So I have this blog. You know this because you’re reading it.
Among other things I do for a living, I teach people about blogging and why it’s a good thing to do. But I find that I devote so much time to the teaching of blogging and other social media practices that I don’t blog nearly enough.
So yeah, irony.
The main reason I started blogging again was to get back into the habit of writing, regularly, for myself. When I rebranded this blog I did so to reflect my changing interests. Instead of, say, baseball, the “new” blog has been about things like business, media, communications and teaching. I’ve been writing more about my professional life and thoughts than my personal life and thoughts.
And then I hit a wall. And it wasn’t really a wall as much as it was many walls.
Case in point: I have in my drafts no less than 15 posts in various stages of completion. They are about everything I am trying to write about here, like how traditional business needs to embrace new paradigms, now social businesses thrive in ways above/beyond the bottom line, and how collaboration is key to, well, everything. I write about education and about strategy. I write about writing.
Looking back over a lot of this content (completed or otherwise) I realize there’s not enough focus. A lot of my students hit this wall (these walls), and they appeal to me to help them get over or around it. I tell them to come up with a degree of focus that makes sense to them, whether that means getting super tight and rigid or somewhat looser.
A few days ago it hit me that I need to do this too.
Questions: What do you blog about and how do you go about doing it? Do you have a posting schedule or do you wing it? What are the virtues of mapping and planning out your content?