Because I can’t explain it in 30 words or less.

I was reminded of this dilemma recently when I found the brilliant blog “Pocket-Sized Stories.” What’s that blog about?

Allow me to share the first 30 words you see at the top of it:

“When you teach kindergarten, the things that you bring home in your pockets every day tell that day’s story. Every day, I’ll empty my pockets and tell my story.”

That is perfect.

Who is writing this blog? A kindergarten teacher.

What is it about? The things he has in his pockets at the end of the day.

Why is that interesting? Because those things tell a story.

In less than 30 words the author of the blog gives an incredibly compelling reason to read his blog.

Is that important today?

Yes.

And it will be even more important tomorrow because, every day, 100,000 new blogs are started. Clarity is a great way to differentiate yourself from the masses. Although it’s harder to explain your blog when it has multiple topics (leadership, parenting, writing, etc.), it still needs to be done.

Can you summarize your blog in 30 words or less?

I can’t…yet. But I found a great example of someone who has, and I’m headed in the right direction.

Question:
What’s your blog about?

A few days after that, someone told me I wasn’t using Pinterest the “right way.”

A few days after that, someone told me I wasn’t using Instagram the “right way.”

The funny thing is they’re all wrong.

Not because I’m using them the “right way,” but because there is no right way. There’s only my way and your way and your friend’s way and your brother’s way and everyone else’s way.

Social media is like a dinner party. And right now, the world is full of experts who will loudly tell you, “That’s the wrong way to throw a dinner party! A dinner party has to be inside and have at least four courses. There has to be a vegetarian option, local organic cotton placemats and a dessert that, at some point, is on fire.”

And then you, at your outdoor crawfish boil and table scattered with corn and potatoes and buckets of drinks think, “Wait, why is this guy telling me how to throw my dinner party? I like to be outside. I like to grill and throw the Frisbee and have dogs and kids swirling about in the backyard. That’s how I do a dinner party.”

If that happened in real life, you’d never listen to that person. If anything, you’d probably make sure you never invited them to your party, and then proceed to boil more crawfish. Or post whatever photos you like online, or use Pinterest however you want.

Can you learn from other people further along the path than you? Of course. Folks like Michael Hyatt have provided me with an insane amount of wisdom and encouragement in the world of social media.

But don’t listen to experts who say you’re not doing some form of it the “right way.” The whole thing is like an hour old. None of us are doing it the right way.

And when I do, I say these four words:

This too shall post.

It used to be “This too shall pass,” but then I learned something about sharing your failures with people.

1. People can relate to your failures.
Chances are they’ve had their own. Chances are they thought they were the only ones. Chances are they know what you’re going through because they went through it too.

2. They can learn from your experience.
If you share honestly about your own failures, people can often avoid having the same thing happen to them. If you stepped in a hole and it hurt, it helps if you tell other people not to fall down that same hole.

The temptation, of course, is to only share your success. From the stage as a public speaker or from the mailbox as a neighbor, it’s much more comfortable to tell a story in which you made a wise decision. You look a little like a good guy. You win.

Fight this temptation.

We’re full up on leaders who only recount mistakes they made from 20 years ago.

We’ve got enough people on Facebook telling us about their perfect life.

We’ve got more celebrities crafting fictional reality lives than we can possibly stand.

What we’re missing is people who, when they fail, say “This too shall post.” We need people who, instead of dramatizing the failure or glamorizing it or oversharing in inappropriate ways, simply ask the question, “What did I learn in this experience that might help someone else?”

You don’t need a blog to “post” either. A post for you might mean coffee with a friend or a phone call to a family member. We all have the chance to post every day in a million different ways.

This too shall post.

It’s the new “This too shall pass.” And I’ll go first.

Several weeks ago, I found out that I lost 99% of all the Facebook fans of Stuff Christians Like. The group went from 10,000 people to 23. Facebook changed the rules of groups. There must have been something I was supposed to do in order to accommodate that change. I did not do what I was supposed to do. And so the group essentially disappeared. Why? I was lazy. I started to coast on a few of my social media platforms. I thought I had set them in motion, and that’s all I had to do.

