I was just reading Patti Stafford’s post on Staying Motivated when you are not seeing results and I had to chuckle to myself because I’ve just recently changed things up big time on my own blog. For seven years I’ve written about myself and my life through my blog. I started doing a photograph a day in 2005 and would post the photo and write something about it or about my family. I began to wonder why I wasn’t getting many comments. I figured that I’ve been doing all the talking. So I stopped.
I didn’t stop posting my photo however. I continued to take my daily photo and instead of doing all the talking I just posted my photo to see how the conversation would go. Would the photo spark conversation? Would my lack of written post spark conversation, concern, anger, apathy. It has been an experiment going on for about a week now and I am enjoying the results.
What I’ve also been doing is getting more efficient. Ive been using PixelPipe to blast my daily photo to a ton of sites. This has helped me post so much faster and to so many different places quickly and easily. When I first did the blast I ended up spamming Twitter because I had so many separate sites automatically posting to Twitter. It has definitely been a learning curve to make sure that I am getting the information out there quickly but not overextending the amount of repeat information that is being posted. But I am enjoying the simplicity of PixelPipe, a sort of set it and forget it site.
Part of why I am changing things up is that I have been writing an ebook for content creation. The ebook is being made in conjunction for my speaking engagements at Modern Media Man and also Blog World Expo. My sessions are titled “Energize Your Blog with Surf-Stopping Images” (Modern Media Man) and “Content You Care About” (Blog World Expo). Having all this extra time by not writing daily posts has really freed me to get this ebook finished. And, after the conferences the ebook will be available for anyone through my blog. I’ll post a link to it here once I make that available to everyone.
Because of that newfound time and energy I’m thinking of actually doing a Silent September and all of my Photo-A-Day posts will be photos only and have no commentary at all from me. Maybe do a weekly recap of what was going on in our lives because there actually are people who are missing my daily recaps. So, I think this experiment is interesting because changing things up a bit actually gets me some better insight into my audience. So if you get a chance, change things up and give your audience their voice.
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