There are some great writers out there. I mean, really,
really, great writers. People who deserve an audience, and, at one time or another, they'll contemplate starting a blog.
That's the easy part - after all, it's never been easier to start a blog, and as a result, there's a
ridiculous number of blogs out there. There's obvious downsides to that quantity; there's a huge variation in
quality, and making your own work stand out from the crowd takes a significant amount of effort. Far too many writers (both for blogs and for more conventional publishing) start out with a false premise. They assume they're great writers - perhaps they've even been told so in the past - and because of that, they'll fall into
Field Of Dreams-like beliefs in what will happen once they start publishing their writing.
If you blog it, they will come. Sadly, it rarely pans out like that.
There are some great blog promoters out there, as well. Unfortunately, we can't all be good at everything. In fact, the number of people who are good at both writing
and web promotion is surely very small. In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest that the two might even work against each other. The personality type that produces good writing is highly unlikely to be much good at self-promotion; likewise, those who are dedicated enough to spend a lot of time "selling their brand" probably don't have a lot of time left to crank out the really good stuff.
Take a look. These folks are good at Twitter self-promotion in the 'blogger' category - and, depending on your personal tastes, you might not consider many of them great writers. (Of course, being a 'great writer' and a 'great blogger' aren't necessarily the same thing).
Back to our new bloggers. After a short period of time - perhaps about two or three weeks - aspiring bloggers begin to get disillusioned. They've churned out some wonderful stuff, perhaps some of their best work, and are disappointed when they visit their blog dashboard and discover they're not getting many page views. There's a few courses of action available. Many just throw in the towel, and another soul enters the
blogging graveyard. Some will persist with their writing - which is probably the best thing to do. The quality topics are still there to be crawled by the search engines. Visitors will eventually come, won't they? Posts will fall on the blog, but if there's nobody there, do they make a sound? However, they're not the group I feel most sorry for. Things are most difficult for those new bloggers who look at their disappointing page views and
decide to do something about it. Ironically misquoting
Edward Gibbon,
unprovided with social networking, unformed in the habits of Twitter, unskilled in the arts of self-promotion, they resolve to promote their site on the net. Perhaps shortly they realize that they're spending more time on the promotion (which many of them hate) than they are on the writing they loved. This isn't right.
This is what this site is all about. It's an experiment, let's get that straight from the start, and, just like our aspiring bloggers above, I won't hesitate to pull the plug if it just doesn't work, but several pieces of a puzzle fell into place yesterday. There's a way to get good new bloggers out there, for readers to discover good new stuff, for those high-profile web celebrities to find new things to write about, to introduce more people to Posterous, and - let's not forget - get this blog off the ground too. More details to come - but I'm sure those who noticed the title of this blog might have already worked it out.
Posted via email from GuestBlog Me!
