How to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane (4048 hits)
In June I will have been blogging for 8 years, which is a pretty decent run for an original content blog that aims to put out useful, high quality material 48 weeks a year. One of the key success factors in blogging is trust. If you publish roughly the same sort of post, at regular time intervals, people will trust you more because you are sending a signal you take the enterprise seriously. If people trust you, they are more likely to sign up and follow on social media – and share with their friends.
Many people underestimate how important being regular and predictable is to operating a ‘serious professional blog’. I’ve seen a lot of blogs come and go in the education space. I wonder if this is because people assume being a blogger just involves being creative. There is so much more to it than that. I’ve learned a lot about being regular and predictable by being a Qantas frequent flyer. I fly often, but my experience on Qantas is always more or less the same – if I notice the process, it has broken. They do this by making sure there are clear business processes and that everyone understands how they work.
Over the years I have developed business processes for managing a blog that work for me, drawing on a range of digital tools. I thought I would spend a bit of time explaining part of the process to you because I think it illuminates the problem of the academic writer – managing the endless academic writing pipeline. I got this idea from Pat Thompson, who has written about her (impressive) writing pipeline. Pat breaks down her writing tasks into: stuff she has to write (reporting on research projects), stuff she gets asked to write (such as book chapters), stuff related to supervision (writing with her students) and stuff she wants to write (projects which interest her). It’s a good set of categories that pretty much lines up with mine, but Pat leaves out blogging, describing it as “part of everyday activity, a bit like brushing your teeth”.
