Working Blogger

I’ve been blogging for two and a half years now, but ironically, these days I’m feeling like a babe in the woods.

Looking back, I’d say I’ve achieved a measure of blogging success - if you measure that success in terms of money. I make a good part-time income from my blogging (including the freelance blogging that I do) and I know that for many bloggers, this is a serious metric when it comes to measuring success.

But the thing is, I seem to be moving in a different direction than most bloggers. Most bloggers are moving towards finding financial success with their blogs, while I have blogs that make money, but I’m moving towards developing blogs that speak to my passions.

Eventually these new blogs of mine will make money - I’ve been around long enough to know that time does make a difference online, whether it’s websites or blogs, especially when I combine that time-in-existence with what I know about monetizing sites. But for these blogs, I’ve taken money out of the equation for now.

So I sit here, feeling very strange - a seasoned blogger who’s also very much a newbie tackling a new-to-her type of blogging, with all the social and networking aspects that that implies.

(I think that maybe a post entitled “What’s a Shy Blogger to Do?” is due to be written soon.)

One of the things that I’m finding a bit challenging right now is finding my voice on my new blogs.

Can a Blogger be a Private Person?

I am essentially a very private person - when I began blogging at my Internet Marketing blog over two years ago, I couldn’t even bring myself to use my full name, and ended up blogging using my initials. (By which I am still known - another complication, this going by two names business).

I do think, though, that you can be a blogger while still being rather private about your personal life.

But here’s the challenge that I’m facing right now.

My Best “Voice” is a More Personal Voice

When I’m at my best with my writing, I’m doing it from a gut level. It’s not that I’m talking about my private life, it’s that when I write about something that I know or that I’m exploring, I attain my best writing when I put myself into it fully.

It’s something that I’ve been resisting. I have been trying to stay professional in my blog posts at my new blogs, and it’s not that easy. The writing isn’t as smooth as normal. I feel strange.

What I really want to do most when I blog, is share. And it seems to me that I am most effective at sharing when I inject who I am into my writing.

I can write professionally, as an expert - I’ve been freelancing as a writer for years now, and in my freelance articles, I do this all the time. It’s very much a matter of fact, this approach.

But it doesn’t seem to work as well for me when I’m blogging. When I’m too professional, it’s like something is missing.

Being Personal and Professional at the Same Time

Today, I came across a post called “Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes” written by Nneka at Balanced Life Center about the changes she is implementing, both in her blog and in her life.

Her opening paragraph really caught my eye:

“They” say that you aren’t supposed to talk about yourself if you want to grow your blog readership. Today I’m breaking the rule.

And then she goes on to write one of the most beautiful posts I’ve ever read on her blog, which I’ve been following for a while now.

While she might have thought she was delving into the personal, to me her post felt like the perfect blend of personal and professional.

Her word for this year is “foundation”. My word for this year, in my personal life, has been “authenticity”.

After reading her post, it occurred to me that perhaps my word for the year is applicable to both my personal life, and my professional life as a blogger.

I am on my way to truly finding my voice on my new blogs, I think. It will be a challenge, grappling with being more open than I’ve ever been, while at the same time, staying the professional me that is still very much me.

But finally, I feel like I have a true sense of direction.

Sometimes I am just in awe of how the blogosphere always has a post somewhere that gives me that pick-me-up just when I need it. Darren’s post Make a Contract with Yourself at Problogger was the one thing that I needed to read right now.

After I developed my blogging schedule the other day, and finally finalized what I wanted that blogging frequency for that last blog to be, I had a short spell of relief - I felt like I’d accomplished something. But shortly after, when I took a look at what I was setting out to do, it felt to me like I had just outlined the blogger’s equivalent to climbing Mt. Everest.

In one word, I felt overwhelmed. Way, way, way overwhelmed.

But now that I’ve read Darren’s post, I’ve been thinking about that contract with myself - what terms and conditions will I include? The consequences and the benefits. The requirement to keep to the schedule for a set period of time before I let myself terminate the contract, and chalk it all up to a failed experiment, an example of me pushing myself too hard, too fast, too far.

