Why my blogging has sucked lately :)

I’ve been blogging less and less
As many of my readers may have noticed, I’ve been blogging less and less lately – it used to be multiple times a week, then it became once a week, and recently I’ve been blogging once every other week or so. I’m sure I can keep up that pace for quite a while, but it certainly makes for a less interesting blog :-)

Anyway, some of the reasons why I’ve slowed down in my blogging:

Blogging is more fun when you’re meeting people from lots of diverse companies and industries
When I was doing my Entrepreneur-in-Residence gig, I had an excuse to do lots and lots of meetings with people from across the digital media industry. On a single day, I might talk to companies in mobile, ad infrastructure, payments, social networking, games, and more. That was a great opportunity to blog because it’s easy to see connections and talk about ideas across industries. I don’t do this much anymore, so it’s harder to come up with these observations.

Getting deeper and narrower results in boring blog posts
Getting deeper and deeper in an area is a key part of the startup experience – you learn lots of weird things about your particular project, your particular target audience, and your specific industry. This doesn’t translate to great blog posts though, because most of what you learn there is completely inapplicable to other peoples’ situations. Instead, you get articles that are too “inside baseball” and esoteric.

Long blog posts are hard (and get harder over time)
Sometimes I really appreciate Twitter’s 140 character limit because it forces you to be short and sweet. A blog post, in particular my blogs, go the other direction. Over time, this has become a big pain in the ass since I’m not as comfortable posting one or two paragraph blog posts and instead go overboard with essays. I should probably just come up with a word limit and try to keep things down to a more reasonable size instead :-)

News-driven versus writing whatever
Another is getting inspired to write something – it’s a lot easier to write to comment on something in the news, versus just thinking about a particular topic and writing something great there. It’s always helpful to have some inspiration.

Potential changes?
From the above, it seems like a couple experiments might make sense. A big thing I should do is probably to write shorter things, and maybe do more news commentary. We’ll see if that helps at all :-)

Anyway, less excuses – back to blogging!

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http://www.gamesbrief.com/ Nicholas Lovell

Would be good to see you blogging more, Andrew, I love your stuff.

But I disagree that long blog posts are harder. The challenge is to take one idea and distil it down into its basics. I find it easier to make a long rambling post than to to hone it down. But in 11 months of blogging, I have got much better. A good (IMHO, of course) post takes me about an hour and a half these days, down from a full day when I started.

So I guess I'm saying that to get back to blogging, perhaps you should consider the following formula:

Have one thing you want to say. Say it. Stop.

:-)
http://jratlee.com john ratcliffe-lee

Sounds like what you really need is a change in pace with the software you're using. Do you have a lot of drafts hanging around? Half-written thoughts? I had the same problem. My passion for blogging faded a bit and what I realized was WordPress, while great software, was the culprit.

Seriously try something like Tumblr (what my blog sits on) for a bit and you'll probably notice the change you're looking for. Too many people accept the major software choices as norm and don't invest enough attention to the design and focus of the software they're using.
Gabe

Just a theory – obviously, I can't see inside your head:), but perhaps the reason why you perceive a decline in the frequency and quality of your blog posts is that you seem to have been operating in stealth mode for quite a while. And operating in stealth mode kind of militates against the kind of well-ventilated environment that would be conducive to blogging . No argument here one way or the other as to whether operating in stealth mode is good or bad! I'm just saying that I could see how it might affect one's blogging.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

I do have lots of half-written drafts :-) That's part of the fun. I'm not sure that what I'm facing is really a software or technology problem though…
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

It's not just stealth mode – even if I were completely out there with what I've been working on, you wouldn't want to read about it every day :-) What I do agree with though is that going deep with a company concept creates a weird little vacuum that makes it harder to hear about (and blog) normal stuff.
http://walkercorporatelaw.com Scott Edward Walker

Hey Andrew – Your post really struck a chord. I’m a corporate attorney, and I just started blogging a couple of months ago. Indeed, as you point out: “Getting deeper and narrower results in boring blog posts” (see, e.g., my post “SEC Form D and Related Securities Law Issues: Q&A for Entrepreneurs” here: http://bit.ly/3lWoEj). Moreover, as you also aptly point out: “Long posts are hard (and get harder over time).” The “SEC Form D” post took me two days to research and write; other posts have taken longer.

I’m trying to do two things now to keep things interesting: (i) I am incorporating some video posts (see, e.g., “Five Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make in Dealmaking” here: http://bit.ly/10eiiN); and (ii) I am doing what you suggested – “comment[ing] on something in the news” – like I did with my recent post: “TechCrunch Gets It Wrong Re TweetPhoto CEO” here: http://bit.ly/1ipyed. Both seem to be helping based on my analytics.

I hope the foregoing is helpful. Take care, Scott
http://jasoncrawford.org jasoncrawford

Glad to hear you'll be blogging again. I definitely like the idea of shorter posts more frequently. My preferred format is at most ~800 words, at most once a day.
rickholman

Andrew: I have read lots of blogs by various people. With most, after a couple of weeks, they begin to repeat themselves. Your blogs are thoughtful, make me think and I check every day to see if there is something new. I recognize that it takes a lot of work to think this through, and then write these. One way you might look at it, is to go back through your blogs and see if there is an overall pattern that you could use to pull together a book or overall project that goes to the next level (the opposite of Twitter :)). Anyway, I enjoy readying your blogs. Rick
desmondpieri

Andrew, when I started blogging, the consensus of advice was two things: 1. shorter is better. 2. Only blog when you have something of interest to say. I post a couple of times a month. And I try to keep my posts under 400 words. That said, my “most liked” post — about the first job I did as president of a turn around company was I cleaned the company kitchen — is a bit over 600 words.
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/ Mike D.

I don't think you should pay any attention to frequency when you maintain a blog as a labor of love and not a main source of income. Essentially, you should forget about everyone visiting your site and pretend you only have RSS subscribers. Every time you publish something, you are knocking on their door and saying “Hey, I wrote something!” If you're my friend and you rarely knock on my door, I'm totally cool with that. Or conversely, if you knock and have something interesting to say, I'm also cool with that. But the worst thing is a lot of knocking without a lot of interesting stuff to say. Just write when you feel like it… don't worry about slowing down.
http://andrewchen.typepad.com Andrew Chen

Thank you sir! Solid advice.
http://www.goodpuma.com/ Puma shoes

So I guess I'm saying that to get back to blogging, perhaps you should consider the following formula:

Have one thing you want to say. Say it. Stop.

@andrewchen