Power Blogging Hour (and Why You Should Have One Too) | Hacker News Reader

Power Blogging Hour (and Why You Should Have One Too)

mygengo.com

It's a good idea to make sure that you write a certain amount each week (both for personal brand and startup brand).

I personally find that there are some days where I am incredibly driven to write, with the words brimming over in my head, and other days where I don't feel that at all - so I usually wait for the overwhelming urge to come instead of forcing it at a particular time, as I think that makes the writing easier and better. But then, there are some weeks where it never comes.

Perhaps there's some happy medium which both allows for creative spontaneity but ensures consistent weekly output.

I recently started a daily blog that I've given to a few close friends -- I write about anything and everything that I want to, from things that happened to me during the day to rants about whatever topics bothered me on a given day. Worrying about my audience and personal brand tended to hinder me in the past, so this time I'm trying to just write daily and not worry about that kind of thing. I'm averaging over 1000 words a post.

The problem with me is that these passionate urges to write occur maybe once a year. For someone like me, setting aside one hour per week to just man up and write no matter how unmotivated I am is the only way to really build the habit.

I'm just getting started, but I've found that writing regularly helps keep the words flowing. When I go for a month or so without writing, it takes forever to get back into the flow. I've set a goal of averaging one or more posts per week on my personal blog for this year.

My mom used to have a power cleaning hour when I was growing up and that house was spotless! I can see how this kind of focused attention is great for getting through things that are a bit annoying to do.

edited for cussing

This is an interesting idea, but I'm not super clear on what happens to the posts after they're written. Do you have a separate blog for people to look at and associate with the company, or do you have an internal-only blog for the posts?

Do you ever worry about image problems from opinions posted in PBH posts -- especially here in Japan?

Oh: we have Tim, our resident blog editor, review the posts and tidy them up, then schedule them for during the week. We share the posts so we can all have a look before they go up.

Image problems in Japan? Not yet... we're not super careful at the moment but we're also pretty sensible people too.

>PBH Nice!

Yeah I am pretty happy about the fact that I got an acronym

I have to say, the more I think about this, the better an idea it is. I want to go back and read your blog posts as they come up, and while I may never use myGengo, the blog posts mean that you have a way to take mindspace with me and I'll be more likely to say "myGengo" when someone has a translation project I can't handle personally...

A more free-form way of getting those posts out is setting up a Planet (http://www.planetplanet.org) that aggregates the blog posts from everyone in the company. This is very common among open source companies and communities. Although Planets are generally different than what is being proposed in the article which I guess is more about having all developers writing posts for the company's official blog.

I consider it an advantage to have a certain workload every week, but for this it is helpful to have a blog where you keep ppl up-to-date about your work if you have the time to blog. It also helps interact with others who may give you brilliant ideas who would otherwise maybe not have thought of before

Great stuff here. Reminds me of high school when we had 15 minutes of "free write" in writing classes . We were instructed to just write for 15 minutes straight - anything that comes to mind. Some of my prized work came out of those sessions. Great advice!!!!

Decided to restarting my blog which hasn't been updated for the last 10 months.

We've been doing some version of this for about a month, but now I feel like it's time to step it up! Good advice in here!

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