Meme Week Finale: The Dream Meme
A while back, I asked the question, “What is Your Dream?” I talked a little bit about my dream in that post, and asked my readers to do the same. I have to say, I’m amazed at the response. Everyone who commented has something they want to accomplish as a writer. Here is just a sample of the comments:
Tom Vanderwell: ” I’d like to enjoy what I do and provide a good living for my family at the same time.”
Brett Legree: “I want to write a book about my wife and children. And I’m doing it, right now - so I guess I’m living my dream.”
Kameron: “My dream is to be a full-time novelist. I’ve gotten sidetracked with other projects and interests over the last two years, but I’m refocusing on that original dream once more.”
Pamela Weir: “My dream is to add value and change one person’s thinking.”
James Chartrand: “I have a dream that me and my family will always be happy and be able to continue to pursue their dreams.”
Every comment on that post has something inspiring and interesting in it. I’ve gone back to those comments many times as a source of motivation, and I’m sure I’ll do so again. What does all of this have to do with Meme week here at The Writing Journey? I want to start my own meme: The Dream Meme.
The rules are simple:
- Write a short paragraph describing your dream. What is it that you want to accomplish? Your dream doesn’t have to be related to your blog, though it can be. It can be anything - what you dream for your family, your career or anything else you want out of life.
- Identify three tangible goals you can accomplish in the next year that will bring you closer to fulfilling that goal.
- Describe one action - just one - that you will take, today, to work toward your goals.
- Link back to this post, if you please.
- Feel free to post a link in the comments back to your post.
- Tag specific folks or all of your readers - however you prefer.
To start it off, here’s mine:
My Dream
I want to make enough from my writing to support my girls through college, pay for their weddings and provide for my retirement. I want to do this managing my own business and writing what I want to write, rather than working for others. As part of this dream, I want to help other writers get where they want to be, as well. I want to do all of this while maintaining high writing and business ethics standards.
My Goals
In the next year, I will:
- Increase my overall income by 20%
- Set aside $1,500 for each of my girl’s future
- Open my writer mentoring program
Today
Today, I’m going to spend one hour after I’m done with my paying work to outline a plan for my mentoring program.
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Consider yourselves tagged.
To help you along, enjoy a little Aerosmith:
4 Sure-Fire Ways To Make Your Blog Useful
The more I read about blog promotion, the more I begin to think that some folks are missing the point altogether.
Heck, even I miss it, from time to time, and yet it is one of the main themes of this blog.
What is it we miss? Usefulness. Blogs are supposed to be useful to their readers. That’s one of the big things that differentiates them from simple static SEO websites. We’re all about building loyal readers, customers and clients by providing something of value to our readers, right? At least, that’s what we say we’re about.
But sometimes, we get off track. Feed stats and page views take precedence over providing true value.
Instead of helping other Internet writers to achieve their dreams, I focus a little bit too much on achieving my own dreams. In doing so, I work against my readers and, paradoxically, my dreams as well.
Take, for example, the idea of the links post. Everyone knows that it’s a good thing to link to other blogs. Not only that, there are almost always a large number of posts out there that our readers would find useful, maybe even more useful than our regular posts.
So, we collect a week or two worth of useful links and put them up on… Tuesday, right?
Nope. Links posts never go up on Tuesday through Thursday - those are typically our highest traffic days. No, we offer links when our traffic is at it’s slowest, preferably on a Sunday afternoon.
Why is this a problem?
In our quest to promote our blogs, we wind up being useful, but not too useful when it comes to pointing out other great resources. We also make the conversation on our blog that much more narrow and secluded by not engaging with other bloggers in our niche.
OK, so you move your links post to Wednesdays. Good form. Promote the pack and, in turn, the pack will promote you. Some of your readers will even remember who gave them all of those awesome links. That’s the first way to increase your blog’s usefulness:
Make links to other blogs a top priority.
What else, though? What can you do to make your blog more useful?
James Chartrand from Men with Pens asked recently, on Twitter, if bloggers ought to be allowed a posting vacation. I’ll leave it to James to gather and analyze the results of his little poll, but it got me thinking:
How often do you I post something truly useful on my blog? Let’s face it: sometimes, you post for the sake of posting, especially if you missed a day or three. Your forced content winds up being, in many cases, less than useful.
There are ways around this, of course. You can do like I did on Friday and count on your readers to make the post useful. (Which you all did, and for which I’m grateful.) You can’t do this all the time, though, or your readers might just catch on and take the conversation elsewhere.
So, how do we apply this idea?
Only post useful content, even if that means posting once a week.
