this, but it’s a spectrum, and it’s easy to see where I need to improve next. If you want to improve your writing, daily blogging is a great place to start.
- Structure is the key. It’s easy to look at a 5-posts a week schedule as unreasonable. To find excuses not to write some days. To start with a tamer schedule, like once a week. But for me, this has always caused me to abandon the whole idea even faster. The value of a daily ritual like this over even a one post a week schedule is the routine you create in your days. It’s just a task in my day, like brushing you teeth. The fact that I do it every day means I eventually find a place for it. And the work and willpower to get going starts to come almost automatically. I won’t claim it’s always easy every day, but if I had first followed a weekly post schedule, I can almost guarantee I would’ve failed by now.
- Write for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with writing for an audience, and I’m always happy to have one if they choose to listen. But there needs to be something in it for you in order to stick to a habit like this. And for me, it’s an outlet to get ideas out of my head, and see if they can stand up straight on paper.