MicroWebmaster Blogging Community

Ok, I’m really not torturing him… He broke his elbow two months ago, and just got the cast off three days ago. He could barely move it, and required Physical Therapy to regain movement. It is very painful to him. The PT showed me how to do it, because we are 60 miles from the nearest therapist. I joked that telling a mom that she has to hurt her teenager isn’t a bad thing… But it is an unpleasant thing to have to do.

I’m not fond of hurting my kids. But this is something that needs to be done, because Erik requires it to regain his mobility. The doctors told us that we’d be doing well to regain 70% of normal motion, because of the type of break - right on the ball of the elbow joint. We’ve done about 50%, just in the first few days, but I can see that we are about to hit a wall, as the improvement lessens each session now.

I’ve had to do this kind of thing before - Alex required that I do blood draws on him, both through his Hickman (then Broviac) central line, and then through a port. He didn’t like having blood draws through his port, because it hurt. We did it anyway, because we needed to.

I find that business is like that - any business that you take seriously. You have to do things you don’t like, and sometimes they are painful. But you do them and move on because if you don’t, things get uglier than they are if you just do them.

Blogging is business. Sometimes it is for fun, but here, it is mostly for business. Sometimes you have to do hard things, things you don’t want to do. Blog when you don’t feel like it, promote when you are tired, cut out something you like in favor of something that works.

Those moments are the ones that separate the stickers from the faders. If you stick with it, it works, if you drop it when it gets hard, it fades into nothingness. Blogging is no different than business in that respect

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I’ve said before that blogging is an exercise in mundanities… If blogging becomes a source of worry over each post, and perfectionism bogs you down, then you’ve missed the point.

Blogging is popular partly because of its spontaneous  nature. Lose that, and you lose a lot of the appeal.

The real trick is to just write. If it isn’t very good at first, don’t worry, people really aren’t reading it much then anyway. Just write. As you keep writing regularly, you’ll get better. The blogging experience at first is largely about learning how to write. Then it becomes about exploring things more in depth.

Your readers are not all English teachers. So you are free to be yourself.

Just write!

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Sadly, the limits of my task manager are to remind me of the task. No matter how I hope that somehow it will simplify the tasks, or better yet, eliminate the need for them, it refuses to do more than accuse me with the ones that have not been done.

It is better than having a client call and having to fess up that you completely forgot that you had a job to do for them, at least this way, you can be thinking up good excuses before they call. But still, those red flags can be really demoralizing.

At first, your goal is to keep from getting any red flags for overdue projects. Next your goal is to keep from getting any REALLY IMPORTANT red flags. And eventually, your goal is to not have ALL red flags!

Part of the problem is that we get buried with work, and then devise a strategy to keep ahead of it. As soon as we do that, we think we can take on more work! So we are quickly behind again, and in need of a new strategy to catch up. Efficiency in stages.

The task manager has been a shining success, in spite of it’s sad deficiency in actually DOING the work.  But I’m still behind on blog posts.

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If you attend a speech, event, show, or other organized event, take along a notepad. They are great fodder for blog ideas. I sat in a dinner once frantically writing on the back of my own business card, taking notes as great ideas for blog posts whipped past. It fueled one blog for weeks!

I find that I usually need a notepad most when I forgot it. A Palm, or a laptop also works. But take SOMETHING!

Ideas tend to come on whims, and if you don’t record them, they slip away. You can only remember so many at one time.

Get onto a mailing list for a promo company, and eventually they’ll send you a sample notepad - that’s one way to get a nice one. Otherwise just go purchase a cheap one that you feel like you can stand using. Pen attached is helpful!  Tuck it into your purse, or stow it in a pocket every time you go somewhere that you might encounter some good ideas.

Writing ideas down for later is one of the things that has saved my sanity in blogging!

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My son broke his arm. That entailed a trip to the ER. Then a trip to the surgeon. Then a trip for surgery. I took work with me for the appointments that I had to attend with him.

I find that most hospitals and surgical centers now have internet, so I can blog from the hospital, or do other low risk access tasks. I cannot access my client sites, but I can do a lot of other things. I can also do work that does not require an internet connection, including prepping blog posts ahead of time, or other writing.

Something about blogging on location gives it a dash of reality it doesn’t have if you write about it later. Of course, having a laptop is the key to it.

I really have no use for a desktop computer anymore, I’ve used large screen laptops for about 4 years now, and have no reason to go back to a stationary system. I don’t want to have to mess with file syncing anyway.

It is always a bit of a minor miracle to me, that I can make use of waiting time that is otherwise wasted time, by doing bits of work that benefits our business. Opportunities to do that are increasing all the time.

I can live with that.

