It’s been nearly a month coming, so I hope my friend Sandie Law at Geeked Off will forgive me. At least it didn’t take me as long for this one as it did for Amy’s from yesterday!

OK, so here are the rules for this one:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’ve been tagged, and to read your blog.

Honestly, I’m hesitant to do this one. After all, I gave you 32 things yesterday, and you can also find another 7 “interesting things about me” linked from my About page. That’s way too many things. I considered a couple of cheesy options, including:

• Randomly picking 8 from the 39 existing things, making them truly 8 random things.
• Post a link to the 8 Most Common Internet Writing Mistakes and telling you that I’ve done every one of them.

I really didn’t want to cop out entirely, though. After all, Matt did 16 random things just to show us all up. I also thought about making it 8 relevant things, but it’s been done. I can’t even talk about my sister doing yoga, since I’m an only child.

So, what to do? Overload you with things? Not do the meme?

I think I found a solution. I’ve given you 8 random links in this post to enjoy.

———-

Here’s where I’m going to break meme form. I’m of a mind that the best memes will reproduce themselves. I hate putting pressure on anyone to do a meme, and I fear the rejection of a meme being denied. Grab this one if you want, just let me know so I can follow along.

Or, If you’d prefer not to do the entire meme, you can tell me 1 random thing about you in the comments below!

photo credit: LaMenta3

So, in response to Darren Rowse’s Group Video Project, I’ve decided to try something new.

 To finish off my Banging My Gong series, I offer you a short (4:13) video about why it is that I blog:

This was my first video podcast, so forgive the quality; I’ll get better as time goes on (and I get some software other than Windows Movie Maker!)

 If you haven’t yet read the earlier posts in the Bang The Gong series, I’d encourage you to start here and work your way back up to this post. 

So, I told you yesterday that my Internet writing career began while I was in grad school.  I didn’t really go looking for a writing gig;  in fact, I was bound and determined to teach history.  I was back in grad school for the express purpose of becoming qualified to teach college history courses.

As I mentioned, though, student loans weren’t quite enough to cut it.  After all, we’re a family of 5, and we have a mortgage and two cars.  So, when Angie became ill, went in for surgery and lost her job, it was time for me to find a new way to make a living.

Instead, it found me.

One of Angie’s good friends ran (and still runs) a pregnancy web site.  A huge pregnancy web site.  Three of them, actually.  She needed to have some articles written, and was frustrated with the poor quality of work she received from the low bidders at places like Scriptlance.  So, knowing that we needed the income, she asked if I’d like to write some articles for her.  I agreed, and chose a female pseudonym with which to write the articles.  The rest is, as they say, history.

Over the next two years, I was able to finish my Master’s degree and provide for my family with student loans and the income I was making writing pregnancy articles.  By the time I finished my degree, I realized that it would be at least another decade before the history field would be open enough for me to be able to get a good tenure-track position.  Rather than flounder around from one adjunct position to the next, I kept writing.  After all, I was really enjoying it.  And, for once, I felt like my work really benefited people.  I could see how women (and men) were directly benefiting from the research I’d done and the articles I’d written.  That, my friends, was cool.  Very cool.

As time went on, I managed to find more pen-for-hire work.  I wrote web content for a number of different sites, and did article work for several clients.  There is a chance you’ve read my work somewhere other than here, especially if you’ve read anything at the major article directories on parenting, pregnancy, conception, writing, or, believe it or not, satellite TV.  I wrote articles for traditional web sites, blogs and newsletters.  The vast majority of this work I did in anonymity, of course; because that’s how most Internet writing works.  Unless you’re writing for your own blog or web site, your work is never your own.

That brings me to today.  Today, I’m making the transition from writing for others to writing for myself.  This blog is, in many ways, the ultimate expression of that transition.  For the first time in five years of making a living writing on the Internet, I’m making it as me.

Why is that important?  Why do I want to make a living writing on the Internet as me?

Well, I answered that, indirectly, in the second post of this series.  There, I said:

I want to provoke conversation.  I want to participate in conversation.  I want to interact with my readers and with the whole blogosphere.  Like I said yesterday, I want to share my failures as well as my triumphs.  I want you to know me.

Why?

That’s a silly question, isn’t it?  Who doesn’t want to know and be known?  Who doesn’t, deep down, want to learn from other human beings, to help them when they need it, to share their experiences, to help shape their lives and be shaped by them.  That’s what being human is all about.  Apart from how we relate one to another, there isn’t much separating us from the rest of existence.