You can’t coast with social media.

Lesson learned.

Starting again.

This too shall post.

Question:
What’s something your last mistake taught you?

Last week, we talked about the first three C’s of social media dominance: content, context, and clarity. Today let’s talk about:

4. Consistency

Two years ago, the readers of my blog Stuff Christians Like raised $60,000 to build two kindergartens in Vietnam. It was an incredible experience, and it firmly cemented in my mind the power of what a generous community can do online.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote an article about the first kindergarten, and the headline was, “Blogger raises $30,000 in 18 hours.” Technically, that headline was true, but the headline should have actually read, “Blogger raises $30,000 in 18 months.”

That’s how long it really took to raise the money. For 18 months, I consistently wrote Stuff Christians Like. I poured in a million words of the best ideas I could think of into the conversation with readers. Day after day, post after post, with consistency, I jumped into the discussion happening on Stuff Christians Like.

And I had written a different blog for a year before I started SCL. I didn’t show up one day out of the blue and say, “Hi, my name is Jon. You’ve never heard of me. Give me money for a kindergarten,” but sometimes we think that’s how social media works. We watch certain ideas go viral and think our business, cause, blog should go viral too. We want social media to be a silver bullet. Here’s the truth:

Social media isn’t a silver bullet. It’s a million free bullets.

If you use them with consistency and clarity, you can change the world.

If you try something for a month, though, and give up, you won’t change the world. If you write a blog for 90 days and quit, you won’t change the world. If you fool around with Twitter for a week and then stop, you won’t change the world.

It takes time.

It takes grind.

And it takes a commitment to consistency.

In the old school, “Who? What? When? Where? Why?” model of journalism, content is the “What?” context is the “Where?” clarity is the “How?” and consistency is the “When?”

When will you share your message?
When will you reach out to people?
When will you keep writing, blogging, and tweeting even when the results you’re looking for aren’t there?

On Wednesday, we’ll talk about the fifth word, “Community.”

(If you’re coming to the Quitter Conference, I’ll go into much more depth during our social media session.)

What do most successful people have that others wish they did?

A platform.

It’s the thing that elevates you so that your voice can be heard. And, these days, getting heard in a noisy world is easier said than done.

But if you’re someone with something to say or sell, building and expanding your platform is more important than ever.

Unlike a stage in the theater, today’s platform is not built of wood or concrete or perched on a grassy hill. Today’s platform is built of:

• Contacts

• Connections

• Followers

Your platform is going to be a combination of your online/social media presence (Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc.), public appearances, and possibly appearances in traditional media like radio, magazines, and newspapers.

But why build a platform…and why now? There are three reasons:

1. A good product no longer stands on its own. About ten years ago, I started to notice a disturbing trend. Let me explain. As someone who has been in the publishing industry for more than three decades, I know how difficult it has always been for aspiring authors to get published. You had to have a brilliant idea, a compelling proposal, or a well-written manuscript.

But that no longer seemed to be enough. With alarming frequency, we were turning authors down who had all of that. What they didn’t have was a platform. While we still believed “content was king,” suddenly, platform had become queen.

The fact is, competition has never been greater. As a result, people are now more distracted than ever before. And not just in the publishing industry. Just think about the crowded app market or the music industry. There’s so much noise that being good, or even great, is no longer enough. If you want to get noticed, you now need both a good product and a good platform.

2. It’s never been easier to build a platform. Facebook. Twitter. Do-it-yourself blogging services. These are tools that have become more and more sophisticated, yet easier and easier to use in recent years. For the first time in history, noncelebrities—people like you and me—can get noticed in this increasingly noisy world. Making things even better, most of these services can be used for free.

In the past, traditional media held all the keys. This is no longer the case. The gatekeepers are gone. The only thing that can stop you is, well…you.

3. It’s better to start building your platform before you realize you need it. The best time to build your platform was yesterday. The good news is that the second best time to build your platform is today.

