I haven’t posted here since April 12. That’s almost a full month. If I were my own client I would advise posting “at least every other week, minimum, and once a week would be much better.” But, if you suffer from blogger angst, you know that it’s a vicious cycle – the longer between posts, the more you worry about NOT posting and the harder it becomes to sit down and write something. Well, it’s easy to write something, but it’s hard to write

something you think is worth publishing.

Then, you check your calendar and it’s been a month! Yikes! The pressure is on! You must publish a post!

I’m a believer in the benefits of procrastination. Sometimes we really do just need to slow down and give our mental processes time to do their thing. However, it can go too far. Like when you wait a month between posting on your blog.

Since I am pretty much an expert at identifying when I have crossed the line between “taking a mental break” and “becoming a total slacker” I feel comfortable offering some tips:

Take advantage of the times your mind is fertile. There are days when I think of about 15 blog post topics. If I can capture a few notes about each one, I have a start on some posts. Better yet, if I can sit still and write them out fully, I’ll have stockpile. Days like that can’t be scheduled in, but there are some things you can do to increase the likelihood of them occurring.

Boost your creativity. The easiest way to do this is to give yourself little challenges. No matter what you are doing, try to think of some way that it could connect to the theme of your blog. How is a road trip like what you write about? Are your kids’ activities in any way like what you write about? Is there a current trend in your city that you can relate to what you write about? The more you stretch to make these connections, the easier finding them will become. Of course, you won’t always end up with a post you can use doing these kinds of mental challenges, but sometimes you will.

Write at least a little, even when you don’t want to. This is just another way to say “keep showing up.” You don’t have to publish what you write, but you really should write on the days you think you are supposed to be writing. You can’t write just whatever for this one to work. Writing just a sentence or two of a post or editing an old post or making some notes for a future post is fine, but journaling about something totally unrelated to your blog will not help you overcome blogger angst.

Publish it anyway. Don’t let excuses stop you. It doesn’t matter if you can’t find a suitable photo to illustrate what you’ve written, or if you aren’t quite satisfied with it. Sometimes, you have to just let it go and publish it anyway to avoid being stuck forever. If most of your posts have all of the elements that are important to you, that’s what’s important. You may even find that a not-quite-finished thought resonates with your readers, or that a good photo is extraneous to what you are doing.

How do you overcome blogger angst? What makes it worse? Please share, because, to be honest, I’m still feeling a little angst-ey.

 

 

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This morning, as my oatmeal cooked, I decided what the topic of this post would be. Then I ate my oatmeal, checked my RSS feed, left comments on 5 or 10 blogs, considered setting up a new folder for local blogs I’ve started following, fed my birds, had a cup of coffee, stared at the screen a minute, recorded the oatmeal in my daily nutrition tracker…

I’ve written about procrastination before. Clearly, it is something that I deal with regularly. Sometimes, it’s okay – even helpful – to put things off. Other times, we do it out of fear, or laziness, or simply because we dread doing whatever the task is.  In the case of writing this post, I was probably putting it off because the idea wasn’t a very good one, or at least it wasn’t a full idea. It was something that should go into the idea file.

Procrastination, though, is a topic I could write about for days on end due to my long experience with it. Right now, for instance, I am not only putting off writing this post, but something else as well:

Several years ago, I had a job as a telemarketer. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds – we were only calling licensed insurance agents, and we weren’t actually selling anything. We told them about products or job offers, and set up times for someone else to call and give them more details. But I made hundreds of calls a day – 300 calls a day wasn’t unusual. And mostly, people didn’t answer. Very few people returned calls when we left messages, so we rarely left them. It was mostly dialing and listening to ringing. Somedays it was a struggle to stay awake.

For a few months, I shared an office with just one other person. She tended toward depression, so sometimes I would tell her stories to distract her from sad thoughts, while we listened to the phones ring. Eventually I was moved into a room with 8 or 10 other people in it, and without the entertainment of telling stories, I had to work to stay awake again. So I started writing a story. I wrote on scraps of paper that I kept under my keyboard, in tiny handwriting. I decided I kind of liked the story, and dug all those scraps out of my bag took them home, and typed them up.

Then I got fired from the telemarketer job. (It was a crazy place. LOTS of people got fired from there.) And I stopped working on the story.

I kept thinking that I “should” work on it some more. It liked it more than any other fiction I’d ever written. I let a couple of kids read it (it is a kids’ story) and they liked it. One of them even occasionally asks me if I’ve written anymore of it yet. But it just sat there, in a file on my desktop. After a year or two, it seemed to be taunting me, so I moved it off of the desktop, where I couldn’t  see it anymore. But it still crossed my mind regularly.

