Gawker had a small item yesterday on how “blog millionaire” and Mediabistro.com founder Laurel Touby conceded via a Twitter update that “blogging is harder than I thought”.
For anyone who writes a blog on a regular basis or attempts to write a blog on a regular basis, Touby’s confession is not a surprise. Blogging is hard even if you’re a natural or trained writer. It’s difficult to write and write well on a consistent basis, let alone every day.
This is why I admire bloggers at ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Mashable who are pumping it out every day all day. It’s not uncommon for some people to write five or six posts a day. While it must be exciting to be in the eye of the hurricane, it must also be a grind to keep feeding the blogging beast.
The need to feed is probably the biggest reason that most new bloggers fall by the wayside after the honeymoon period is over. At first, writing blog posts is exciting but the sizzle disappears after all your initial ideas have been exhausted. Then, you’ve got to grind it out, and somehow come up with a blog post that offers some kind of value.
Truth be told, blogging is not for everyone. It helps to have good writing skills; it helps to be meeting with people who have interesting ideas; and it helps to have enough time to not only read what other people are writing, but have the luxury of time to come up with your own new thoughts and ideas.
All the above “requirements” go a long way in explaining why Twitter has resonated with so many people. It’s short, it’s snappy, it requires a lot less work and writing, and it provides the platform that many people need or want.
As I’ve said before, blogging is dinner (multiple courses, takes a long time to get through), while Twitter is desert (quick, easy, doesn’t last very long).
3 Comments
No kidding! I know a few bloggers who still crank out 10-12 posts a DAY. I'm way off my 3-5 a day level. But Twitter and Posterous has taken the place of a lot of those posts. Maybe it's making blogging easier.
I agree with you Mark, blogging is very challenging to do on a consistent basis with high quality content regularly. I used to pump it out pretty well on my personal blog, but finding it more difficult as my time gets more limited and my tweets increase.
I think the easiest way to do it is find or take a picture of something everyday that's out of the ordinary, and then apply the original significance of it to whatever you're interested in. For me it's business and marketing. Or I guess by expanding on your 140 character tweets could work as well.
It's also not just the writing that takes the time. Writing some good words or a solid opinion is good, but blogging is about linking to other good, original content which takes your reader to some of the sources of your opinion, and linking takes time. When I write for my blogs, it takes almost as much or more time adding relevant and important links as it does to write the actual post.