I was chatting with my good friend Cory Miller recently about his 30 Days of Clicking Publish. I wanted to see how it was going. It sparked too many questions and it got me thinking…
I logged into my WordPress dashboard to run some plugin updates and happened to look at how many drafts I had sitting in my posts. It was horrendous. I have so many posts in my drafts that I’ve often wondered why I never finished them.
- Why did I spend time working on blog posts only to find myself not clicking publish.
- What state were these drafts in? Is it just a title or is there content in them?
- Why did I want to write these posts?
- Why didn’t I finish them?
Well, the truth is, I think it’s because I’ve been so focused on them being perfect, that I forgot about just clicking publish.
Getting Stuck
I got so stuck into making sure they had SEO keywords: they were long enough to get ranked, they were well researched, they had images, they had quotes. Even what framework should I use to write my posts. All the items go into a good, quality blog post.
But that meant, that I never actually posted them. Because I got so stuck into the mechanics of what a good blog post was, I failed to post them. That’s right. I failed.
That’s what got me to today. Today and for the next 30 days, instead of focusing on perfect, I’m going to focus on clicking publish.
I’m not going to focus on those mechanics. Instead, I’m going to focus on spending 30 minutes every day writing about a topic. It might include revisiting some of the blog posts I have stuck in drafts. It might not.
The point though is to develop a habit. To get into the habit of clicking publish. To get into the habit of writing for myself. To get into the habit of sharing what I know.
I’ve thought this for quite a while, but SeanWes said it best.
- Share what I learn.
- Teach everything I know.
If I can look at my writing as meeting the needs of those two statements then I consider it a success.
Defining Success
While I consider my writing to meet those two statements, I think it’s worth really defining success and being held accountable for it.
There are several frameworks that you can use to help you write a blog post, but I want to focus on the single framework I’ve used for the last several years. Stu McLaren created a framework I’ll call, Teach Anything.
I’ve used this framework for webinars, videos, even presentations. I’ve never used it for blogging though. It seems to fit really well with blogging though as I start every one of those other presentation mediums with written text. So why not just move it into a blog post?
In order to be successful, I would like to make sure that I’m including these blog posts in that format. We’ll talk more about it tomorrow…