A New Approach to The Blog
I’ve been writing blog posts for just under a year now. In that time, I’ve written 12 posts, and have enjoyed writing each one. The goal was to put out at least 1 post a week, and last I checked, 12 posts in 11 months is not the same as one post per week.
I also wanted my website to hold some technical, musical, and other ‘skill based’ guides and tutorials, but I haven’t done that either.
So, there’s two issues that I need to fix here:
A lack of consistency in posting
A lack of new genres of content (guides and tutorials)
I have tried to solve these problems in the past by trying a few things:
I tried to build accountability by adding ‘see you next week!’ at the end of each post, but I ignored it each time (..hah, no excuses on that one)
Simply trying harder and trying to write posts even when I didn’t want to
Safe to say, neither of those approaches worked, and I need a newer, healthier approach to do this. This post is all about the approach I’m using to be more consistent and introduce more content to the website.
The main reason why I’ve lacked consistency over the past year is that the kind of posts I was writing just took a lot of time. For posts like What do I do With My Life? and Getting Ready to Start a Career, the more I thought about them and mulled them over, the better the posts turned out. None of these posts would have been what they were had I just given them one week each. These types of posts take time, and I cannot expect to make posts like those every week. The solution then, is two fold:
More genres of posts!
I’ve wanted to make tech and skill based guides, which would take much less time to make. In addition, this also solve my ‘lack of skill-based documentation’ problem.
In addition, some weekly summaries of my daily updates can also be a great way to crystallize learning and put it across in a sharable way.
If I add that kind of content and put out ‘classic’ posts (like this, this, and this one) once a month, a majority of my problems would be solved
A newer strategy to ‘making’ content
‘Document, don’t create’: Creating something new takes time and effort because you build things up from scratch. On the other side, if I simply document the things I’m learning and interesting conversations I have, content will create itself.
As an example, I have been journaling for the last year and a half, and if I go back and pick up pieces from different entries, I could coalesce them into a new post with minimal effort.
In fact, this strategy is the exact reason why Frndship Time (a podcast I started with my friend) is so consistent. We release at least 1 episode every week. The secret is that none of it feels like work. Ratik (the cohost) and I record our general conversations, do some minimal editing, and send the episodes out every week. In fact, we discussed this exact strategy on episode 2 of the podcast. Check it out:
This is all good in theory, but only time will tell whether I will be able to pull it off. If things go according to plan, I should be averaging more than 1 post a week, which is much more than what I was trying to do earlier, but with the new strategy, I am more optimistic this time.
Finally, accountability: each month, I’ll put out a ‘What you can expect this month’ post on the website. This will include all the posts I have planned out for the month, in addition to approximate release dates. I have to plan this out anyway, might as well turn it into a post. I’m already doing the ‘document, don’t create’ thing.
Okay, here’s the TLDR: expect more content. Expect different content. How I organize the tech/skill guides and the ‘classic’ posts is a bridge that we will cross when we get to it.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week!
See you next week for a new post.
Thanks for reading! You can always email me to chat about this post - or anything else.
As is true for any advice or counsel you ever receive: Y.M.M.V! Your mileage may vary. Some advice can be a vice. Feel free to take what you can use, and leave the rest. There are no rules.
