Mack Collier’s Sunday night #blogchat discussion on Twitter wins fans

One of the neat things that has happened on the social networking platform Twitter is the emergence of “hashtag chats”, where the use of a # hashtag in a tweet lines that tweet up in a discoverable stream of tweets using the same hashtag.

Anyone can make a hashtag. Not all of them attract attention.

One that has is #blogchat, set up by blogger Mack Collier – @MackCollier – on Sunday nights 8-9PM Central Time, for discussion about blogging.

That works out as late Monday morning for me and although I had other plans for what I was going to do today I found the discussion on #blogchat so engaging that some of those plans experienced some slippage.

From some of the tweets, today as on other days, I saw that I am not alone in thinking #blogchat well worth the time spent in following the discussion. There is also the fact that I got to connect with a number of bloggers I might not otherwise have discovered.

Blogging raises questions

A paradox I have learned from years of blogging and talking about blogging is that while blogging is basically a simple process it seems also to have an inexhaustible capacity to generate questions.

It is simple because with the right advice and guidance it doesn’t take much to set up a blog and get started blogging.

But once you get serious about blogging, there are marvellous possibilities for variation and relative complexity, especially when you start to delve into such aspects as the mysteries of search engine optimization (SEO).

Not to mention the scope for quite basic questions to arise, such as the hardy perennial of which blogging platform to use.

So where does the work from home professional go with questions about blogging?

From what I’ve seen to date, the Twitter #blogchat stream would be a good place to start. The tweets reflect quite a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience of blogging, from people just starting out to quite seasoned practitioners.

As one might expect, there is no shortage of opinions delivered with supreme confidence as the *only* answer to some questions and if you tried to follow all the advice given on #blogchat you would go totally barmy. But there is plenty of useful information being shared.

So, as long as you maintain some objectivity and think about what you want to achieve rather than what someone else thinks you should do, you should be able to get some valuable information and some good tips – “tricks of the trade” so to speak – as I do each week on #blogchat.

Would love to know how you go if you try it.

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?