A few months ago, I decided to read it and see if I still liked it. I did. It’s fairly unusual for me to read something I wrote a few years earlier and still like it. So, I put the dang thing back where I see it. I even printed it out and put it in my backpack so that I can work on it when I find myself in a waiting room or at lunch alone.

Almost immediately, within a week of re-reading it, I had about 12 new ideas for other stories I wanted to write.

(My organizer friend is going to tell me I should have written them down, filed them away and come back to them when I finished the kids’ story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what I should do.)

I did write them all down, and file them all away. Then I started writing one of them. Now, I have two unfinished projects that I really love chattering in my head, bugging me to work on them. “Write us!” they say every night while I’m trying to raise my high score on Bejeweled Blitz. So far, I have successfully ignored them.

In this case, I don’t think I can say that either of these stories just needs time to “ferment” in my head. One of them has been doing that for about five years now, and the other o

ne just pours out when I work  on it. The words don’t get to the page fast enough to suit my brain. So, yeah, the need to let my unconsciousness work its creative magic cannot be my excuse.

Because I firmly believe that we all have plenty of time to do the things we want to do, I cannot say that I’m too busy to work on these projects. Because I (and you!) can find time to work on the things we love. Bejeweled Blitz, anyone? My high score is over 300,000 in one minute…

That leaves fear. What will I do with these things once I feel they are “finished”? What if they are not particularly good? What if I take all the risks to my ego and send them to agents, or publishers, orwhoever (I really don’t even know who I would send them to) and get – gasp! – rejected? Would that make me feel sad? I don’t like to feel sad. Maybe I should just go ahead and delete those stories and forget about writing them. It’s too scary.

All of those questions, all of that fear is bullshit. It’s ridiculous and silly and unworthy. If a friend told me they felt that way, I’d tell them to quit being stupid and write the stories, stop borrowing tomorrow’s troubles, and figure out what to do with them when they are finished. Start spending an afternoon a week working on them. Or a half hour a day. Whatever, just write, and stop worrying.

Why is it so hard to take your own advice?

Do you have a project you love so much you are afraid to work on it? Do you just buckle down and get it done, or do you give yourself mind-candy to numb your brain and silence your creativity?

 

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Do you participate in writing challenges? I’ve never taken part in NaNoWriMo or anything like it, or even entered any kind of writing contest. I pay attention to them and am usually intrigued, but still stay sidelined. It could have to do with fear, which is strange. I’m not the least bit afraid to write to write samples for clients, and I never worry when I submit

work for review.

 

I hate the idea that I might not be doing something because of fear. That’s just silly, especially with the “something” would probably be fun. So, I’m going to give myself a small personal challenge: set aside a minimum of a half hour every day to work on personal projects. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s more than I’m doing now.

 

Making time in your schedule to do the things that are important seems like a simple thing. A couple of years ago, I decided to begin dedicating time each week to fitness. It took a while to make the habit stick, even though it was something I wanted to do and really enjoyed. I’ve always made time in my life to read, and to spend time just hanging out with my family (as opposed to running here and there to scheduled events).

 

The thing is, when you decide you will spend an hour exercising, an hour writing, an hour doing household chores, a half hour reading, and then add those activities to your normal work schedule, and then make time for any family obligations, you might start to run out of hours. This is probably where most of us start whining about not having enough time. But, as I have said before, there is plenty of time to do the things that are important to you.

 

I’ll be flexible in my personal writing challenge – the post will count as today’s “personal project time.” But I will make writing my own stuff a priority. I may not be ready for the big NaNoWriMo push, but there are two or three other challenges that look interesting.

 

Do you participate in challenges? If you write for a living, do you work on personal projects also? Where do you fit that writing into your schedule?

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Everyone dreams of being able to build up an audience, create some products, set up some affiliate marketing deals and then make money while reclining

on the beach.

 

It is a false dream. Even if you get all those things in place, you cannot just kick back and watch your bank account get fatter. There will always be more work to do.

 

I have never had a big following on this blog, for lots of reasons, the main one being that gathering a large audience was not/is not my main goal here. The folks who read Smiling Tree Writes may not be many, but they are mostly people I think of as friends and that I would like to know better. This is the place where I write in my own voice, where clients can read samples of my writing, where I can ask other professionals open questions, and where I share thoughts about life and owning a business.

 

Even with a very small following, traffic on this site suffered in a big way during the last 2-3 weeks. My father in law became gravely ill in mid August, and passed away on August 27. During those few weeks, we were traveling and staying in Eastern KY, where internet service is spotty at best, and besides, my mind was occupied with family concerns far more than with business worries.

