I’ve read a couple of articles recently about why you shouldn’t post every day, like this excellent one from Scott Stratten. Instead, say the writers, you should wait until you have something meaningful to say, until you can write a post that knocks it out of the park, that people cannot wait to share and discuss and link to.

I’m fine with that idea in principle, but in practice if I’d followed it I wouldn’t have a website.

Hellooooo, burden of expectations

There are a bucketload of fears to manage when you start a website: I’ve documented nearly fifty in my upcoming how-to-manage-your-website-fears resource, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few.

When I started, if I added, “Oh, by the way? Every post you write needs to be totally awesome.” I would have run screaming for the hills. Instead, I was aiming for decent. Useful. Good Enough. Knowing that I was still shaky, that I had an audience of three people (all family members and friends), that I needed some time to start hitting the mark. Knowing that the more I posted Good Enough, the more I would improve.

Fail fast, fail often

It took about a hundred posts for my style to really start clicking into gear. I needed that time to find my voice and to find the right balance of information and personality: check the earliest posts and you’ll see I was barely in them. It was a deliberate choice… I was careful to make sure the posts weren’t all me me me and that they were, more than anything, really useful to the readers. I let drips of myself in a bit at a time to judge the response, and as I found that people responded better when I talked about myself (and my mistakes) than when I use hypothetical case studies. When I took the extra time to explain my logic. When I was quirky.

Because I post daily, it took about three months to get to that stage. I shudder to think how long it would have taken if I was only posting weekly. Or monthly!

Awesomeness by inches

I’m in favour of small improvements, especially when you’re stuck, scared or constrained in some way; I regard the five-minute missions as possibly the smartest idea I ever had.

I don’t think that every post you read needs to provide an epiphany to be worthwhile. If it gets you to take a tiny action, that’s Kick. Ass. That’s success. It’s not as dramatic as a home run, but getting you to bunt onto first base ain’t nothing. Especially if you’ve been sitting in the dugout up until now, chewing tobacco and sweating.

(What’s with these baseball metaphors?)

Notice my focus there on action. I don’t mind how big the action is as long as you’re moving, and because I post daily if you act as often as I post you build up an unstoppable amount of momentum. In fact, you might outstrip the results of the guy that read the One Super-Fantastic Post. And because every action was small and unscary, you might have freaked out less than him, too.

Awesomeness on schedule

When you regard your writing as an unpleasant duty, it tends to suck. No argument from me! But for me, the fact that I must write a post every morning has not made my writing into an unpleasant duty. When I started posting daily I was still in the honeymoon stage and had enough drive and novelty to keep me at the keyboard every morning, excited and ready to kick some ass. And as the honeymoon excitement faded, the posts had enough commenters and supporters to keep my enthusiasm high, and in fact, build on it. Without that building rhythm of post and response, my interest would have faded as the novelty wore off, and the website would probably end up another burnt-out hulk at the side of the information superhighway.

Cue the crickets and the tumbleweeds

I have written posts I was sure were “knock it out of the park” kind of posts. Posts I spent hours on, clarifying and improving, thinking, “This is possibly the best post I’ve ever written. This is a game-changer. It’s gonna rock my readers’ world!” And when I released them? A dog barked somewhere. A tumbleweed rolled down the street.

Now, if they were the only posts I wrote I might have given up in despair. But it’s been balanced out by the times I’ve dashed out a quick post in less than twenty minutes that I thought was all right, I guess and those posts have been the ones that rock my readers’ world.

Obviously, I have no fucking clue what you really want.

I don’t have tumbleweed posts as often now: every post works for someone. Sometimes they resonate with lots of you. Generally speaking, I still have no idea which will be which. So I’ve stopped guessing: as long as there is one person who says, “Yes! That is the thing I needed to hear!” then I call it a win.

I could probably cut back to less regular posting now, but I’m terrified that the posts I would skip would be the truly great ones that resonate with you.

So what’s the moral of the story?

I think that Good Enough is better than Not At All. If you have the skills and internal resources to write epic posts on a regular basis, do it (and let the English see you do it). But if you’re too new, too uncertain, too needy or too something-else to do so? Then write less epic posts that still help people. Write as often as you can keep the mental and emotional energy flowing. Give whatever you can give and don’t feel ashamed if it’s not as fantastic as someone else’s work. As long as you help one person, even in a small way, I still think you’re doing an awesome job.

What do you think? Come tell me in the comments!

Speaking of the website-fear-managing resource (which I am doing a lot right now, it is my life), if you want to get the inside scoop on what’s going on and find out about the awesometastic people I’m interviewing, sign up for special updates!

I’m in favour of awesomeness. (No, really?)

I’ve been pushing myself hard these last few months: getting up at 4:30am to chat, writing and studying every spare moment, abandoning a number of my favourite hobbies, working 14-hour days… you know, stuff I thought I couldn’t do, stuff that was Too Hard for the likes of me.

But it’s not too hard. Do you know why?

Because of you.

Because helping you get unstuck enough to start a website is the best feeling in the world.
Because encouraging you to show your delightful personality to the world makes me proud.
Because every time you tell me that you’re afraid but you’re going to do it anyway, I feel I’ve won a great victory.
Because every time you post something, you’re making the world a tiny bit more awesome.
And as I said, I’m in favour of awesomeness.

The fear and awesomeness tango

I’m also in favour of fear.

Umm.. what?

Fear is our protective parent. It stops us from poking tigers or punching police officers or investing your savings in a “sure-thing” online marketing system. Fear is a damn useful tool…

*caveat alert*

if you can manage it.

If we can manage our fear, then we can have safety and risk, stability and growth, usefulness and delight… and of course a gigantic bucket of awesomeness.