You may look at yourself or your career or your business right now and think you don’t need a platform. I would encourage you to think bigger. Six years ago, I didn’t know I was going to need a platform. I wasn’t trying to write a book or release any kind of products. I was just trying to find a better way to communicate with my co-workers.

Now I have a blog, MichaelHyatt.com, that has more than 300,000 unique monthly visitors. In addition, more than 70,000 people subscribe to my daily blog posts and over 92,000 are monthly podcast listeners. I also have more than 123,000 Twitter followers and 17,000 Facebook fans.

To put it simply, it is infinitely easier to get a book deal when you have a platform like that than when you don’t. It also takes the guesswork out of creating good products. When you engage with your platform, they will tell you exactly what they want.

Start building now. The ideas will come.

There is no reason to delay any longer. The writing is on the wall and the tools are at your disposal. Don’t fear making mistakes—trust me, I made plenty of them along the way. If you have a message that is waiting to get out, there has never been a better time than right now.

(Go to http://michaelhyatt.com/platform now to purchase the book. Until the end of the day on May 25, Michael is also giving away $375.98 in bonus resources with each book purchased. I read the book, endorsed it and recommend the step-by-step suggestions Michael provides!)

Question:
What steps will you take to begin building or expanding your platform? If you’ve already began, how did you start?

conTENT not CONtent by Matt Chambers

I have a confession to make.

I’m a…contentaholic.

Never heard of it? That’s because it’s probably not officially a “real thing.” (Not yet anyways)

But I promise I have it. It’s self-inflicted, easily enabled, and I’ve been struggling with it for years.

Basically, it’s a mental filter that stops enjoying moments of reality for what they are and processes them according to what kind of tweet I could create as a result, or how amazing it would look on Instagram.

To make matters worse, now there are websites like Klout screaming at me constantly.

“That’s a pretty good tweet,” they say, “But if you worked a little harder, you could be awesome across the board in no time! Give us more!”

So I do.

I haven’t quite begun dreaming in 140 characters, but sometimes I think I’m close.

There are moments when I’ve actually ignored the calls of “Daddy! C’mere, I wanna show you something!” so I can finish posting content. I feel guilty and dirty afterwards, but at the same time I can’t wait to see how many retweets or comments I get.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this too.

There’s huge pressure in our time to forego actual memories in exchange for virtual ones. Everything we do has some sort of online social element attached to it, especially if that’s also a part of our jobs. But I believe there’s still incredible value to experiencing and enjoying the moments of our lives without a technological component attached. And it has to be purposeful.

To see our children grow up with our own eyes instead of through a lens. On the other hand, I don’t want people’s memories of me (especially my family) to always include a screen of some sort.

We must not allow the pursuit of posting profundity to overtake the importance of savoring life as it is.

We must be careful not to keep records of absolutely every experience to be blogged about at a later date.

We must learn to be conTENT rather than fostering our addiction to CONtent.

This calls for a commitment to balance, to the people around us, and to ourselves. I believe our work will be better because of it.

It’s a huge challenge, and I accept. How about you?

(Matt Chambers is father to 6 (including 1 with special needs), director of SafeWorld, founder of a new yet-to-be-announced project, advocate, speaker, writer, leader, learner. You can follow him on Twitter @chambers_matt or contact him directly matt@iamsafeworld.org. He writes daily at http://ethoshift.com.)

Technically, there wasn’t a trophy or anything, but I’m pretty sure I hold that title.

Blog traffic became a drug for me and I hit the refresh button on Google Analytics like a junky.

I don’t hate Google Analytics. I think it’s a great tool.

It’s an amazing way for you to measure blog traffic.

But it’s a horrible way for you to measure self-esteem.

I got those two things twisted. Lesson learned.

But blog traffic is a continual source of anxiety if you’re a blogger. You never feel like you have enough, no matter what amount you have. So today, I thought I’d share a really simple secret about how to stop worrying about blog traffic.

And despite telling my 9th grade math teacher I’d never need math when I grew up, this secret is all about the numbers.