It really is no more complex than that.  I love my job, writing for the Internet.  I love that people benefit.  It gives me meaning, when I crawl into bed at night, knowing that my writing touched lives that day.

But I want more;  I want to see my readers benefit up close.  I want to dialogue with them, not just have them learn from my writing from a distance.  I want to answer questions, and ask some of my own.  Most of all, I want to help other Internet writers to achieve their dreams.

So, there you have it.  That’s my brand:  Helping Internet Writers to Achieve Their Dreams.  It’s on my new header up at the top of this blog, it’s on my business cards, and its in my email signature.  Most of all, though, it is in my heart.  It is what I am passionate about, and what I most want to spend my time doing.  And, as time goes on and this blog actually generates revenue, I’ll be able to do that more and more.  At some point, I’ll be able to refuse pen-for-hire work, knowing that my life’s calling – to teach other writers and help them on their writing journey – is enough to support me.

Tomorrow, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, I’ll have a surprise for you.  Make sure to come back then!

 If you haven’t yet read the earlier posts in the Bang The Gong series, I’d encourage you to start here and work your way back up to this post. 

After yesterday’s shameless self-promotion, it’s time I took it down a notch.

photo credit: eisenrah 

I’d love to tell you all about how I spent nearly a decade in the computer industry and how great it was to me.  Technically, those things are true.  For a time, the industry was amazing.  I started out working a help desk job for Concentric Network for $7 an hour.  Eight years later I was making four times that as a slightly-underpaid network engineer.  The computer industry put food on my family’s table for a long time, and it provided me with all sorts of opportunities for career advancement.

Unfortunately, that was only a small part of the equation.  You see, by the time I was fired from my last IT job, I was clinically depressed.  I was so constantly anxious that my eldest daughter didn’t even like to talk to me.  She was afraid I’d start yelling at any moment.  My wife was thoroughly disgusted, and nearly left me.  She’s told me since then that there were several days that she started packing things for her and the children with the intention of moving out.  The combination of long hours, the pressure of keeping on top of new technology and a jackass of a boss had driven me to the brink of my own sanity.  There were times when I even thought about driving my truck into a telephone pole so that I wouldn’t have to go in to work.

I had hit rock bottom.  When they fired me, it was almost a relief.

photo credit: PK Kool

I say “almost,” because being jobless and looking at three months of unemployment checks before my family could no longer eat didn’t exactly bring a hell of a lot of comfort.

I shut down, almost completely.  I spent many days in bed that summer, at the end of my rope.  I shut out all of my friends and family.  I even stopped playing D&D.

My amazing wife, who had been a stay-at-home mom since we were first married, went out, got a job and kept our family afloat.  She figured out how to get the kids to school, managed all of the doctor appointments, and made dinner most nights.  She did all of that while endometriosis was rotting out her insides, too.  (That was a problem that would take several years and 4 surgeries to correct).  I can’t tell you all how much she still impresses me, every day, with how strong a woman she really is.

 I realized one cold February morning that one of the reasons I had been so unhappy was because my work was not fulfilling.  With the exception of the six months or so when I’d run my own computer business in 2001, the computer industry had never provided me with any self-satisfaction.  I loved the pay and liked my co-workers, but there was no feeling of accomplishment when I would fix a router in the dormitory at 3 AM so that some freshman could get to his Internet porn.

When I was a child, someone told me that I should “do what you love, no matter how much it pays.”  The fact that I’d not followed that advice had finally caught up with me, and was about to destroy me.

At any rate, I figured that I needed to do something fulfilling: I decided that I needed to go back to school.  I wanted to help people, to teach them.  Hadn’t that been my dream so many years ago at IWU?  To do that, I would need a Master’s degree.  I enrolled in the Humanities program at Central Michigan University and took out as much as I could in student loans.  Still, when Angie got very sick with endometriosis and couldn’t work, we needed some more income. 

That’s when my Internet writing career began, and that’s where I’ll pick up next time.

It seems I’m going to have to continue spending some time talking about myself.  Honestly, its one of my least favorite subjects.  I’d rather talk about all of you, and what you are all up to.  Twitter has been helping me with that in the last few days, so I suppose I can continue banging my gong for a little while.

So, where did I leave off?