It seems to me that committing this to paper, and then adding the symbolic gesture of actually signing it, will solidify my commitment. It’s something that I really do need solidified.

After that, I can do what I know I need to do - quit seeing it all as Everest, and break it down into daily chunks of “do this, do that”.

John Wesley over at Pick the Brain has written one of the best posts I’ve read in a while about how to get more traffic and more feed subscribers: 27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3000 Visits a Day and 2200 RSS Subscribers.

The entire post is a motivational call to action for bloggers, I think. It’s definitely something I’d go back to read, especially two to three months into a new blog - I always think that two to three month mark is the make-it-or-break-it point in terms of whether you have enough commitment and persistence to keep going with it.

I especially liked no. 17: “Make people think. It doesn’t happen very often and they won’t easily forget it.”

But best of all is John’s final point: “Do what works for you. Be completely genuine. Trying to promote a fake persona isn’t sustainable. People will see through it.” It seems to me that this is THE question to ask yourself before you even get off the drawing board for a new blog. But it’s something that’s easier said than done ahead of time - I find that quite often, it takes me a while to actually settle into the rhythm of what a blog will be for me, even when I have a pretty clear vision of its purpose.

Getting your voice down, truly nailing it, is the key.

I downloaded the Better GReader Firefox extension for Google Reader from Lifehacker yesterday, and I like the Smart Subscribe option very much.

What it does is add a little icon or image in the top right hand corner of a webpage that has a RSS feed, and if you want to subscribe to the feed, you just have to click on the icon and it takes you straight to your Google Reader, instead of to the splash page that Google normally sends you to, where you have to then choose between iGoogle and Google Reader.

That’s very convenient, but it’s actually not what I like best about it. What I really love is when I’m on a webpage, if I’m already subscribed to the RSS feed, there’s this nice big checkmark through the icon in the upper right hand corner.

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted subscribing to a feed only to discover that I was already subscribed to it. Since I have so many different blog projects on the go, I have a ton of feeds to manage, and it’s not that rare for me not to remember a site I’ve already been to and subscribed. (This assumes, of course, that you’re already logged into Google Reader. I’m always logged into Google Reader.)

I ended up turning off the optimized skin option of the extension, because it rendered the left hand column too narrow for me to read enough of my feed names to know which they were. It also placed the “edit tag” input box halfway off my screen, so that I couldn’t enter a new tag unless I deleted the existing tag - and I couldn’t see any new tags I input in their entirety, since I could only see about four or five characters into the input box.

Since I don’t use the keyboard short-cuts, I didn’t give the Quick Links option a whirl.

Overall, I’m quite happy with this extension. It will shave some time off my blogging day, that’s for sure.

Because Chrissie and I have one collaborative blog (GadgetChick) and are working on a second one (currently set to “launch” on June 1), last week we decided to solidify a blogging schedule, so that we would know what was expected of each of us, posting-wise, each day of the week.

Blogging Discipline

What I’ve discovered since then is that actually writing down a blogging schedule reinforces the discipline that’s required to keep on track with blogging frequency goals.

Since I have never played well with the word “discipline”, schedules had never worked well for me in the past, but I think my current combination of a renewed focus and the sharpening of my blogging vision is far more conducive to a successful blogging schedule.

So I’m working now on incorporating all my content blogs into this blogging schedule.

I’m not incorporating any of my search-engine driven news blogs into this schedule, mainly because I already am on a schedule with these sites. I basically do them at the same time I do my freelance blogging - the energy from the latter drives my posting to the former.

Posting Frequency

Developing a blogging schedule means that I need to take a good look at each blog’s intended posting frequency - and this is also something that I had resistance to doing in the past. It’s something I’ve often thought about, and talked about doing, but I’ve always felt constricted by the thought of tying myself down to specific posting frequencies.

(Again, this doesn’t apply to my news-type blogs. In those cases, money is the motivating factor.)

A Contract with Myself

Everything does seem to be shaping up nicely though. I have a draft schedule set up right now, and once I make a decision regarding posting frequency for one of the blogs, I’ll consider it a done deal - a contract with myself, so to speak.

I’ll report back in a future post, and let you all know how well I’m faring with this more disciplined approach.