According to statistics, there are 2.4 billion people online around the world.

There are an estimated 450 million blogs online.

If you divide the number of people online by the number of blogs online, each blog should have approximately 5.3 readers.

If you’ve got 10 readers, congrats, you’ve got twice as many as you should have.

If you have 20 readers, you’ve got a pretty good-sized audience.

If you have 100 readers, you are crushing it!

Is that silly? Sure, but it’s no sillier than thinking a certain number of blog readers will make you feel happy. That number doesn’t exist. Trust me, I’ve had 10 readers and 1 million readers and neither number was the answer I was searching for.

Your blog, the one with 10 readers, is great.

Your blog, the one with 100 readers, is great.

Your blog, the one with 1,000 readers, is great.

The average is 5.3 readers per blog. You’re absolutely killing it.

Question:
Do you ever get anxious about your blog traffic

Why?

Because for more than four years, I’ve written a blog about church.

In order to keep up with the self-imposed content demands of my blog, I had to become a content machine. I had to train myself to see church and worship and Sunday not for what they are, but for what they could be.

I had to develop “blog goggles.”

Eventually, it got to the point where it was hard for me to sing. I wasn’t really singing, but I was thinking about the different ways people hold their hands when they sing. I was thinking about the face the bass player made, would I title that blog post “bass face?” I was wondering if there’s a way to write about worship leaders who read lyrics from their iPad.

I started writing a blog about my life instead of living my life.

And I fear I am not the only one.

I’ve talked to a lot of mom bloggers who have told me the same thing is happening with their subject matter – their kids.

As someone who writes about his kids, sometimes I get this temptation. I confessed once that my six-year-old daughter McRae wouldn’t let me take a photo of her. I asked why not, and she said, “I don’t want you to tweet it.”

That was her telling me, “Let me be your kid, not your content.”

It’s easy to walk down this path, too. You only have to have one person comment on a blog post about something funny your kid said to think, “I should post other funny things my kids say.” And before you know it, you’ve started to take steps down the content path.

You might be better at handling the pressures of blogging. Although I’ve gotten a lot better at unplugging from my blog at church, I am most definitely a work in progress. I am not done with this struggle and will continue to search for healthy ways to write about church, my family and a million other things.

But, regardless of where you are with your blog, be careful.

Live your life first. Write your blog later.

Question:
Do you blog?

Here in a 90 second video I explain the thumb test, something I learned working in advertising. (What I don’t explain is how to not have the opening frame look incredibly goofy. Look at my crazy half smile. Ridiculous.) Big shout out to Patrick Tohill for putting together the video!

Question:
If you put your thumb over your last blog post, book idea or project, would it pass the thumb test?

After he went home and my wife and I were getting ready to go to bed, I wrote a tweet that said, “Great day with @__________, an artist who inspires me to be a better me.”

Then I asked myself a three letter word that has the power to radically improve every blog and tweet you ever write:

“Why?”

Why was I tweeting that? Why was I writing that and sharing that thought with people? What was my real motive behind that simple sentence?

The truth is, I wrote that tweet so that people who follow me would see I had dinner with someone cool and would then by nature of association think I was cool too. That was an ego tweet. Even worse, it was dressed up as if it was a compliment to that musician. In addition to hiding my true meaning behind the tweet, I also got to pretend that I was being kind to him at the same time. But that’s not true, because if I wanted to thank him for inspiring me, I could have sent him a direct message or a text message.

And I wasn’t tweeting his name so that other people would get exposed to his music and discover him. If that was my motive, there was no reason to mention that we had spent some time together. I could have added a link to his site and said, “I love the new album by @_______. If you haven’t heard it, you need to!”

I didn’t send the tweet that night, and I didn’t because I took the time to ask “why?” I stopped to ask what my real motive was. There’s been other times when, despite brilliant books like Start with Why by Simon Sinek and a history of ego-driven mistakes, I’ve just tweeted or just blogged without asking why I was really doing that.

Want to improve your blog posts?

