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!