Blogs are cool. Blogs can be awesome. Blogs allow you to participate in this amazing thing we otherwise refer to as the internet. The content from Blogs feeds Google, keeps it alive and helps it grow.
From a personal aspect; blogs are important because blogs allow you to continue jabbing and help you hone your writing talents; and we all know how important writing talents are; even if no-one reads what you write.
Seek blogging advice from anyone who has blogged for more than ten posts and the advice you’re going to get is: pick a schedule and live by that schedule.
It is the single best advice anyone can give a young and budding blogger.
It works; till the time it doesn’t work and then you need to tweak it.
Think about this advice in terms of plain old mathematics. It’s like this; you become a better writer by reading more and writing more and given that you are reading as much as the other person; if you are cranking out four articles a week your chances of getting better at the craft of writing are four times more than someone who cranks out one article a week. Right!?
Well, the statement is moooostly right.... for you.... if.... you are starting out a blog or want to get into the flow of writing consistently. A regular stream of blog posts on a well-established schedule gets you in the flow for writing.
Besides it makes life simple for the Google crawler and your readers because they know exactly how much content to expect from your blog and when to expect it.
It forces you to show up even on the most depressing of days.
Like I said, the advice of writing regular blog post works.
At-least till the time it works.
And then comes a point of time in your life when the advice stops working and you need to tweak your schedule.
Here are some reasons why you might end up tweaking your publishing schedule:
- You’ve done enough jabbing for a couple of years and now you want to move into deliberate practice of writing by producing articles, books or relatively longer essays which will need your concentrated effort for a week, sometimes more than a week, sometimes a month and sometimes even multiple months before you can publish them out to the world. Posting four posts every week might not be possible here.
- You’ve done enough writing about code and now you’re going to be writing even more awesome code or doing something life changing. A classic example of this being Jeff Atwood who is the primary proponent of the “one step success” for your blog which was blogging regularly. Jeff started Stack overflow (now called Stack exchange) and slowed down publishing posts on his own blog.
Like I said, the advice works and it has it's own benefits while it works.
Then you reach a point in your life when you realize that just jabbing is not taking you to the next level in practicing your craft. You realize that just doing a given number of posts a week isn't enough deliberate practice of your craft.
When you have that realization it is time for you to slow down and focus on what is most important to you.
I’ve been blogging about three posts a week for months now. I've been contemplating the idea of longer articles on topics I feel strongly about, working on the book I said I would be working on, trying out some serious humor and doing some serious bullshit busting.
With those intentions in mind I am going to relax my publishing schedule down from three posts a week to sometimes two and sometimes even just one post a week. On any given day the writing I do is probably going to increase. The frequency of publishing however might slow down a little in the weeks to come.
What that means that while the quantity of the posts might go down the quality of the posts that you see here might shoot up.
These posts will be edited much more meticulously. Some of them might be long enough to warrant turning them in articles that you can download in PDF or Kindle formats. You might also continue to get a full blown eBook or Kindle book every few months.
In the fitness world they say that nobody ever gets stronger by doing the same exercise again and again.
In the world of neuroscience they say that nobody gets smarter by solving the same kind of math problems again and again.
Continuously publishing three posts a week was a commitment I made to myself for months and it was a commitment that taught me a lot of things. It has now become a part of my life.
Having said that however, I feel I have grown out of and it is now time to master other aspects of writing. Even if that means reducing the number of posts I publish every week.
Long story short, the blogging frequency of this blog ‘might’ go down from three posts a week to two and sometimes even one a week. But I will hopefully continue to show up without fail. Every week! Consistently. And with lesser number of posts and more effort the content is expected to get better.
Expect to see posts with more content, more research, more fun and more takeaways. Expect to see PDF or Kindle versions of articles and occasionally also expect to see some eBooks once or twice each year.
Now, if you are a young and budding blogger seeking advice on how you can become a better blogger, here’s my advice:
- Pick a schedule that you are comfortable with and stick to it!
- And Do NOT change your schedule frequently.
More often than not any temptation to change the schedule is out of hidden laziness and your lizard brain playing tricks with you so be very careful before you decide to change yours. And when you do reduce your frequency; make sure you double your efforts.
That by the way is EXACTLY what I intend on doing on this blog; so do keep reading.
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