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My Approach to Blogging

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This is a guest post by Zach Nielsen of Take Your Vitamin Z (a blog which I highly recommend). Zach’s post gives a good “behind the scenes” view of blogging and how to be productive in it.

Some people have inquired about my method for blogging. How do I approach it? How much time does it take?  Do I make much money from it?  How does it all work?  Here is my response.

The number one catalyst for my blog is very simple: Google Reader. I subscribe to over a hundred and fifty different blogs via Google Reader and most of those posts form the content of my posts on Take Your Vitamin Z.  Google Reader makes my blogging way less time consuming than if I was bookmarking all those blog sites. If you read a lot of blogs and don’t use RSS yet, you are simply wasting a lot of time. The idea is not complicated. It’s just like checking your email, except for blogs. All your favorite blogs can be read on one internet page. Google Reader updates whenever a blog that I subscribe to updates. If I am going directly to one of the many blog sites that I like it may or may not have updated, but with Google Reader (or any other RSS feed provider) I have the freedom to only be notified when those blogs that I like update. This makes my blog reading much faster and efficient.

In terms of how I decide what to post, it’s pretty simple as well. I just look for things that I find to be interesting.  This is how my blog has been all along.  If I find it interesting then I’ll post it. This usually means that the topics include Christian theology, music, art, some sports, culture, adoption, abortion, leadership, short essays that I choose to write on various topics, and other random things that I find amusing.

It seems that there are other people out there who resonate with the same things that I do and find my blog worth reading, but it is also important to note that I have been blogging at least 5 days a week for almost four years in a row. Most people don’t understand that it times a huge commitment over a long period of time to have a blog that might be consistently read. Guys that know way more about blogging than I do always say that the key to a good blog is great content and consistency over a long period of time.

When I first started my blog I thought I would write long essays everyday that would be full of life changing wisdom. I found out after day two that day one’s post wasn’t all that life changing and the well was dry for day two. Thus, taking my cue from my college roommate, Justin Taylor, I mainly post things that other people have written. Those folks can usually say it better than I can anyway and I’ll bless way more people if my blog is more than just what stems from my own reflections. Also, I simply don’t have time to craft my own short essays everyday. Even if I did have that much to say, I wouldn’t be able to justify it in light of the fact that I have a wife, four kids, a busy church job, jazz gigs on the weekend, and am planting a church in Madison, WI in 2010.

I usually do most of my posting in the morning. Google Reader fills up during the night and in the morning there are usually 50-100 items for me to looks through. I can look through these very quickly and if I see something that is of interest I can copy the text, copy a photo, write some short interactions with it, etc. in a matter of minutes. On Blogger (my blogging platform) you can schedule what time your posts go live on the web so at times I’ll schedule four posts, an hour apart, but do it all at once. I often check Google Reader through the day but this usually only takes 1-10 minutes since there usually are fewer items to sort through.

I have started to make a bit of an income from blogging. It’s nothing that I could support my family with, but it is a nice extra bonus every month. This comes through two various streams of income, 1) Amazon.com, and 2) paying advertisers. The Amazon.com program is rather remarkable. All you have to do is click on any Amazon link that I provide anywhere on my site and then buy whatever you want (not necessarily the product that you first clicked on) and I’ll get a small commission. This extra income is a great way for us to save money for our church plant in Madison, WI, so if any of you out there would be willing to remember to click through my site when you buy on Amazon it would be a blessing for us. All you  have to do is go to my blog first and then click on an Amazon link in the right sidebar under “sponsors” or any Amazon link in my posts.

In my life, this whole blogging thing has taken on a bit of a life of it’s own, beyond what I ever thought it would, but I enjoy it quite a bit. If you are interested, I have posted some other reflections here on why I have a blog.

Why Many (Most?) Great Ideas Never Get Off the Ground

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Scott Berkun has a good article on how describing your idea or product is as important as conceiving it. Here’s are a few excerpts:

Just about anyone in the professional world is, in effect, a professional speaker. Every single idea in the history of the business world had to be explained to at least one other person before it got approved, funded or purchased by anyone else. Call it what you like–sales, marketing, pitching or presenting–but I know the history. Despite dreams of a world in which the best ideas win simply because they should, we live in a world where the fate of ideas hinges on how well you talk about what you’ve made, or what you want to make.