Want to improve your tweets?

Want to improve your conversations with neighbors?

Take the time to ask yourself “Why?” You might not like the answer, but why always pays dividends if we’ll take the time to listen.

Which brings us to today.

Last year, Tony hit pause on his blog for the last ten days of December. Instead of creating new content, he reposted the top ten most popular posts from the year.

Why am I doing that and why should you too? I can think of 5 great reasons:

1. It’s a chance to remind your blog who is boss.
Blogs get awful bossy, don’t they? Give me new content! Update me constantly! Don’t let traffic slip an inch! Dance monkey, dance! Blogs will run your life if you give them a chance. Don’t. Your life is bigger than a blog. Remind it who is boss and break its control over you by walking away from it for a few days.

2. Your content in 2012 will be better.
It’s easy to get blog burnout. Depending on the nature of your blog, there can be a lot of pressure for you to constantly come up with new/awesome content. Give yourself some breathing room. Allow your tank to refill. Pause for a second and allow great ideas to gather. Your content in 2012 will be better if you give yourself a brief pause.

3. It’s Christmas. Focus on what matters.
“You’re not spending enough time on your blog Jon, you’ve got to blog more!” That’s something my wife has never told me. And she probably never will. Whether you’ve got a spouse and kids or not, there are people in your life who would love your undivided attention during the Christmas season.

4. Less people are reading during Christmas.
Don’t waste your best blog material on days lots of people aren’t going to be reading. It’s fun for my ego to think, “I better write something amazing for Christmas Day because next to opening presents, checking my blog is top priority for people,” but it’s not true.

5. Give people who are reading a chance to see something great they missed.
Don’t assume every reader you have has read everything you’ve ever posted. They haven’t. Posting your top 5 or top 10 posts gives them a chance to catch up on the posts that defined your site in 2011. Don’t make them do the work of digging through the archives. Do it for them, and share the best of the year.

Those are the five main reasons I’m going to pause at the end of the year. Will that work for everyone? Of course not. If you just started your blog or your blog is about Christmas, you might want to take your pause somewhere else in the year.

Practically speaking, what will a pause look like for my blogs?

Well, starting on December 26, I’m going to post the top 6 posts from 2011 on Stuff Christians Like. So #6 will be on December 26, #5 on the 27th and so forth. On JonAcuff.com, I’m going to post the top 5 starting on December 26. I’ll engage in the comments as time permits, but won’t be posting new content during those small breaks.

The fear as a blogger is that if you do something like this you will instantly lose all your traffic, people will never read your posts again, and when you return on January 1st you will find a zombie-like ghost town where a once vital, vibrant blog stood.

Nonsense.

Don’t be afraid to hit pause. Rest and renewal are as critical to hustle as sprinting is.

Question:
Have you ever paused your blog?

The reason is that waiters are often motivated to get rid of certain dishes. At the start of a shift, a restaurant manager will say, “We’ve got a ton of flounder that we need to move tonight. Push the pepper encrusted flounder dish.”

Then you sit down to eat and ask the waiter, “What’s your favorite thing here?” And he responds, “I love the pepper encrusted flounder.”

That’s not to say every waiter does that. A lot of honest ones are out there. But how do you find them? How do you sort through the ones who aren’t going to shoot you straight? How do you weed through the ones who have ulterior motives? Easy.

You ask them a simple question:

“What’s your least favorite dish here?”

If they respond with, “I love them all. They’re all amazing. There aren’t any I don’t like,” then they’re not telling you the truth. When you’ve eaten 30 different items while working at a restaurant, there’s at least one you don’t like. That’s just math. When you have 30 students in a class, somebody gets an F.

If they tell you, “I’m not a big fan of the skirt steak. I personally find it to be kind of dry and bland,” then they’re telling you the truth. And if they’ll admit what they don’t like, you can trust them when they say what they do like.

The same goes for bloggers.