 

It was interesting to take a look back at the traffic here, though. There were several things in place that probably helped keep a few visitors dropping in, but for the most part there was very little activity  around here. A grand total of two comments were left in my absence, and the number of visitors over two weeks was about the same as I would usually see in one normal day.

 

Here are some prematurely drawn conclusions based on my statistics from the last few weeks:

Social media matters. Under normal circumstances, I spend a fair amount of time each day participating in conversations on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and a few other networks. In fact, most of the traffic here comes from those social networks. There is a direct correlation between blog traffic and social media participation.

 

Commenting makes a difference. In late June/early July, I set a schedule for leaving comments on other blogs. My plan was to leave a minimum of 20 comments on other blogs each week to try and find out if that would increase traffic here. Turns out, that is harder to do than it seems. I had trouble finding enough blogs to read, and then, some didn’t leave room for comments, I couldn’t think of anything relevant to say, or other people had already said it all. However, I was beginning to see a slight increase in traffic here that was probably attributable to all that commenting.

 

Even tiny gardens need water. This is a tiny blog, but if I don’t respond to comments and post new content with rigid regularity, the itty bitty following it has taken a couple of years to build disappears. Quickly.

 

There are millions of blogs, and only a fraction of a percent of them are well-known. You can bet that the owners of those few big names don’t spend the majority of their days taking it easy while the money rolls in. Blogs require work, and when you stop working, people stop visiting.

 

What’s the longest period of time you left your blog on autopilot? Did you see a major difference in traffic? Have you found anything specific (social media, commenting on other blogs, etc.) that impacts your statistics more or less than you expected it to? 

 

 

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The list of social sites that I use is getting long:

Twitter

Facebook

Google+

LinkedIn

Spotify

StumbleUpon

This Blog

SparkPeople                                                                                                                       * image by Patrick Hoesly

Goodreads

 

Believe it or not, each of those sites offers individual benefits, and I use them to meet different needs. If you were so fanatically impressed with my amazing writing skills that you wanted to connect with me in all of these different places, you would rarely, if ever, see the same content duplicated. I do provide links to my blog from several other sites, in the hopes more people will come here, but that’s about it.

 

You may be thinking, “That’s a LOT of content.” You’re right, it is, and sometimes I struggle with what to post where. Would this link work better on Twitter or Facebook? How many more people are likely to respond to this question on Google+ than on LinkedIn? Where should I share this in order to provide maximum exposure?

 

The thing is, I’m not really normal – in the way that I use social media. It is part of my job to offer my clients insight and advice regarding these various platforms. If that weren’t the case, I’m not sure I’d be active in quite so many places. Also, if I had a job that didn’t involve marketing or social media at all – if I were still a teacher, for instance – I would certainly be slower to get involved.

 

This run down of my own social media habits has a point: Any normal person would be overwhelmed.

 

That overwhelm usually leads to a handful of reactions. People link their feeds together so that the same status update or link or whatever appears everywhere at once. Sometimes, business owners simply ignore the latest and greatest and stubbornly stick to whatever has been working for them (know anyone still relying on the Yellow Pages?). Other folks just hire it all out to an agency.

 

Linking your profiles and pages together is a bad idea, for several reasons. One is that you miss out on the particular benefits each platform offers. The reason all these sites can coexist is that they don’t do the same things. The jokes and chatter that work perfectly on Twitter fall flat on LinkedIn.  I’m certainly not the first person to offer this advice, but I do think the temptation to link accounts will grow along with the number of platforms that could be linked.

 

Not taking the time to even learn how the next big thing works is a mistake, too. You need to at least have some idea of what each of these sites can do before you can decide where your business should be. Twitter might not be right for your business, but if you never check it out you will never know. Lots of businesses have found new customers through Twitter that never expected to be able to. Lots of others have tried and flopped – either because the people they were looking for weren’t there, they lacked an understanding of how that community works, or they were inconsistent or impatient.

 

Hiring an agency might seem like a good idea, especially if you listen to a well written and delivered pitch. But, unless you or someone who is extremely knowledgeable about your company works closely with the agency, it could be a disaster. In order for marketing through social platforms to work, you have to be personable and responsive to what your customers want. A representative from an agency cannot do that nearly as well as someone who lives and breaths your business. I’m not saying that an agency is NEVER the right idea, but you (or someone you trust) will have to spend time making sure the agency knows your company well enough to represent it.

 

I’m curious as to how the people who read this blog handle the overload. Do you wait to see how everyone else is going to use the latest new thing, or do you jump right in? Do you link your profiles together? Do you use different platforms to share different sorts of information or is one place as good as another?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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