Reason Not To Blog:Just Who Do I Think I Am?

Today I started to write and this started to come out. A bunch of reasons not to blog again. This time, instead of analyzing each one separately with an article for this series, I just kept going.

• With time I do know that I know myself better. And I actually think at times that in knowing myself better, I like myself less.
• I know that I am a slacker a lot and many times if I can get away with something I will.
• I know that I hope for the best at times and stop putting in the effort too early.
• I know that I should be doing something else now and I started writing practice again because the other thing was worse.
• I know that I put things off until the last-minute.
• I know that I drop the ball on keeping things in order all the time.
• I know that my mood, drive and many other things are directly tied to the money I am making.
• I know that I should be finding ways to relax more often and be more active physically.
• I know that I don’t what the next year will be like with us just treadmilling now.
• I know that I really don’t know what I want to do. Because when I think I do, I eventually get bored with it and try something else.
• I know that I am not as good as a writer as I think I am or that I once was.
• I know that I let a lot of people down in the last year and I am not quite sure how to fit that into my picture of being a good person.
• I know that I need to be more realistic about things with myself and especially with the people I work for. I had these priorities turned around.
• I know that good feeling of having everything in order is only momentary and possibly a delusion.
• I know that although I am fighting hard and have massive drive, I am a little more let’s call it realistic now and that is friction for drive. You gotta have a little bit of unfounded faith.
• I know that I am really not sure of some of my abilities. I am one hell of a troubleshooter, solution finder and problem solver, as long as I have some else do the work and can explain to them how to do it well.
• I know that I am trying to get this over and looked at the word count again.

And that really is about how you fix that issue. Let your inner hater rant until he is done talking and then go on your way and get your work done. And, Hemingway, that was a joke.

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Reason Not To Blog: It is too hard to write

Then don’t. That’s the simple solution. Stop driving yourself crazy and beating your head against the wall.

And if you can’t. Then deal with it. You will have to find a way.

Writing and blogging is a bitch. There are times when you are in the groove.

I had been slowly writing a post a day for a few weeks when I wrote this post. Today I edited about 7 to get them ready for publishing, wrote another 3 and came up with about 20 new ideas for articles.

I am not bragging about this accomplishment. I am thankful because I know how that I am an expert at fighting writing. And that’s about what it is. If I sit down and actually force myself to start writing and not stop for at least 15 minutes, I usually come back with something if only the drive to try the same thing the next day until I finally do come back with something good.

But I fight it. Call it useless. Let it conveniently slip my mind. Let other tasks get in the way.

With an hour a day, anyone can see good results from a blog within a year. I know that. You will not at the top of the heap, but you will be able to say it is worth it. I know this because it happened to me and the traffic has been pretty steady through my hiatus due to good anchor content.

So I will give my blog that hour a day or close to whip it back into shape. I planning on continuing to post this series or a post 3 times a week leaving more time to fix things up around here and come up with a full plan of attack.

But once you have gone through the process of just forcing yourself to write, to keep the pen moving for at least 15 minutes, every day until it becomes habit, it sticks with you. Your writing practice has memory and after a few days of writing daily, blogging is not hard at all.

I know this. I guess the solution is not to forget this and let other things get in the way.

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Reason Not to Blog: I Have a Crappy Writing Style

I don’t really like pictures of me. I know that unless they are taken from very specific angles that one of my eyes is higher than the other one. Shannon Daugherty can get away with it, but I am not Shannon Daugherty. And I am really not sure of the point of that sentence, because this is not a post about my profile picture being grainy on purpose. It is a post about being a naturally nervous person and getting things done in public.

I don’t like videos of me. I had two chances to be in commercials when I lived in Phoenix because I just happened to work in the corporate “show” store of an auto parts retailer. It freaked me out and I turned them down. No, I lie. I did not turn them down. I walked out of one while they were filming and went to lunch. I have maybe five videos currently on YouTube. I do plan on making more, but I really haven’t tackled this issue yet. But this is not a post about videos. This is a post about, “Yeah, internet people are real people and crap I wish I could think they were imaginary again.”

A blog was about the only way I was going to get this started but I am getting tired of my own writing. It seems the more I do it, the more I hate it. See that “the more” thing in the last sentence. I probably use that in every other post, along with “basically”, a first person voice and purposely running a sentence too long to simulate the effect of a person who thinks faster than he can talk. And watch, I will probably use repetition to drive a point home somewhere in this post. I can add to this list but then I would really stop writing because the reality is probably worse than I have imagined.

I even pulled up old articles from years ago and came to the conclusion I wrote better then. I had actually gone backwards in skill. And I still feel that way at times.

I have written since my teens. I bought every year’s Writer’s Market. Not really, I wrote that for effect though I did buy quite a few. I never had the nerve to send my writing anywhere until I finally sent a short short to a literary magazine in Canada a couple of years ago which promptly went out of business before it could publish my story. But this is not a post about my corollary to Murphy’s Law. It’s a post about stage fright.

I have even had compliments on the way I write. I loved them, but it didn’t change things much. I still saw the errors and when I read the posts outloud, they all sound a little bit less intelligent than I think I am. It’s the gap between ideas and words and you can never close it, only get better at coaxing them closer to each other.

