Publish or perish

An experiment in establishing the habit of publishing regularly (5 days / week)

I’m writing plenty of words every day, at least 750 to be precise, at 750words.com. You can see from my stats page that I’m cranking it out: 418 days in a row, as of today, and over a million words since I started. But, I wasn’t really publishing very much, since everything on 750words.com is private. I did write some stuff for my company blog at Cadent.com, but that wasn’t happening with any consistency either. I wrote a few odds and ends here and there that went up on my other blogs.

I want to get in the habit of publishing on a regular basis. What does that mean? “Publish” can mean a lot. What counts as publishing? How many words? How often? Where do I publish? Does social media count?

So I answered the question like this:

• I’m going to publish at least 100 words at least five days per week.
• I’m going to publish on Cadent.com at least three of those days each week.
• Published material is available to the public (no limits to access, so Facebook updates just my friends doesn’t count, for example).
• Articles and posts are fully edited, and incorporate all required graphics and media. Drafts don’t count either.
• I can schedule publication dates in the future if I have a backlog of articles ready to go.

Those are the rules. I’m also going to set up automatic notifications for each of my publishing platforms so updates and links go out to all my followers, as appropriate. So far I’ve linked my LinkedIn and Twitter account to Cadent.com via Jetpack.

I started doing this on Sunday, November 12, so today is the fourth day in a row. I’ll check in regularly with any news and at the end of the month I’m going to look at my traffic, compared to right now. I’ll post the results mid-December and then decide if I’m going to change the rules or stop doing this.

This post here fulfills today’s requirement, although I worked on a number of other posts today as well. I wasn’t able to get any of them ready for publication, though, so I just banged this out.

Here’s what I think will happen (these are my hypotheses):

• I’ll get more traffic to at least some of my sites, ideally Cadent.com.
• I’ll get much better at publishing things on the Internet.
• I’ll learn how to publicize what I publish and how to automate that process.
• I’ll get better at writing.
• I’ll clarify some other goals I have for my online businesses.
• I’ll learn which publishing tools work best. Right now I’m focused on using WordPress, but I’ll use other tools, like Blogger.com, if needed.

So, those are my six hypotheses. I’ll see what happens after 30 days, and post the results by December 15th, 2017. Stay tuned, and your comments are always appreciated!

Update: March 21, 2018

Well, I didn’t update this after 30 days had passed, as I hoped. It turns out that publishing stuff is hard. I still write every day: as of today, I’ve written at least 750 words for 544 days in a row, or 126 days since I first posted this article. So that doesn’t suck.

I’ve also published quite a bit, just not as much as I planned. I’ve posted a number of long-ish articles (eight articles since I first posted this) to Quora.com — view all of my answers here. As a result, I’ve become one of the Most Viewed Writers in Learning to Play Musical Instruments — I’m number 7 today, and interestingly enough, I have the highest views to answers ratio. I’ve only posted 8 answers, and I’ve got over 6,000 views, while the others in the top 10 have posted more articles (almost 100, for some) for roughly the same number of views. I don’t know what that means, but it’s interesting. My answers tend to run long, maybe that has something to do with it. I’ve also made the top 10 for:

• Learning to Play Guitar — #2
• Guitar Lessons – #6

My Quora Readership stats for the last 3 months shows the results of publishing at a ridiculously minimal rate

So that’s cool! People are reading my stuff. Another interesting tidbit: one of my best performing Quora answers is something I posted almost 3 years ago (What are the human benefits of learning to play guitar?), with almost 18,000 views and 62 upvotes. I know this is small change for Quora, but the point is this: by posting consistently on topics I enjoy and know well, I get recommendations from Quora for readers to read my back catalog, a virtuous circle of publishing and reading.

I like how Quora has a built-in audience. It’s not like my various web sites and blogs that get a fraction of the views that my better Quora answers get. I also like that I’m responding to specific questions, and sometimes I even get some feedback (often positive) from the people who posted the questions or read my answers. I find that’s really motivating!

I’ve been saving up all my Quora answers in a Google Doc and by now I’ve got enough material to launch a website devoted to learning guitar, a topic I enjoy. I’ve also demonstrated that I can write about it in a way that other people at least find useful, and may even enjoy.

Finally, my daily writing habit sure makes it easy to bang out a Quora answer. Writing every day makes my writing better, and it also flows more easily. So maybe for most of those 126 days I’ve written since I first posted this, I’ve written disorganized garbage, but every now and then I’ll nail it and crank out a good article in short order.

What I Learned

So, here’s what I’ve learned from my experiment in regular writing and posting:

• If you want to get better at something, practice, ideally every day.
• Build on your good habits. I may write every day, but I don’t publish every day, because that involves editing and finding graphics and other things besides writing. But, I have to write before I can publish! So I’ve got the first step nailed. Now I just have to maintain that first habit, and then add another habit of publishing on the regular on top of the writing.
• If you want to do something every day, set a daily goal that’s relatively easy. I can bang out 750 words in less than 20 minutes, especially if I don’t have to worry about the quality! My publishing goals (above, 5x/week) were just too ambitious for me, although they might work just fine for you. Now that I’ve tried this, I’ve decided to publish just once a week, instead of five times a week. I can do that!
• Put yourself out there. By publishing on Quora, I’m getting lots of feedback and encouragement, even though I don’t publish very frequently. Also, once something is out there, you never know when it might go viral. None of that happens unless I hit that [Publish] button.
• Write about what you know and what you love. This is almost a cliché, but it certainly makes writing more enjoyable. I think it improves the quality of my writing too. The articles that perform the best for me are on topics that really excite or interest me. Coincidence?  I think not.
• Measure what you do and reflect on it. Even though my experiment “failed,” because I didn’t publish as much as I hoped, I learned so much. Writing this update is part of that process. I didn’t realize how well I was doing on Quora until I looked at my stats for this article.
• Publishing is harder than writing, but it’s a habit that you can cultivate. It’s easy for me to write every day. But to put my work out into the world where people can criticize it, that’s hard. Also, I need to take time to edit, which is harder than just writing. But, like the writing itself, publishing regularly is a habit I can build and develop.
• Something is better than nothing. If I hadn’t set this ambitious goal for publishing five times a week, I probably wouldn’t have published as much as I did. I wouldn’t have learned so much about Quora, and I wouldn’t have published this either. Now I’m going to pursue an easier habit, just publish once a week, and see how that goes. Even publishing something to Quora every 2-3 weeks, instead of every 5 days, as I planned, had a huge effect: I’m a better writer and I’ve got literally thousands of readers who never would have read a single word if I hadn’t published anything.

Post a comment below if you have any questions or if you’ve tried something similar. Thanks for reading!