Timothy Gallwey’s brilliance was discovering that the subconscious has a lot more to do with success in sports than most people thought. What we think, and when we think too much, can cause our performance to decline. The same holds true with blogging, we can spend so much time looking for something to blog about that we never actually get around to writing anything. Just start typing.
I used to take blogging pretty seriously-I was pretty active on Blogcatalog, Technorati, and Digg. Not so much now. But recently I got a couple of emails asking me to check out their new layouts and features. To be honest, well, they are all prettier, but does that really matter? These are fun sites to prowl around on though, it is amazing how many people have blogs now and how many of them have managed to focus on one topic.
Blogging about Politics or Sports or the Stock Market is pretty straight forward, your daily topics just show up in your daily news feeds and you give your two cents on the news of the day. In fact, it’s pretty hard to think of any topic that someone isn’t talking about somewhere. Lots of bloggers like to blog about themselves, and many of these are among the best that blogs have to offer. After all, the view into another world is why we read novels, so why not peek into someone else’s life?
Lots of people start a blog and then let it die a slow death. I tend to think that some people just run out of things to say while others just didn’t realize how much time it would take. Then there are those that wanted to get rich from Adsense or Blogher Ads or Amazon or one of about a gazillion affiliate programs out there. All of them work on the idea of setting up a site, stuffing it full of keywords, and then stumbling, digging, tweeting, and otherwise spamming your way to wealth. I never figured out how to do it, though I did get pretty good at the whole keyword stuffing thing.
I did notice something I thought was a bit off about Technorati and Digg’s topics-they don’t have one for Books. They have music, film, TV, even comics, but no books. I guess all they care about is the topic, not so much the medium, but I like reading. I only notice as I tend to do the occasional review of a book and I never seem to find the right place to put them.
As long as I am talking about blogging, I’d like to send out thanks to iDope for their WP Captcha Free Plug in. After months of dealing with comment spam I found something that works.
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I think the ultimate task for any new blogger is to remain interested through the sandbox and the lean days of few visitors. It takes such a long time for people to start reading and even longer for others to think your so good they are going to link to you and help your little blog become more powerful.
It’s not an easy task to keep the faith! Then again what is!