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Minding Your Ps

Roger C. Parker wrote about planning your blog content awhile back. He offered a diagram for success that put writing in between Planning and Promotion, with well-earned Profits as the result.

It’s a great visual, and there are a few more Ps to add: Purpose, Personality, Persistence, and Patience. I don’t have a cool visual to prove that point, but I do have an interesting story. Consider two blogs: Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Non-Conformity and my Big Bright Bulb. We launched them only eight days apart back in February 2008, so it’s reasonable to compare them for this purpose.

And let me say this story is not to bash myself or put Chris on a pedestal. It’s simply real-world proof that Planning, Promotion, and the other Ps are critical for a successful and profitable blog. Chris and I approached blogging in dramatically different ways, with dramatically different results.

Purpose and Personality

Chris always had a grand plan. As I understand it, his goal was to document his global travels as he visited every country in the world while establishing himself as a professional writer and achieving world domination—whew! To that purpose, he launched his blog with thoughtful posts about his adventures and offered his singular opinions and insight—a quintessential blogger.

I started blogging entirely by accident. A few years earlier, I wrote an ebook with product reviews for microbusinesses. When I heard about Google Adsense, I thought I’d try leveraging the ebook content for ad revenue. A WordPress blog seemed an easy way to manage it, so I clicked a few buttons, copypasted my ebook and voila! I was a blogger…NOT! Within a few weeks, the Adsense was gone and my personality peeked out, but those first days of blogging were admittedly feeble.

Planning and Promotion

Chris’s plan, as he mentions in his manifesto, was to build his community with direct contact through social media and email. He began with enough posts for 3 months and started publishing two or three times each week. Chris also created an email newsletter where he talked about his projects and products. In the background, he regularly wrote emails both offering and asking for help. Along with that, he sent a thank you to each person who joined his growing community.

I, on the other hand, had no plan beyond experimenting with ads. It was a simple make-money-online experiment that was both short-lived and short-sighted. And while I had no intention of meeting people or making lasting connections, I immediately started to. However, without a content plan, my topics bounced aimlessly from week to week. And without a product plan, I had no clue what to offer my own community…and that’s how much I earned from months of writing: Nothing.

Persistence and Patience

Chris has never missed a posting deadline. Every week for two years—whether from his home in Portland or a hotel in Auckland—he pressed the button to get his words out. He posted on schedule while writing for the Oregonian, the Huffington Post, and Anderson Cooper?s 360. And also while creating (and promoting) 5 ebook products, 2 manifestos, and various other projects. And even while writing his about-to-be-published book. I suspect it was lonely work at the start, when a week would go by without a single comment. But he was patient and persistent, and these days he may have over 100 comments for a single post.

For my part, I began blogging with an overly-ambitious Monday through Friday posting schedule that I couldn’t sustain with my full-time freelance work and graduate school. When I took a break from blogging, my one week hiatus stretched to one month and then to a year. To make things worse, my blog stopped running as soon as I stopped writing because there was no stash of pre-written posts. It took me months to get back on track and settle into a manageable publishing schedule.

After 2 Years of Blogging: The Results

We already saw that Chris will have a book released by a major publisher and regularly writes for big media. At this moment, he has a community of 27,827 Twitter followers. He was mentioned in the New York Times, The Washington Times, Slate.com, Lifehacker.com and Seth Godin’s blog. He’s also visited 122 countries. He’s accomplished a lot, and much of that happened within the first year. He still has 70 more countries to see, but he’s almost entirely achieved his goals.

As for me? I was busy achieving other people’s goals. For much of the two years I wrote software manuals, developed databases and training materials, and ghostwrote ebooks as a freelancer. But I was also doing what Chris did two years before: dreaming and thinking, planning and strategizing. And now, two years after starting it, my blog has a purpose and a plan. Finally.

Just Getting (Re)Started

Despite my original lack of focus and that long absence, I have regular readers who leave great comments, over one thousand Twitter followers, a lot of good friends, and a few raving fans. Proof that you can do it wrong and still get something right. It is a much smaller community than Chris has, but it’s a good start. Or really…it’s good for a start over.

And with my full attention now on Big Bright Bulb, things are moving forward. Each week I get more readers, subscribers, and followers. People contact me for opinions, bloggers ping me with ideas and projects, and I’ve been invited to write guest posts (like this one!). After two years of spinning my wheels, I’m working up to products—and profits—of my own.

From the very beginning I did just about everything wrong! But things turned around as soon as I started minding my Ps. If it’s working for me, it can work for you.

So whether you’re an old hat at blogging, just getting started, or trying to start over, learn from Roger’s diagram, my mistakes, and Chris’s success:

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Published by: Grant Griffiths

Full post as published by Blawg for Profit on January 21, 2010 (boomark / email).