I’ve been writing. A lot.
This is a wonder as I used to produce two to three articles a month.
And there’s one good reason why: I’ve decided not to care about how perfect my article must be before I publish it.
I think part of the reason why I’ve felt so burned out by blogging before, was that I had to do so many things before hitting the publish button.
Research keywords, do tonnes of research and when it’s all done, write a magnum opus and optimize content for SEO. Each article can take up to a month to produce!
I’ve adopted two new philosophies that has supercharged my blogging volume:
- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (also called POSSE) or Publish Elsewhere Syndicate (on your) Own Site (also called PESOS)
- Digital Gardening
Blogging the POSSE/PESOS way
Twitter’s meltdown has awaken me to the fact that I’ve been producing content for social media platforms free for years, when it could be on my blog.
The POSSE/PESOS philosophy is all about having a homebase on the Internet. That homebase should be a website with a domain name you own. All your content should pulse from the website to channels you do not own like Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads.
I’ve worked in marketing communications for years and we’ve always told our clients and stakeholders to practice this, but for some reason I have not implemented this in my online life!
So, I began populating my blog with content that I would’ve shared on Twitter or Facebook. Short posts recommending an article I read. Jornal-like posts about my life. Half-baked articles.
It’s all messy and imperfect and I love it.
Digital Gardening
Another philosophy is to treat my website/blog as a digital garden of random notes, unfinished articles and jottings. The idea of digital gardening is that sometimes you do not know where a note or a jotting would go, but you’re here to record its journey towards an article. So digital gardeners will create an article, only to return to it later to add more notes or ideas. They eschew chronological formats. In the place of a date, their articles will contain something like “Last updated on …”
Some enthusiasts who literally publish their Obsidian archives on the Internet. I’m not like this, but I have embraced the philosophy of “perfecting it as I go”.
Cheryl Lindo Jones: liked this. via hachyderm.io
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Martha Crimson: liked this. via hachyderm.io
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Martha Crimson: reposted this. via hachyderm.io
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elizabethtai.com: mentioned this in The September 2023 Review. via georgettetan.com
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Pingback: Is the Internet really broken? – Elizabeth Tai
elizabethtai.com: mentioned this in Algorithm & Blues. via zeldman.com
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Great plan, own your content. Websites are far from dead. And although common user behaviour on social media is to ignore linked posts (though still “like” it), there are many of us that do actually follow and read posts in full.
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Pingback: 2023 Recap: Concepts and discoveries that made the year better for me – Elizabeth Tai
@elizabethtai.com
This bit about publishing the Obsidian vault reminded me of:
"What I have learned over the years is that for many academics the research journal they bring to conferences or workshops is not their only one, and that their other research journals look quite different."
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/11/04/keeping-a-research-journal-that-works-for-you/
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elizabethtai.com: mentioned this in Algorithm & Blues. via zeldmanproduction.wpcomstaging.com
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elizabethtai.com: Hi! Just in case you are able to read this on your blog I want to try if I manage to make work my digital garden! via comunicacionabierta.net
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