My formula for simple blogging

When I first started blogging on BigThink, I compiled a list of people who I admired.

I wanted to use those folks as a north star as I was trying to figure out how I should blog to a group of people who weren’t just reading my personal blog (which despite all traffic numbers, in my head was always just my mom – hi mom!).

The past few months, you’ve all been kind enough to pay attention as I was finding my editorial voice. I’ve tried a lot of different tones ranging from serious to playful, and I’ve found that the big traffic tends to come in for the gimmicks.  

It’s a bummer, but that big bump in the image above is when I wrote about Rebecca Black – compare that to average daily visits.

I’ve also found that I’m happiest when sharing ideas that could help someone understand and do their job better.

Through that process I’ve found my new strategy for blogging: Spend an hour helping a friend, and then write a blog post about the best idea or conversation we talked about during that time. [ReTweet this]

You can see the evidence of that in my last 10 posts – I think it’s helping me create a resource that’s far more likely to be useful for a longer time, so I’ve been a lot happier with the last 10 posts then with the previous 10 before that.

Gary Vaynerchuck said it took about 80 episodes before he really developed the voice of Wine Library. If you are reading this, then you are following along with me while I’m developing the voice of CTF, and I want to thank you for the company on an early, bumpy, and imperfect road.

I’d love to offer you a small thank you gift for being so awesome: That “help someone for an hour and write a blog post” means I need to help a lot of friends. Got a strategy question you need help with? Tweet me and let’s see if I can help! 🙂