You’re sitting at your desk, sipping coffee, gearing up for a productive day and…
EUREKA!
Out of no where, an idea for a great blog post pops in your head.
You know it would be a huge mistake to let this idea slip by, so you immediately start pecking the keyboard.
Thirty minutes into the writing session, you lean back in your chair, put your hands behind your head, and say to yourself, “Wow, what in world is this BS?”
Backspace, backspace, backspace. Now you’re frustrated and that frustration instantly kills the creative process. So you take a break. After your blood has stopped boiling, you decide to take another stab at it…and the exact same thing happens again!
Maybe you try a couple more times, but, to prevent any further self-destruction, you eventually convince yourself the idea wasn’t so good after all.
What a nightmare! This isn’t what you dreamed about when you passionately started your blogging journey, is it?
Avoid The Disease That Plagues Novice and Intermediate Bloggers
The writing process above — if you can call it a process — is the single most devastating disease that plagues would-be successful bloggers. It’s one of the primary reasons tens of thousands of blogs are updated for a couple months, then quickly turn into a desolate wasteland after being abandoned.
Nobody wants to feel as if they’re constantly up against a wall every time they try to take an idea from mind to paper (or computer screen).
The problem is you can’t change how ideas are generated. They fly in at the strangest times — while you’re taking a shower or thinking about everything except blogging — and detonate deep in your mind.
Ideas come to every blogger in basically the same fashion — randomly and spontaneously. They give no warning. They bring no set of instructions about how to most effectively use them. They just show up, sit on your desk, and stare at you.
Creepy little guys, ideas are!
The beginning of your creative process is always going to feel as if it’s on a crumbling cliff edge, because getting an idea is little more than a random, spontaneous burp of the universe.
The overwhelming anxiety you feel when you start working with an idea is perfectly normal and, as serial entrepreneur Jonathan Fields points out so often, it’s important to embrace the uncertainty that comes with creative ideas.
If You Can’t Change the Way You Generate Ideas, What Can You Change?
What separates you from the successful bloggers who seem to have no trouble pumping out amazing content in short periods of time? Why are you struggling so much to transform one idea into a valuable post?
The answer is actually quite simple: You need a formal writing process and a template that has been proven effective.
Most beginner and intermediate bloggers already know the lack of a good writing process is the main reason they struggle. I’ve personally been there in the past and I know it’s incredibly easy to convince yourself of three things:
- That turning ideas into great posts consists of nothing more than persistence.
- That you’re different from successful bloggers and don’t need to follow their experiences of what does and doesn’t work.
- That you’re special and special writers don’t need a formal process or guidance.
You’re Not Special and Here’s Why
Writing well isn’t about being persistent with an idea. There’s no such thing as “sweating out a great blog post.”
You wouldn’t have kept reading this post if blogging was simply a matter of being determined, because you wouldn’t have the writing problem described at the beginning.
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