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Generally, by the time I get to this blog, I’m babbled out. I tend to blog in batches, and this is usually close to the last (unless there is another that I cannot think of something to write for). So when I get here, it feels a lot like inane babbling. And sometimes I’m in no frame of mind to know if it isn’t!

We’ve had an exciting week. We launched a new networking site,  which I am going to have to throw into the blogrolls of all of my sites. Then I located a programmer to work on a project that I’ve had in mind for close to a year now, but could not get done, and on Saturday night, had a flash of inspiration of how I could use the new project in tandem with another project that we just completed, to create some synergy between the two.

The calls have started to pick up again as well, so we are pretty busy, and that is always good. And of course, we have more projects in the works, which will be leveraged with this one.

Go ahead and babble… It isn’t a bad thing.

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Sometimes the only thing that keeps a blogger going is plain bull-headedness. The determination not to be done in by a brain fog or fatigue.

Blogging doesn’t go away. It is always there. For avid bloggers, it is an awareness at all times that anything is fair game. For casual bloggers, it is the remembrance that sometime today, or tomorrow, they’ll have to come up with a topic and splatter some words onto the page.

Sometimes, you just have to write, even when the topic isn’t all that great, and even when you have nothing profound to say. Oddly, sometimes those moments when we are not profound, produce some of the most popular stuff. Other people sometimes pick up on mundanity and trivia more than they do on deep thought.

That dogged persistence is what makes you reach in deep and become a real writer. It is what makes you hone your skills, pull out something below the surface and discover a hidden quality. It is the difference between an amateur and a pro.

Dig in your heels and just do it.

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A blog is a great place to learn to write better. You don’t have to be perfect to do it, and in fact, can be a long way from it! Generally, if you keep doing it you naturally improve, so blogging them becomes a good classroom in which to learn.

Bloggers are a casual lot - they like well written stuff, but if it has personality and life in it, they are less likely to gripe about a few typos or grammar errors. They don’t like to wade through a ton of them, and they don’t like people who are lazy about punctuation and capitalization. But they’ll forgive you some errors if they feel that you are entertaining, or if they identify with you.

If you feel drawn to blogging, then dive in! Your first blog may not be anything to write home about, but it will help you practice and prepare for something better. There is nothing like DOING it to get you better at it.

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I’ve been woefully behind in blogging. I’m teaching a class in blogging starting June 10th, and have been working on curriculum and other projects that have timelines, and there just has not been time to check in on the blogs.

Everything, it seems, requires writing. Sometimes that is a huge drain. I mean, put me in a room with people and I can talk till I am blue in the face. I can write for days as long as I have a compelling topic that I want to convey. But demand that I come up with something fresh, and new, several times a day, for multiple websites and blogs, and I eventually run dry, until I refuel.

Currently, the projects that I am in the middle of which include writing, consist of the following;

1. 4 different blogs, which have a goal of every other day posts. That’s two articles per day average.
2. Two upcoming classes -Blogging for Business, and Images and the Web (through the University of Wyoming Enrichment Program). This requires the equivalent of 1-2 pages per day.
3. MicroWebmasters Alliance - A massive project requiring additional writing - it still needs about 300 pages of content added, some of which I have, but just need to prep for online use, some of which is still in my head, some of which needs to have scripts written, or handouts prepped.
4. Front Porch Folks - Another massive project which requires about 200 pages of writing.
5. A new project which will only require about 30 pages of writing.
6. Our hosting site documentation - a project requiring probably 150 pages of writing, several video tutorials, and multiple reference manuals.
7. Documentation for our business - perhaps another 100 pages of writing.
8. Several online forums which I maintain, volunteer for or participate in. Each has varying degrees of writing commitment.
9. Several clients who require that we produce written articles or pages for them on a regular basis.
10. Clients who correspond via email - this means typically between 30 and 50 emails per day.

My fingers and my brain are challenged heavily. I love my work, but some days there just is not enough to go around.

So now, I’m getting ready to teach a class on blogging. I’ll be including strategies to keep up with a high writing demand, but I doubt any of my students will be required to do that much writing!

My typing speed is increasing yearly. Nothing like practice to make you faster at typing!

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They grow on you… Once you have one, you may find reasons to have more.

A word of caution though, each one, like children, bring responsibilities. Unlike children though, they are not sure to reward you. They take a long time before you get anything more than a feeling of ownership – true, they don’t spit or drool on you, but neither do they smile at you when they are still immature.

Each blog takes time to get going – and it takes inspiration to come up with topics on a frequent basis. If you follow the “one post every other day” rule, to get growing traffic, then you may be able to manage more than one. If you insist on posting daily, you are going to get buried pretty quickly. Blogging can easily become a full time job, even when you have only one.

So the point is, consider carefully before you create an entire collection. They’ll drain you dry and leave you feeling inadequate if you get too much too fast. Get one established, then try another, but get your first established first.