Last night, I finished the work on the first post in this series, Register to Vote For U.S. Midterms 2018. I also discovered that the custom theme that I inherited doesn’t handle WordPress featured images very well. I’ll have to fix that after this sprint to the election deadline. In the meantime, I just embedded the image into the post.
Since I inherited the TrustTheVote.org webmaster job by volunteering, I’m still learning about the ins and outs of the site configuration. The site already uses the somewhat obscure WP-SEO plugin. I’m still learning how to make the best use of that tool.
The plan is to promote the post on the OSET and TrustTheVote Project Twitter feeds. I’d like to see if I can revitalize the TrustTheVote Project Facebook page, as well. Right now it looks like Twitter is going to be the best source of traffic for new visitors.
I’m trying out a new road warrior setup: I’ve got a little Samsung Tab E tablet, with a 4G cell modem, which I paired up with my Logitech K480 Bluetooth keyboard.
The keyboard has a handly little knob that I can use to quickly select up to three different Bluetooth devices. Right now, I’m just using slots 1 and 2 for my iPhone 6S Plus and my Tab E.
I’m using the Tab E instead of my refurbished Lenovo X201, which runs the latest version of Ubuntu. That computer is a favorite, because it’s small and easy to upgrade, compared to (say) a MacBook Pro. But, it doesn’t have a cellular modem built in.
I’m going to see how much productive work I can get done with this setup. Since my main productive activity is writing, and I’m doing that right now on this Logitech ‘board, I’m happy with that.
To publish or edit posts on my WordPress blogs, I can use the WordPress.com app, which is OK. I prefer the desktop browser interface.
I suppose I could use the desktop version of the WordPress admin screens on the tablet, but I don’t have very much screen real estate, even compared to the relatively tiny screen on the Lenovo.
Here are the biggest advantages to this setup:
Because both the tablet and the iPhone are connected to my cell network, I don’t need WiFi (but I can use it if I want).
I can power both my devices with my huge external USB battery pack if my device batteries run low, so I don’t need a wall socket if the batteries run down.
If I do have access to a wall socket, I can charge the battery pack and then use the battery pack to charge my tablet and phone.
The tablet and the keyboard are lighter than a notebook computer.
Here’s what I can’t do:
Any kind of WordPress development, including basic CSS work, is really out of the question.
Photo editing: I can use online tools, Instagram or Skitch to edit photos, but that means simple stuff, like cropping and applying filters, nothing fancy.
I can’t really do any media editing, like editing video or audio. I’d want to do that stuff with macOS or Ubuntu, with a dual-screen setup back at the office.
But, I can write and listen to music and update my blogs. I can answer emails and check Google Analytics. I can do what I need to do.
If you are a writer or a content creator, you need to write. This is the only way to improve, to hone your craft. The more you write, the better you’ll be at writing. It’s like any other skill: you must practice to improve. And the best way to improve your writing? Make it a daily habit.
The idea is to purposefully chunk your workload into tiny units which you can easily accomplish every day. So in the beginning, instead of writing 3,000 words a day and then slacking off for days, you only write a few hundred words within 24 hours but make sure it becomes a daily habit.
How did he establish the habit of writing?
The amount and quality of what you write every day has nothing to do with talent. Mars started out as “a terrible writer.” But he kept at it, wrote every day, and now he makes most of his income through writing. “And if I can do it, you can do it … and you can do it even better,” he concludes.
Use the power of Kaizen, or improvement in tiny steps, to improve your writing (and the amount you write each day). By increasing the amount he wrote every day by 50 – 100 words each month, “I started writing only 200 words a day in 2010 and upgraded to about 3,000 words a day within five years.”
Go back to basics to battle inertia. He explains, “falling back to the basics will always ensure you can write on auto-pilot because you OWN the fundamentals.” Read on for the basics of good writing.
Gamify your writing: Measure how much you write every day, and keep track of it. I personally use the web-based 750words. com, to track my writing and streaks. Mars prefers Scrivener (Mac, Windows, and iOS).
