The Problem With Good Advice

There are a lot of articles around the place giving generally good advice on how to be a better blogger and get noticed. Alastair Rankine highlights one of the key problems with slavishly following this advice – you become boring:

I was initially attracted to Atwood’s blog for its relatively simple premise and smart delivery. With startling regularity over an extended time he managed to deliver bite-sized morsels relating to the stated domain of programming and human factors. He writes well and generally illustrates his point in a clear and easy to digest style. It’s quite engaging.

…

It seems quite apparent that Jeff Atwood has stepped outside his expertise recently, and that this is something he did comparatively rarely in the past. I haven’t gone groveling through his past posts, but from my recollection I’m pretty sure his hit rate used to be better.

What I think has gone wrong is that Jeff, like most bloggers who go pro, is trying to keep to a regular posting schedule even when he’s too busy to do it well or has nothing good to post about. Regular posting scheduled is a universal recommendation on how to blog lists and it’s got a lot of merit. If you blog more often, you’ll get better at it. The more content on your site the more likely searches will lead people to your site. The more you comment in response to other people’s sites the more likely they’ll notice you and respond, including linking back to you.

The problem is that life and inspiration don’t work on regular schedules, they fluctuate. If you quit your day job just to blog you can probably keep life under control enough to post every day but inspiration still isn’t guaranteed. If you’re trying to start a new company or maintain a day job, your life probably fluctuates so that some weeks or even months you just don’t have time to sit down and write a good blog post. Similarly with inspiration, sometimes you’re doing something so interesting great blog topics just keep popping up and sometimes you’re doing stuff that’s fairly mundane and you don’t have anything too interesting to contribute to the conversations going on in the blogosphere. That’s ok, just don’t post anything for a while or simply point to the interesting stuff that’s going on without comment.

It’s a fairly common process which probably should be named after Robert Scoble since he seems to go through the process over and over again. For most people it’s a one way process where they get stuck being boring, but Robert seems to have turned it into a cycle:

1. Blog based on what you know and are passionate about
2. Become popular
3. Feel an obligation to your audience to blog a certain way or blog regularly. Sometimes this is trying to please everyone, sometimes it’s trying to go pro and others it’s just getting caught up in the hype of being a celebrity.
4. Become boring or lose credibility.
5. Reflect, refocus and go back to blogging about what you’re passionate about.
6. Become popular again…

I think this process is why I read so few blogs from people who make their living from writing/publishing. The interest I have in blogs is to hear from people on the front lines doing the interesting stuff, not the ones that are just writing about it and it’s really hard to be an A-List blogger and get much else done. When I do read full time bloggers it’s usually because they make good filters for the great torrent of information that flows around the internet, allowing me to read the good stuff and skip the rest.

Finally, to provide something constructive, let me point to Planet Intertwingly. Since subscribing to it my list of articles to consider more carefully and/or blog about has started overflowing. Sam Ruby hosts it and it’s full of seriously smart people with a strong tech focus. I’m pretty sure it picks up all the Planet Apache blogs (also good quality), but I take it as a huge compliment that my name appears in that list anyway.