Ah, yes.  I’d just arrived in Marion, Indiana, with the intention of studying for the ministry.  But, what does that have to do with branding, and with my journey as a writer?

photo credit: Rainer Ebert

Well, like a lot of kids, I went through several different branding attempts over the first couple of years I was in college.  I was the super-devout mystic, the carefree surfer dude, the professionally-groomed and dressed megachurch minister type, the cool youth pastor, the music devotee, and others.  I finally settled in on being the “academic.”  I spent most of my college career debating and discussing the big picture ideas with folks.  I decided that I’d rather help folks by educating them than pastoring them, so I switched from Christian Ministries to History and Philosophy. 

In college, I worked a bunch of different jobs.  I did work study in the library’s media center, where I was first exposed to PCs.  I worked as a Youth Pastor in a small church where the Pastor sold snake oil on the side.  I worked for a small manufacturing company called American Mobile Power driving their truck to Ohio to pick up inventory. 

photo credit: jurvetson

American Mobile Power was a neat experience.  The owner had invented a particular type of plastic polymer to use for hydraulic oil tanks on Semis.  Apparently this polymer was much better than steel and much cheaper than other plastics.  He was making a killing.  It was there I first got a taste for entrepreneurship.

In terms of college and my eventual writing career, there’s not a whole lot more to say except for this:  if I hadn’t been a decent writer, I never would have met my wife.  We met via Prodigy in 1995.  This was back when the online services were still big, and few folks had a direct Internet connection.  I placed an ad on the Prodigy Personals area entitled, “Philosopher/Poet.” 

Somehow, she fell for it.

Prodigy Personals would eventually evolve into Yahoo! Personals.  There’s a brand I’d support today, even though the product looks nothing like the one that meant so much to me all of those years ago.  The quality outcome of that experience has created a customer for life.

After college, I tried a semester of grad school.  I wasn’t really ready to be there;  I was more interested in other things.  I wandered around from one customer-service type job to another for a while.  I worked for a bank (NBD), the Avon-equivalent of women’s fashion (The Worth Collection), and Hellyer Communications.

photo credit: nervsappy 

Hellyer was a voicemail company.  We don’t have too many of those today, but back then they were quite common.  At any rate, Hellyer Communications was the one job I ever quit based purely on principle.  To make a long story short, the terms of my employment required that I do my best to mislead (not lie to, but distract and misdirect) an 80 year-old woman named Pulaski into agreeing to keep voicemail service she had been subscribing to for five years but never used and would never use.  I refused, and quit that moment.  I didn’t even bother to put in a letter of resignation.  Hell, I didn’t even tell my boss.  I didn’t feel like these morally bankrupt people deserved that common courtesy.  I got up, walked out, and never went back.

My branding, in my early 20s, was very unsettled.  I suppose it is that way for a lot of folks.  It wasn’t until 1996 when I would settle into a brand.  By 1996, I was a family man working for Charles Schwab doing Windows NT Administration.  Thus began my career in the IT field that spanned the better part of the next 8 years. 

I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow.

Over the past few days I’ve spent a lot of time writing about myself and about my blog.  I’m not entirely comfortable with this sort of introspection, to be honest with you.  I feel that I am much to young to genuflect.  Still, I think this has been a necessary exercise for me.  I stated that this sort of thing was imperative for the blogosphere right now, and I believe that the best way to lead is by example.  To that end, I’ve tried to articulate my vision and I’ve explored my voice.  But where do I go now?  How do I translate that into a brand?

I think branding flows, naturally, from vision and voice.  My vision is to help other Internet writers get where they want to be.  My voice works to accomplish my vision by sharing my own experiences with you, and interacting with you.  The natural outcome of this is my brand.  So, where do I start?  I guess I should start by telling you my story.

My Early Writing Career

I grew up in a middle-class family in Linwood, Michigan.  You probably haven’t heard of Linwood;  we have one stoplight, two churches, six bars, and a post office.  Oh, and a bait shop. 

Linwood is just outside of Bay City.  If you’re old enough, you might remember the Bay City Rollers, an English band in the early 1970s.  The legend goes that the Bay City Rollers got their name by tossing a dart at a map of the U.S.  The dart landed on Bay City, and the name stuck:

(How’s that for branding?)