So this reason, I am not really sure of the solution. Maybe, just do it. Your writing will get better if you write often enough, care enough about it to edit and learn from your mistakes. Forget your readers and write, but then remember your readers and edit. But this is not a reason to stop blogging. It’s a reason to blog and get better at it as you go.

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Reason Not To Blog: I have to work to put food on the table.

But that is no longer something I can trick myself into thinking any more. I get lost. There are times after a bout of staring at the same php code day after day that I just snap and can’t look at it any more.

It is not a snap, really. I just get easily distracted when I get burnt out and just let myself go with the flow. Because anything is better than going back to that mind numbing code.

But it is not really the answer and I am not quite sure that just forcing myself to do the work is the answer. The answer really is that I am a spot in my career I am not liking too much and I am unsure of.

It seemed like I climbed up a big hill to get where we were financially and once we got there, I slid down the other side. And I do not attribute this to any one action but to a shift in focus.

What you keep in your mind is what you will do?

This seems to be a simple concept and yes it is, but simple concepts can sometimes be very powerful.

But what you keep in your mind is not necessarily what you think is there.

I started making money online out of a hobby of programming and internet surfing. I looked at what I was doing and said, “I know myself well enough to know that I can be interested in just about anything that is intricate enough to keep my attention.” ”But I am looking at this wrong. Just a slight shift in my attention to how I can make money off of what I am doing could possibly change some things.” I continued with myself.

By doing that and always finding a way to merge what I liked with making money from it, I eventually did start making money. And it was pretty cool. I was for the most part playing with concepts I would have played with any way. I just added a cha-ching button.

And I am writing about this now because, like I said, I reached this point where I don’t feel excited about things any more. I had gradually built up a good steady stream of income that came in day and night with only a little work on my part and I had one job.

The Hourly Slave

But overextended my time and probably took things for granted and the income started to slip and I started working for clients. Not that that was a bad thing. We needed the money. But the thing about working for anyone by the hour or even by the job. You will only make so much because there are only so many hours in the day. There are no sales while you are sleeping with this plan.

I am going back to statement now I used to keep in my head. “A day I don’t work on one of my projects that makes me money with no one else calling the shots is a day I fall behind.” I think that sounded better in my head. But you get the point.

Any type of semi-automatic income stream takes a while to build steam. It also takes a while to lose steam. And when you are running in the rat race, the instant money each week can begin to look better than spending a week on something that may only make $20 the week after it is finished. But a year later when that $20 is up to $50, the week of work that started that ball rolling is now worth $2500.

The numbers and time may be off, but you get the point. Now I need to. When I started playing this game, I was making $100 a day extra a month later. I keep looking for that golden ticket again but it is slow and steady time.

And another lesson I need to add in with this.

If you spend 80 of your 81 free hours working, taking 4 or 5 hours to build an income stream is not going to effect you much. Just get something done that is just for you.
I used to preach this a lot to everyone I met and then I slowly got beat down and burnt out. Not sure why.

I used to laugh at the mentality that said stick with your day job and squirrel away money so that you are rich when you are too old to have fun. But with a few mistakes and hearing it said over and over again, it started sinking in.

Well, it is time to rip it out again and vaccinate against it. I have built things that make money and I will build things that make money and the day job mentality is meant to keep you down. Well, maybe I will take the conspiracy theory out and just state the fact. A day job mentality can do nothing but keep you down. It seep into every pore and one day you wake up a zombie.

I am never quite sure if some of my posts were meant for you or for me. Well, any way glad to have you here. Hope you come back. And thanks fot listening to my rant.

So to wrap this one up, work for yourself daily. Trim costs. Cut back on other activities. But find a way to do it. It is your only way out of being an hourly slave. Being a high dollar whore is better than being a street walker, but it is much better to be the pimp.

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Reason Not to Blog #3: I just can’t find the right tool.

There is no killer application that will do everything for you. Quit searching. This is something I have to tell myself often but I forget.

I will start something new as a beginner and make great strides and I will always mess it up by looking for tools to help me do the work.

I will get just that close to a blogging schedule, then I will go looking for software to make it easy.

I will get into writing again and start writing every day. Then I will have to get a new pen, a new notebook, new software to organize my ideas.

I will just get to getting things on my to-do list done and go looking for project management software.

I actually wrote this post in the middle of writing another because I caught myself thinking I wish this software would post to my blog. So I had to tell myself, “No, it does it’s job well. This is how you are organizing your ideas more effectively. Posting them can be another process.”

And then I had to write this post. Because it is definitely one of the reasons that can stop you blogging if you are person like me.

My theory is that there will never be perfection in anything including software, but it will always be evolving. So, you should check often for better tools. The downside of that is that changing tools can take time.

Another downside is that my ideas quickly turn into missions if I don’t curb them quickly enough. It will start with looking for software. Then I will be on page 50 of a Google result asking myself if I should write the software.

Since I run a few product review blogs and do reviews of software here, I have the added excuse that I am doing research. So this one is hard for me to fight.