But if we don’t manage our fear, it leads us to perfectionism, procrastination, and many other painful, obstructive behaviours that stop us from rocking it out like the brilliant fascinating rock stars we are.

I know this from experience.

The fears I had to manage to get this far

I can’t learn about websites!
I can’t do design!
I can’t build a business while working a full-time job!
I can’t sell my expertise!
I can’t say that!
I’m going to fail.
I’m going to go broke.
Oh God, what if I succeed?
No-one will listen to me!
I don’t want to offend anyone!
… and a dozen more.

Most of these are reasonable fears: I am putting myself at risk by starting and growing a website. I had to learn how to listen to the sensible parts of my fear (“Do not spend $2,000 you do not have on a training course, you will not be able to pay for it.”) while placating the nonsensical parts (“No-one will actually shun you on the street if you write a bad post.”) This took me three years. Three years in which I talked about starting a website, I planned and daydreamed and what-if’d about starting a website, but I never, ever did anything about it.

Register a domain name? What if I pick the wrong one!
Apply some (any) of the knowledge from the blogs and courses and e-books I ceaselessly read? Oh, but I’m not ready yet!

Luckily, I improved.

After a lot of work I’m now pretty skilled at managing my fear. I still get it wrong sometimes, but I have a website, I post every day, tell people about what I do, sell my advice and skills, and have an achievable plan to quit the Day Job.

More and more as I listen to your comments and talk to you in various media (including the survey, and thank you to everyone who replied to it), I can see I’m not alone in having this balance to manage. And many of you are in a similar place to where I was three years ago: too scared to start a website, or too scared to grow it the way it should be grown.

Do you want some help?

I’m writing a resource to help people who aren’t managing their fear as well as they want to.

It’ll include:
The signs that you’re not managing your fear
Some excellent general strategies to manage your fear better
Some specific website-related fears and how to manage them

And I’m also going to run a special group for people who want one-on-one, customised help.

Are you interested?

It’s live, baby! Learn more about Awesome Fear-Wrangling here.

Any questions? Come tell me in the comments!

Things are going well: the Awesomeness Consulting sessions have been a blast, and I now have a regular consulting client (sweet!). There’s been some great response to the website heresy series; our daily visitors are up, and we’re selling copies of the Website in a Weekend course without doing anything to market it.

But right now I’m not happy. And I want to talk about it.

Warning: contains LOTS of graphic cussing, irrational thought and hyperbole. You are not required to read on.

Join Twitter, they say. We say. I say! You’ll meet lots of new people and you can connect with the greatest minds in the world and it will be Awesome. And this is technically true. You CAN meet new people. You CAN connect with the greatest minds in the world. But if you translate “connect” into “get to know well” or “become best friends with”… well, you’re asking for Social Media to rip your heart out and turn it into a dildo to fuck you in the ass with.

Scott Stratten will not be your buddy.
Elizabeth Potts-Weinstein will not be your buddy.
Chris Brogan will not be your buddy.
Naomi Dunford will not be your buddy.
Sonia Simone will not be your buddy.
Anyone with more than 10,000 followers will not be your buddy.

This isn’t an equal relationship. You’ve put them on a special list so that you can follow every word they say; you know about their cat, their kid, their preferences in spaghetti sauce. But you… you’re just another scrolling name. You’re noise.

This hurts me. I fear Being Left Out. And when I realise that some of my mentors don’t even know my name? My heart beats loud and heavy in my chest and I’m anguished. Anguished. This is all my schoolyard pains, all the rejections of my life, all the Stuff I thought I outgrew… this is all my wounds waiting for me. And they don’t hurt less because you understand the math.

At first I thought, this takes time! Eventually we will be friends and they will link to my posts the way they link to other people’s. I’ll start turning up in the recommended lists. I will become one of the Chosen Ones.

Right. Right?

But the Cool Kids keep talking to each other, and I’m standing outside the circle, laughing at the jokes and making comments that no-one hears. Feeling yearning and left-out. And unloved. And angry.

Fuck’em if they don’t love me. Fuck them.

Oh God I suck. There are hundreds of people following me, and a core of a few dozen who DO comment on my posts, RT my stuff, encourage me and appreciate what I do. And some of them are reading this and thinking, “What am I? Chopped liver?” No. No! And also yes. It doesn’t seem to matter how many wonderful people appreciate me. For fuck’s sake, one reader made a website based on a conversation we had. See that icon for Website in a Weekend in the sidebar? She made that so she could promote my product! I have fans, I have friends.

And yet. And yet.

When Sonia Simone responds to a forum offer for free Awesomeness Consulting to vouch for my awesomeness I think, “Yeah, but you’d never take me up on it.”

When Elizabeth Potts-Weinstein retweets something I’ve done for her and adds I think, “Is that it?”

When I’ve been looking forward to my consulting session with Scott Stratten for weeks and his secretary cancels at the last minute and I know, I know that I’m Just Another Appointment, I burn with resentment and shame.

When I realise that I will sometimes have more meaningful interactions with these people, but it will only be because I am paying them money for it, I cry and clench and fume and sigh.

I may never make it. And even if I form my own group, even if I become the next generation of Cool Kid, this will still hurt me.

Please, please. Please come be my friend and approve of me and treat me as an equal.

Please.

[EDIT: There has been a LOT of excellent commentary and follow-up. If you want to see this explored more, including a saner and more balanced version of this post written two days later, please read the questions about social media, and my new social media rules and a more thoughtful analysis of a problem in social media. There have also been two posts written by other people exploring their own thoughts: Go have a look at Wendy (who hasn't disowned me for bad language) talking about being naked in social media and Gulfsprite continuing her thoughts on social media relationships and expectations. They're both great and thought-provoking reads.]