What are the basics of good writing?
Mars lists his basic rules of good writing:
The rule of one: one page, one call to action; one post, one lesson; one paragraph, one message; one sentence, one idea.
For marketing, use the AIDA principle: “Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.”
Make it readable: target a 9th grade reading level (freshman in high school).
The active voice should be used instead of the passive. Just kidding! Use the active voice over the passive voice.
Use a few strong nouns and verbs instead of a lot of weak adjective and adverbs.
Good advice! Mars recommends some further reading to learn the fundamentals of effective writing:
Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne.
Mars’ post struck a chord with me. I’ve worked for years on developing the daily habit of writing. The hard part, though, is publishing your writing. Mars doesn’t discuss this in his post, but the principles are the same:
Practice publishing every day: it’s great to develop the habit of daily writing, but you need to put your writing out there. Find a way to publish every day, and do it. Start with a blogging service like WordPress.com or Medium. Or, you can answer questions on Quora.com. Your writing will improve even faster if other people read what you write, and even better, give you feedback.
Start small, and increase the amount you publish every month. If you just post one tweet a day, you’re getting your writing out there. After you’ve established the daily habit of tweeting, or publishing a short post to your new blog, keep at it for a month. Then, increase the length of your posts, or the number of posts or tweets you post every day.
Edit your drafts before you publish to improve: if you are going to build your audience, you need to publish quality material. Make editing part of your publishing process. Develop a checklist to ensure your writing is tight, clear, accessible, and entertaining.
Gamify your publishing: in addition to tracking the amount of material you publish, track how many views or shares you get over time. Learn how to use Google Analytics or WordPress stats to learn how people find your writing, and what interests them. Learn how to read the stats on your social media posts.
In addition to these principles, follow these tips to make publishing easier and your published work better:
Own your work: social media sites are a great way to reach your audience, but everything you post on those sites is the property of the company that runs the site. instead of donating your work for free to these hugely profitable companies, start your own blog to store your posts and articles, and use social media to promote and link to your blog, instead of only posting your work to the social media service.
Get involved in online communities focused on topics that interest you. This is a great way to find an audience, and learn what people are interested in reading. Post on Reddit, answer questions on Quora, or find a specialized website or message board that discusses topics that interest you. When you write about what you’re interested in, your writing will automatically be better. When you can help someone else with your writing, that’s even better. Plus, you can get feedback right away from the other members of your online community.
Understand that criticism is a form of attention: if someone posts something critical about one of your posts, it means that they took the time to read it and even had an opinion about what your wrote. Maybe their opinion wasn’t nice, or what they wrote was cruel or stupid, but they paid attention to your writing. In fact, if you are writing well, you will certainly upset someone. If your writing is bland and indecisive, you won’t offend anyone, but no one is going to read it, either. Take a stand, express an opinion, articulate your passionate beliefs. Your writing will be much better. But you have to accept that you will never ever please everyone.
Don’t waste your time on pointless online discussions: instead of spending hours a day replying to tweets or Facebook posts, carve out time to write, without interruption, on the topics that matter to you. This is your body of work: posts, articles and books that you wrote, not a collection of tweets and Facebook rage posts. If someone replies or comments on your post, take your time with your response. Don’t write back angrily or defensively. Remember that they took the time to read what you wrote. Express gratitude to your audience. Or, better yet, start your own blog so you can decide which comments you want to show up under your posts.
Give yourself credit (and even a reward) for putting yourself out there: most people don’t take the step to click that Publish button. If you did, congratulate yourself. If you do it every day, that’s even better. If you make money from your writing, be sure to buy yourself a treat every now and then, when you reach your goal (book sales, downloads, increased sales, whatever you use to measure your success).
I’m still learning how to be a better writer, and how to publish more, better work. What have you learned as you write and publish online? Post your comments below!
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:
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!
The StratoPress 