If you haven’t heard of Bay City, you might have heard of Saginaw, which is another twenty miles or so to the South.  You may remember the Simon and Garfunkel song, America, in which the duo sing the line, “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.”  If you’re into old-time classic country music fan, its possible you know Lefty Frizell’s last #1 hit, “Saginaw, Michigan”:

(I can personally tell you, the Saginaw that Lefty sang about is vastly different from today’s Saginaw. Not better, not worse, just different. So much for that branding exercise.)

If you haven’t heard of Saginaw, I guess I can tell you that I was born an hour South of Saginaw in Flint, Michigan.  You might remember Flint as the setting for Michael Moore’s Roger & Me.  I’ll spare you my thoughts on Moore, other than to say he didn’t grow up on the rough streets of Flint, like he claims;  he grew up in the white, upper-middle class suburb of Davison. Davison is where I lived until I was seven, when we moved to Linwood.

(Moore, regardless of whether you like him or not, knows how to brand himself.)

From an early age, I enjoyed writing.  In the fifth grade, I won the school-wide creative writing contest with a poem I wrote.  The poem is long gone, but as I recall it was something about writing music with words.  I’ve often wondered if there is a copy of it somewhere in my folks’ basement, but I’ve never taken the time to check.  When they are gone, I’m sure I’ll have the opportunity; I think it will be fitting in some ways.  I can still see how proud Mom and Dad were of me on that day.  I can see myself holding my poem up, surrounded by my folks.

In High School, my experiences weren’t as grand.  I took a single creative writing course with a large fellow by the name of Larry who collected Coca-Cola paraphernalia.  In retrospect, I think Larry was probably a great teacher.  I just didn’t like him.  Frankly, I didn’t pick up a pen with any serious ideas of being a writer for another decade.  Besides, I developed other interests in High School.  I decided that I would, after High School, go to Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, and enter the ministerial training program.

I intended to be a Wesleyan preacher.

Come back tomorrow (or maybe Monday, what with the holiday and all) to find out what happens next to our intrepid hero.

If you’re not sure why I’m banging a gong, read this call for action and this post about my vision first.

It has been well said that a writer’s voice is only truly heard through the ink and paper on which he writes. For the Internet writer, that voice is heard via the ones and zeroes inside his CPU, but the idea is the same: To really know what a writer is all about, you have to read his writing. If his voice isn’t unique, it will be drowned out in the comforting yet forgettable chorus of other writers.

So, what exactly is my writing voice? How do I use the medium of writing to effectively portray a unique personality and position? How is my writing different from others? How does my voice complement the Great Song of the Internet? Or is my voice too soft or too shrill, too blustery or too grating?

Simply put, my voice is me. In this blog, I write as if I were writing to a friend. In some ways, I do write to friends; I engage in discussions with many of my regular readers that are deeper and more significant than discussions I have with my “real-world” friends. But if I had to sum up my voice in a single word, it would be this: conversational.

I want to provoke conversation. I want to participate in conversation. I want to interact with my readers and with the whole blogosphere. Like I said yesterday, I want to share my failures as well as my triumphs. I want you to know me.

Why?

That’s a silly question, isn’t it? Who doesn’t want to know and be known? Who doesn’t, deep down, want to learn from other human beings, to help them when they need it, to share their experiences, to help shape their lives and be shaped by them. That’s what being human is all about. Apart from how we relate one to another, there isn’t much separating us from the rest of existence.

At any rate, I could add other words to describe my voice. I’d add words like honest, vulnerable, confident, experienced, articulate, helpful, generous, fun. These are all tones of conversation, little individual modes of my voice. These are the building blocks on which I build my writing. These tones complement my vision. In the same way, there are descriptive words I’d prefer to avoid, like staid, formulaic, monotonous, boring, didactic, academic. These tones work against my vision. I have used these voices at other times, like when I was in grad school or when I’m writing SEO content as a pen-for-hire. But not here. Not if I can help it, anyways.

Is all of this gong-banging a bit self-indulgent? Maybe. But, to some degree, that’s the point of this blog, isn’t it? Like I said yesterday: I want to share my journey as a writer with you. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. Maybe you can learn something from it, maybe not. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I get that. But it’s right here, regardless.

See what happens next. Read about what I see as my brand at The Writing Journey.

Yesterday’s post and the ensuing discussion have had me thinking more and more about what it is that I am doing right here with my blog.  When I pointed the finger at the Internet writing community, there were still three other fingers pointing right back at me.  I knew this when I wrote it, and I knew that it would be something of a revolution for me personally, and for how I approach this site.  I knew that I would have to set an example and follow my own advice.