A revolutionary idea, I know. Will it cost readers? Maybe. but so will the alternative, I think. Some of the biggest bloggers post on an irregular schedule, so daily posting isn’t a hard and fast rule.
There’s something else that can make your blog more useful. This one should be obvious, but I think it is so obvious that it becomes easy to miss.
Have you ever tried to read a blog with light gray writing on a white background? I’m 35 years old. I’m not old, but I’m no spring chicken. Reading gray on white is a pain in the ass. I can’t make it out. Same goes for that tiny print that the kids want to use these days.
I know, I know. Get off my lawn.
Seriously, though, your blog layout and design is an important part of being useful to your readers. If you make it difficult for readers to find archives or don’t offer a reasonably easy method of navigation, you’re making their job harder. At some point, readers will decide that it is not worth the extra work to find out what they were looking for.
Now, I’m not a designer. The “WJ” badge at the top of my blog is evidence of that fact. But, I do what I can to make my blog easy on the eyes and easy to get around, and I do that by trusting my instincts but also asking for advice.
That’s another way to make your blog more useful:
Make readability and navigation priorities in your blog design.
Do what you can. If you have a crappy “WJ” badge until you are willing to invest in a better banner, then at least make sure people can read your blog.
So, what else?
If I had to add a 4th way to make your blog useful, it would be this:
Foster a true conversation with your readers.
I don’t need to tell you how this works. You already know the drill. Put something in the comments and I’ll write back. Let’s do this one together, shall we?
What do you think? How can you increase your blog’s usefulness?
The Violent Truth of Branding
Some of you may already know this. Others may not.
For the majority of the early part of my writing career, I wrote under a female pen name. My alter ego produced literally thousands of articles on parenting, pregnancy, conception, and child rearing. Chances are pretty good that, if you’ve spent any time researching some of these topics, you’ve read my work.
While I enjoyed the work and it helped to catapult my writing career, the time finally came when I needed to break out, and develop my own brand.
Check out The Violent Truth of Branding over at Freelance Folder today to learn how I did it, what worked for me, and what pitfalls I fell into along the way.
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While you’re at it, make my friend Ritu happy by visiting my post, “The Exponential Power of Collaborative Effort“ over at Marketing Hackz today, too!
Three Ways to Juggle Life and Work
It’s Friday, and I’ve put off posting since Wednesday to work on other projects, including putting some ad space on this blog.
Of course, not all of those projects were paying. One involved Harrison Ford, and another involved Goblins. I’ve been prepping the yard for our Memorial Day cookout, too.
So, with all of this busy-ness, I need your help. Today’s high-quality kick-ass post that you’ve come to expect depends on you.
I want you to tell me the top 3 methods you use to juggle life and work, down there in the comments.
Next time there’s a new Indiana Jones movie, Dungeons and Dragons release and a holiday all in one week, I can put them into practice.
C’mon, faithful readers. Give me the hook-up. When you’re done, make sure to check out the announcement over at Men with Pens today, too. You don’t want to miss this one.
Photo by by morbuto
Fiction Writing Thoughts
I’ve got a gaggle of only loosely-connected thoughts for you today, all on fiction writing:
My good friend Kam, who is a frequent commenter at The Writing Journey, has re-launched his Blog, and is now focused on his experiences and thoughts on Fiction writing. He’s a good guy with a decent published novel and a great future, I think. Give Kam a visit at Pens and Swords. Tell him I sent you.
I’m not a great fiction writer. I can do a passable job in certain aspects of fiction writing, and I can do them in small bursts. But, it’s unlikely I’ll ever write a bestselling novel.
I greatly admire anyone who can finish a novel, whether or not it’s published. I especially admire folks that can get published, because it says they’re not just a good writer - they’re good at the business of writing.
As a fan of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, I’m a fan of collaborative fiction. I’m especially geeked about the collaborative fiction/RPG project my good friends James and Harry have coming out soon.
World-building is one of the more interesting parts of fiction writing, to me. Again, this comes from my RPG background.
I like the idea behind NaNoWriMo. I think I’ll give it a shot this year.
I often wonder if I’m cut out for fiction. Midwestern humility aside, I’ve got a decent writing voice. I’m just not sure it translates that well to fiction. I know I do all right telling stories, because I’ve had the same RPG group coming to my table to hear my stories for more than a decade.
All in all, I think I prefer Blog writing to fiction writing. Maybe it’s the interactivity, maybe it’s the compartmentalization of it. Hell if I know. Maybe I need to think about writing short fiction. Or maybe Blog fiction. Is there such a creature? If not, is there a market for one?
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