If you’re experiencing blogger’s block, chances are your blogging has stopped being fun.

Whether your first blog post was great fun or a serious, perhaps gut-wrenching challenge – not everyone loves writing – if you kept going for more than a month or two you presumably were getting some joy out of it, on some level.

More so if you have been blogging for years.

Is there still joy for you in blogging?

Is it perhaps the most enjoyable thing you do every day, or one of the most enjoyable?

Or is it, at least sometimes, a chore and something from which you can very easily be distracted?

And if you’re someone who hasn’t started blogging yet, do you wonder whether you could enjoy the process, or would it be just hard slog?

I’m talking of course about business blogging. For someone blogging as a hobby, the presumption would be that he or she is having fun.

Even with business blogging, I believe there are some people for whom their blogging is more fun than, say, eating, or chatting with friends.

But for many of us, myself included, it is some sort of mixture of joy and dutiful work, with the joy sometimes anticipated but not immediately evident.

No different, fundamentally, from our experience of business – something that at times can flow effortlessly and be quite pleasurable, even joyful and that at times can be seriously challenging, perhaps stressful and even make us wonder why we were so dumb as to give up that perfectly good job we had, and the car, and the office, etc etc.

(At which times we forget, conveniently, the intra-office politics, the commute, the lousy coffee… in short, all the reasons we chucked that way of life for this work at home caper.)

With blogging, what I find as with other business-related activities, is that once I get going I almost always enjoy the process and certainly enjoy completing various projects, including blog posts.

So for me the trick is to get going. That means in turn that I need to set up systems and processes that take the stress out of getting going. And in the course of writing this post I remembered I had written about this before. I did a quick search on the archives of this blog and found a post from way back in 2005, Blogger’s Block Zapped Thanks to a Well-Travelled Meme. The meme in question is a good one: I’m planning to challenge myself and use in the next few days – watch this space.

I recommend you also check out Grant Griffiths’ excellent post on the subject: Writer’s Block – It’s all about the cows. Grant thinks blogging should be fun, too. Yes, even (especially?) business blogging.

What really gives me joy with blogging is getting feedback that a particular post has helped someone understand something better or find something they were looking for. But to get to that I have to first do the post, which means getting started…

Do you have any tricks of the trade to share, for beating blogger’s block?

Image: entrance to Luna Park, Sydney, March 2009, copyright Des Walsh

So how did my LinkedIn search go for groups of home based professionals?

This is a follow-on from my post yesterday, on looking for relevant online conversations, starting with the professional-focused networking site LinkedIn.

On my first attempt to find groups via (as I recall) the search term “home based professionals” the result was some fifty pages of groups. With ten a page, that made around 500 groups.

The listings included:

The first of these was of general interest, but I wasn’t sure that at this point I wanted to get into discussions about starting a home based business.

The second – Consultants Network – looked interesting, especially as it had a big membership at 118,911, and what looked like a busy discussion space, with 85 discussions listed, far more than I had seen for other groups.

The Consultants Network group describes itself as:

A group that unites all strategy, marketing, finance, business, IT consultants & freelancers. With over 100,000+ global members the largest consultancy community on LinkedIn. (consulting, management, business, interim, freelance, advisory, consultant, recruitment, network, professionals)

I had to submit a request to join. That did not bother me, because I like the idea that there is some process of vetting going on. Although I’m wondering what’s happening. It’s about three days since I submitted that request and I’ve since sent a follow-up. No reply of any kind yet. (Update: three weeks on – April 6 – there is still no response – I have also sent messages, via LinkedIn connections, to the nominated owner and nominated manager of the group, neither of whom has replied.)

By way of a footnote to this post, as I started writing I thought, why just LinkedIn? Why not Yahoo!? Why not other networks and forums?

Why not, indeed! Especially as, at this writing, this area of professionals working from home is not looking a likely area for discussion on LinkedIn.

So I’ve decided to do a series on various social networking platforms, under the general heading of Looking for Conversations. Next I might have a look at Yahoo! Groups.

In the meantime, have you had any interesting, useful or curious experiences with LinkedIn Groups and if so would you like to share them? I hope you will leave a comment.