A few days ago my boss sent me a link to 28 top tips for wannabe internet professionals which says that web-savvy guys like me should write a regular blog. I pointed him in the direction of this very site (and others) and asserted, truthfully, that he keeps me so busy these days that I don’t have time to write it.
This is not necessarily true of course. As I keep pointing out to the people who come to me for SEO advice, a great blog is not necessarily the result of hours of considered thought and heart searching. Anything is worth blogging about.
Indeed I want my company to go into blogging in a big way.
Fact is that everybody’s life seems tame to them, even boring. But from the outisde looking in it can be a whole lot different. When I was a struggling wanabe reporter on a lowly local free newspaper I used to dream of how great it would be to work on a national newspaper. When I eventually wound up on a “Fleet Street” subs’ desk I spent my time torn between finding things to do between subbing assignments and worrying that I’d let something major slip through when I got one. It wasn’t actually fun, though the pay was good.
Nowadays, I work for one of the world’s biggest hospitality companies and have access to a heap of wonderful stuff (the folks I work with are pretty nice too) but it’s not what I expected to be doing at this stage in my life.
Like most people, everyday life seems pretty ordinary to me most of the time. But to someone outside, it might all seem very exciting.
The art of the great storyteller is to take the mundane and to make it the extraordinary if you can work out what mundane actually is?
Mundanity is in the eye of the beholder.
That’s the beauty of blogs. They offer an insight of “life at the coalface”, of any of millions of coalfaces. Like Samuel Pepys‘ Diary, some of the most interesting stuff is the throwaway lines about the Great Fire of London, or the Plague or the appointment of Sir Christoper Wren. What you think is boring, others may find fascinating out of context.
There really is no excuse not to blog. No-one cares what you think is interesting. let the reader be the judge.
And it’s not just about frequency either. I update this blog on average about once a month and so that means there’s only you reading it. However it would surely be even worse if I blogged three or four times a day and it was still just you reading it.
On the other hand, some people have audiences in the millions and do very little to get them — aside from international status or job spec. Osama bin Laden blogs a lot less often than me and yet his random musings get broadcast around the world, even though they make less sense then even I do. Actually, Matt Cutts may have been a less contentious example here.
Somewhere in between there are lots of writers producing blogs that lots of people read if only because they enjoy the style and the content. But who’s to say what blog will become a winner.
There really is no excuse not to blog. No-one cares why you think you can’t write, let the reader be the judge.
And it’s not about opportunity either. Everyone can come up with reasons for why they can’t do things but everyone finds the time to do certain things (like go to the lavatory, for example).
All it takes is a few minutes a week while you’re waiting for the commercial break to end on X-Factor or for the cat to be sick to write a blog.
And given the proliferation of blogging platforms these days — including mobile — there is nowhere in the world that you can’t blog.
There really is no excuse not to blog. No-one cares how much time you have. Let the reader be the judge.
And so I’ve just proved how easy it is to write a blog post. Now all I have to do is find someone to read it.
