Blogging 101: Don’t Force Your Content

I’ve been blogging consistently for a little over a month now. It’s my first major effort aside from tweeting to followers or tracking and responding to certain Web Professional topics on Twitter. I’ve been trying to post at least 2 – 3 times a week. One “full blog post”, one “half blog post”, and a quick post series I call “Thinking for the Weekend” on Friday’s.

There I was, sitting on my sofa watching the New England Patriots special teams beat the Miami Dolphins. I’m mentally planning out the rest of my week and thinking about tomorrow morning’s meeting. Then I almost did something very dangerous.

Force a blog post.

I like to post my full blog post on Tuesdays and that’s 2 hours away. I reviewed 5 drafts in my WordPress admin panel. I wasn’t inspired to finish any of them. I started reviewing my Evernote account, weeding through all my “blog post idea” tags.

Nothing.

Then it hit, a vision of Seth Godin; “Don’t let the lizard brain beat you.” (Read Linchpin)

Don’t post something for the sake of posting something. You should be passionate about every piece of content you write. Your content should reach out to your followers and inspire or help them. How else are you going to reach 1,000 true fans? More on this later.

Let’s face it – I’m not a pro blogger, a junior blogger or a tiny blogger. I don’t have much of an audience yet – thus the self set goal of amount of posts per week. However, it does not mean I should produce in volume to simply hit that number.

There is a lot of great advice on blogging out there that emphasizes to run your blog your way. Sometimes we get caught up in pumping out volume to try and capture an audience. You see it on the Twitter stream all the time. People pumping out useless tweets like every thought that runs through their mind, retweeting others and posting quotes at nauseum. It only creates a lot of nothing.

As they say, “Content is King.” (Who are they anyway?)

Be passionate about your content. It means your passionate about your audience. It defines you as a Web Professional.

[Photo credit: Geek and Poke and Flickr]