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From my studies of innovation history (which led to my best-seller, The Myths of Innovation), I know that the difference between relatively uncommon names like Tesla, Grey and Englebart, and household ones like Edison, Bell and Jobs, has more to do with their ability to persuade, convince and inspire than their ability to invent, create or innovate.

One potent thread in the fabric of reasons why some ideas take off and others don’t is the ability entrepreneurs have to explain to others why they should care. The bigger the idea, the more explaining the world demands. Yet these skills are constantly trivialized in many organizations, leading to dozens of great ideas being rejected, and their creators wondering why lesser rivals with weaker concepts are able to capture people’s imaginations and pocketbooks.

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I see too many inventors and executives who see speaking about their work as the least important thing they do. And it shows. To the detriment of the quality of their ideas, their presentations are the spotty lens through which those ideas will be seen. Without dedicated effort, those lenses distort and betray what it is they truly have to offer.

Business as Missions in the Wall Street Journal

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This was a good article from last month on business as missions in the Wall Street Journal. Here are three interesting excerpts:

Faith-at-work movements have been popular at least since the 1857 businessmen’s revival in New York City, in which noon-hour prayer meetings were so full of the city’s professionals that many businesses closed during the gatherings. But churches have typically kept business people at a distance, needing their money but questioning their spiritual depth. With the business as mission movement, that has changed. In 2004, the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism, founded by Billy Graham, featured a track on business as mission. At a recent missionary conference in Hong Kong, Doug Seebeck says mission leaders apologized to the business people present. They had been guilty of asking for their money while keeping them in the foyer of the church, outside of the sanctuary.

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Now Mr. Seebeck says, “Business is the greatest hope for the world’s poor.”

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While advanced economies question capitalism, Christians who work in developing countries see how essential business is to provide jobs and health care, build communities and even minister to souls. For these business owners, a desk job overseas has become a full-time ministry.

How Sound Affects Us

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Julian Treasure has an excellent 5-minute TED talk on “4 Ways Sounds Affect Us.” Here’s one shocking fact that he gives: open plan offices decrease productivity by 66%. (He does give a simple solution to this, however.)

(HT: Jeff Paterson)

Listening

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Listening is not simply, or mainly, hearing what the other person is saying. It is thinking about what they are saying, and doing so from their point of view.

Implication: This includes a willingness to be influenced by others. If you are generally unaffected by what other people say, you aren’t listening.

Why Most People Don't Keep Their New Year's Resolutions–And How to Keep Yours

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Most people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions because they don’t translate them into their schedule.

It’s that simple.

If you make a resolution, but don’t plan time to actually accomplish it, it usually won’t happen. It won’t happen because it remains merely an intention. And intentions that aren’t specifically translated to “actionable zones” tend to be treated by your mind as “nice to do, but not necessary to do” items.

The result is a hit-and-miss approach. Some days you remember and follow through, and others you don’t.

Think of an Olympic athlete. They don’t simply say “my goal is to win the gold medal.” Instead, they adhere to a workout schedule. Without that concrete mechanism of action, the goal would simply be wishful thinking.

Now, what about those more intangible aims such as “lose 10 pounds”? How do you schedule that? Obviously you can schedule the exercise portion of that goal. But what about the “eating less” portion? Speaking from experience, it’s easy to get to the dinner table and forget (or deliberately neglect?) all intentions of eating healthy.

This is where reviewing your goals comes in. Mindsets that need to be more or less continuous (like “eat less”) tend to be kept in mind through regular review until they become second nature. The weekly review helps accomplish this; for things that tend to fall out of mind easily (like “eat less”), just pausing at the beginning of your work day to remember your aims can be helpful.

Which leads to one last thing: you have to keep your number of resolutions small. It’s not possible to create actionable mechanisms for or keep in mind a large number of new (or renewed) aims.

If you find it helpful to make new year’s resolutions (and they are a good thing — see John Piper’s article on resolutions, as well as his article on what to do when you fail), make just a few that really count, and then create simple, actionable mechanisms to make them happen.