What the Doors Can Teach You About Blogging
We chased our pleasures here
Dug our treasures there
But can you still recall
The time we cried
Break on through to the other side!
Yesterday, I talked about the importance of choosing a marketing niche that you enjoy to help you keep moving forward when the going gets tough. But even that isn't always enough.
Beginning bloggers (and occasional bloggers who want to post more actively) often make it for the first few days or weeks and then hit a wall where blogging feels like pulling teeth.
How do you get past a wall? Through a door, right? Let's see what the '60s rock band The Doors has to teach us about blogging.
You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide
Break on through to the other side!
The "night" -- that wall you hit when the initial burst of ideas and enthusiasm wears off -- may divide the day. But the day is more powerful. It destroys the night. If you'll keep going through the "night", you'll discover that it gets easier once you break through to the other side.
Why does it get easier?
- Because you'll make it a habit. Lack of inertia makes it harder in the beginning, but easier once you've gotten moving.
- Because you'll discover strategies for finding inspiration. For example, I've discovered that most of my inspiration comes from consciously and deliberately looking for ideas while reading other blogs.
- Because you'll have more practice. You'll get better at recognizing seed ideas that you can grow into blog posts, and you'll get better at quickly turning them into well developed content.
- Because you'll start seeing the rewards. It may take a while, but you'll start getting more traffic and comments, which will help you keep motivated.
- And because you'll stop expecting it to be effortless. Yes, it'll get easier. But it'll always take time and work. The first few posts come so easily for most people that when they wake up one day without an idea, they decide they don't have blogging superpowers after all and just give up. Once you realize that you can do it without superpowers, it won't feel like a hopeless cause anymore.
Over at Daily Blog Tips, Slava Vishnyakov pointed out a strategy that doesn't work well for breaking through the wall:
It wasn't just any goal that destroyed them, but a particularly appealing Goal. The Goal of "writing a blog post every day for 30 days".
...there's a great evil lurking underneath this niceness that leads to wasted effort and exhaustion.
The first part of evil is that if you've set this goal "“ you obviously chose a wrong topic for your blog. Nobody that chosen the right topic had to setup a goal to write on it.
Most ... successful blogger[s have] chosen [a] topic so important to them that their friends actually have a goal "Make John shut up about [that topic]" in their New Year Resolutions. That's the topic John should've chosen.
At best, setting a goal to blog daily for 30 days simply moves the wall back to day 30. Unless you're lucky enough to have a topic you love so much that your best friend wishes you'd lose your voice, you're going to hit the wall anyway.
In fact, you'll probably hit the wall because of the 30-day goal. 30 days puts the light at the end of the tunnel close enough that you'll fixate on it and miss the lessons you should have been learning during that time.
Blogging daily for a specific number of days won't automatically solve the problems that crush most bloggers. You will learn something along the way. But you'll learn more if you work the problem -- if you consciously look for solutions -- rather than just working and hoping that the problem will go away on it's own.
If you want to set a time based goal, make it a year. Then set short term goals, like discovering concrete strategies for finding ideas to write about, and focus on them. Those are the goals that will help you open the door and break through to the other side.