So another issue I have, you may if you geek out on tech shit and software. Looking for a tool to make things easy is just procrastination if it is not a planned part of your work. Chunking out specific time for tool finding will curb it. I have been trying first thing Monday morning.

And this is because every once and a while, I do find software, that in pure Deux ex Machina fashion does save me time and money, like the unlimited document hierarchy in the software I used to house this series as I wrote it.

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Reason Not to Blog #1: There are too many rules

I almost did it. I almost didn’t write today. I woke up less than motivated. Why? Because I did not get some work done last night and I am feeling a bit guilty. see I have turned myself into a slave to hourly work again and since I care about my work it bums me out. Every hour I spend working on a project makes me more money, but the hours I need to work keep increasing. I am getting burned out on building cracker boxes.

I want this all to work today and I want to put only enough on my plate that I will actually get done. I usually start with a simple list, add on other things, and get sidetracked a few times. I tell myself to stick to a plan and keep it consistent because any plan I layout can easily get away from me. But then I need a reminder to remember this.

I always start out with these introspective articles in the first person that have me going through my thoughts in public. But I have to get through them until the writing just comes out naturally again. To much of my interaction with a computer has been in the form of variables, loops, tables and braces. This worked out pretty well when I was looking for a way to lay out all of my post before I published, but not that well for writing itself.

I need to stop making things so complex. They are simple. Or they may not be simple, but for one person to do them, I need to make them appear. So I will try this slowing down, breaking things down into simpler chunks and not think about the other things waiting. As I say this, I wonder how long it will last.

I think trying to blog and build traffic fast is like speeding in traffic. If you do, you do get ahead of the pack, but you will not really get that far ahead.

So the steps now:

1. Write Posts
2. Use What Works
3. No Pressure.

Or something like that. Rules never really work completely and are really hard to stick to and anyone truthfully trying to follow them will tell you so. Those that faithfully follow rules are either robots or eventually snap and do damage to surrounding objects. People are not computers and infinite loops do not work, they are called “insanity”. You see, too much coding lately.

But rules are good to come back to. I still swear by the methods laid out in Zen to Done.

Of course, since this is a blog, use what works can mean a lot. I will be writing, building links and watching my stats. As well as what I call the “yes, I am a real live person” activities of answering comments and joining social network conversations.

The problem is to get all of this to work together for my schedule. Obviously, if I only have enough time to write a post a day, then I can’t write a post a day. I can only write 3 or 4 and use the rest of the time to promote, comment and network.

Where this balance lies is hard to know, even after I have been doing it for a while. In fact, that is one of the reasons that there are now great gaps in my blog. I loaded up too much on one activity while my time shrank. And then not blogging just became too easy.

But then again I do much more than blogging and I loaded up with too much of everything. I do this to myself a lot. Something I am trying to fix now.
But blogging is good. I always feel like I have things a little bit more organized after I write.

And really there are no rules. Once you start thinking there are, read other blogs. You may be in a rut. Always get a second, third or fourth opinion.

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A Few Weeks Ago

A few weeks ago I started writing posts and saving them on my desktop. You see, each one of the posts I wrote in the last year was meant to be the beginning of a new start blogging, if not daily, at least a couple of times a week.

But each time, it never happened. I just started a series on my Affiliate Marketing Blog about creating content that just started with one post and stopped right there. But I have a good start on that series now too.

Comments were filling up on both blogs and I check them once a week, if that. I had long ago stopped interacting with commenters. I had stopped checking social networks. And I had stopped reading feeds.

So this time, I wasn’t going to post, not until I had enough post to fill a month.

14 Drafts, 18 Rough Drafts and 20 More Ideas

I think I have enough to start now. I always really wanted to do this, organize things beforehand but I never really found the right tool. When I write a post series, there are always gaps. Writing everything or at least planning beforehand helps.

Strange Things Motivate Me

So shortly after I started this process, I just happened on to a post that referenced disclosure policies. And one of those disclosure policies happened to be on John Chow’s blog and guess what, it was just enough to give me an extra boost. His blog will give you the bug and his subscriber count is proof so I guess it is not a strange way to be motivated.

Being Anal

This also had me looking at all of my blogs for missing elements. Blogs are like houses. Constant maintenance. The internet changes and you must too or get left behind. And we all have run into sites that seem to take us back in time, like maybe MySpace.

And I started fixing things and I stopped writing posts. But I caught this and wrote a post about it.

A Series On Not Blogging

I know myself pretty well. Writing and blogging helped me know myself even better. So I knew for a fact, once I started writing again, the posts would be introspective and about blogging and writing. In other words, metablogging.

So instead, I am framing them as a “Why Not to Blog” series. I will take all the excuse I had and expose them for what they are and see if the excuse is still valid. I will be starting out with 3 posts a week and will see how far it gets.

Each post will be linking back here and as I post them, I will add a link here. And I am not just writing this series. Between the posts in this series, I will be writing other posts. But having posts laid out of me ahead of time sure takes the pressure off and when the pressure is off, I don’t have to worry about ideas or writing. It just happens.

The Reasons Not To Blog Series

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