I also knew that I intended to take you along with me on my journey of (re)discovery.  After all, that’s what this blog is about, and always has been:  My journey as an Internet writer, and how my journey can help others.

My vision for this blog is to help other Internet writers improve their craft and, in doing so, become more successful.  I hope to do this by offering useful, practical and timely advice on areas such as grammar, style, voice, format, SEO and many other areas.  From time to time, it means that I’ll dip into topics like article writing, blogging, marketing, and all sorts of side dishes.  Ultimately, though, I want to share my experiences in these areas - my writing journey – with my readers.  I want to talk about my successes, about my mistakes, and about my goals.  I hope to inspire other writers with my successes, warn them of the dangers of my mistakes, and motivate them with my goals.

In short:  This blog exists to help other Internet writers get from where they are to where they want to be.  It is about the Writing Journey.

That is my vision.  While the vision it isn’t unique in itself, the experiences that I bring to that vision make the final product plenty unique.

Tomorrow, I’m going to explore voice, and how I use voice on this blog in order to reinforce, promote, and accentuate my vision.

Read the next post about finding my writing voice here.

Success as an Internet writer doesn’t come easy, and it doesn’t come cheap.  It requires dedication, self-discipline and a hell of a lot of good luck. 

Success as an Internet writer also requires that you have something to say, and that you can say it well.

At the time I am writing this article, the buzz among bloggers has to do with how so much blog content is seemingly regurgitated from one blog to the next.  Painfully, this is true in many cases.  Even many of the most successful Internet writers spend their time covering old ground, ground that could be rediscovered in seconds via Google.  While it isn’t plagiarized, it isn’t unique, either.

Yes, we need one another.  I get that.  We need to be able to dialogue, talk about the same ideas, and work together to find new and interesting ways to write.  We need to discuss the big ideas, like whether or not good writing still matters.  But, we need to step back.  We need to regroup.

It is time for Internet writers to get back to basics.  It is time to bang our own gongs for a while.

Think about the top blogs in your niche for a moment.  What distinguishes one from another, apart from the writer’s name?  Do each of those blogs have their own unique approach?  There was, certainly, a day when they were distinct.  Is it the case today?  What about your blog?  Is it distinct?  What makes your Internet writing different from anyone else’s?

You might not agree with me that this is a problem.  You might believe that the market for your niche is big enough that there is room for many writers all writing about the exact same things.  Maybe that’s true.  If it is, good for you.  Keep at it, and I wish you success.  In fact, you need to let me know which niche that is, because that’ll be my next foray.

If you agree, however, that this is a problem, the question remains:  What can be done about it? 

I suggest to you that there are three steps that Internet writers, whether they are new to the game or whether they are six-figure bloggers, ought to return to:

Get your own vision.  Figure out what it is that you are good at and passionate about.  Determine that you are going to be the  writer on the Internet for your niche.  Don’t get distracted by others; they have their own vision.  If your vision is social bookmarking, don’t get caught up giving grammar lessons.  If your vision is fiction writing advice, don’t write about article marketing.  Get ahead of the pack; explore new ideas, challenge the conventional wisdom, and get used to seeing yourself at the top, because that is where you are going to be.

Find your own voice.  Not only do many Internet writers write about the same things, they do it in the same way.  You’re not Men with Pens; don’t imitate their style.  You’re not Dooce, either.  Let her do her thing, you do yours.  Infuse your writing voice with every element inside your personality.  Give your writing your passion and your apathy, your anger and your love, your prudishness and your profanity, your sarcasm, your wit, your humor, your everything.  Give it a voice that is uniquely your own.

Establish your own brand.  You are the only one that is covering your niche in the way you are covering it.  Get the hell off of your blog for five minutes and tell people about it!  Post comments, write on message boards, send e-mails, write articles for submission sites.  Do all of the marketing you can do, but do it in such a way that you don’t just say, “hey, look at me!”  Instead, do it in such a way that you say “Check me out.  I’ve got the goods.  Here’s proof.  Now come and get the rest.”

If everyone who ever reads this post will do this, we all will be more successful.  The community as a whole will benefit.  Most importantly, our readers will benefit because we’ve broken new and exciting ground that is both interesting and energizing as we add value to the overall conversation.

Want to watch me walk the talk?  Read Banging My Gong – The Vision.