If you write a blog and all you talk about is your successes in life, eventually readers are going to lose interest, if not trust. Nobody’s life is perfect. Nobody wins every time. Everybody gets an F at some point. But if you refused to admit that and, instead, edit your life, shine up your mistakes, and never share anything but your wins, then you become a waiter with 30 favorite meals.

That’s why I love how Dave Ramsey talks about the time he went bankrupt.

That’s why a lot of the lessons I share about parenting or blogging or writing or life are about the times I’ve blown it.

That’s why, in Quitter, I told you about the time I got fired and the time I got asked to leave a company before my two weeks notice was up and the time my wife cried in the kitchen because I was chasing my dream the wrong way.

I hate the flounder. And I’m going to tell you about it because I want you to believe me when I later tell you that the grouper will change your life.

And, if you’re a blogger, I hope you’ll do the same for me as a reader.

Question:
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve shared on your blog?

I’ve been doing it almost every day for the last four years and this is the conclusion I have come to.

It’s hard to build an audience, hard to create fresh content day after day, hard to know when it’s time to change things up and hard to know when you’ve strayed a long way from the goals that originally got you into blogging.

When I bump into those challenges, there’s someone I consistently turn to for help – Bryan Allain.

We’ve been friends for about three years now and he has generously helped me with any and every blog question I threw at him. Finally, after years of doing that for a lot of people, he wrote a book for bloggers.

It’s called “31 Days to Finding Your Blogging Mojo.”

I just bought a copy for myself. It’s only $4.99 and whether you’re a seasoned blogging pro or just starting to dip your toe in the water, this is an awesome book.

If you’re ready to overcome the blog challenges that wreck so many people before they really even get started on the fun experience a blog can really be, pick up a copy of this book.

The posts you throw together quickly that you can’t imagine anyone will connect with will be smash successes.

I don’t know why this happens, only that it does.

And when it happens to you, fear not, you’re not the only one.

It happens to every blogger on the planet.

Question:
Has this ever happened to you?

It’s tempting to spend more time and energy on promoting your idea than you actually spend on creating your idea. With social media we have a thousand ways to grab a bullhorn and tell the world what we’ve created. Which I think can be a great thing. I’ve loved the ability to tell people about the Quitter Conference or my books via social media.

But sometimes I fear the promotion of the idea has become our goal, not the idea itself.

I think it’s because a lot of us want to be famous. We want our book or our blog or our business or our whatever to wow the world. And get people talking. We want fame. But last week a 7 year old schooled me on that very subject.

I was out to dinner with my two daughters at a small Irish pub/restaurant. L.E. is seven and McRae is 5. They were talking to each other about the classes they plan to take in the fall. McRae is going to take art and L.E. is going to take gymnastics.

Thinking wistfully in the way that only a 5 year old can, McRae said, “I’ll be a famous artist when I grow up. I’ll try my best.” Without missing a beat, L.E. met her thought and said something that knocked me over:

“You don’t have to be famous to be an artist. You could do still life, comic books, children’s books. You could do anything.”

I love that idea. “You don’t have to be famous to be an artist.”

Your ability to create art is not dependent on your ability to create fame.

You don’t have to be famous to write a book.

You don’t have to be famous to record a song.

You don’t have to be famous to open a business.

You don’t have to be famous to start a blog.

It might happen. Fame might be a consequence, but don’t do whatever it is you feel called to do, just for fame. That never works out well.

Even seven year olds know that.

Question:
How would you define “fame” right now?

Photo courtesy Flickr/hirnschmalz

But upon seeing this I realized it’s a great example of how to ruin a blog post.

This is a graphic that was on a frozen pizza that happened to include some chicken wings as a bonus. And what struck me about this was the number of disclaimers they managed to cram into this tiny space. Let’s count them:

1. There are “7-8 WYNGZ”
They don’t know how many wings are going to be in this box. They can’t promise you there will be 7. Maybe there will be 8. Who knows? And since when does a range cover just two digits? Shouldn’t it be “7 or 8?” Is there a chance I get 7.5, with some sort of wing nubbin in there?

2. *
When you put an asterisk on something, you’re telling people there’s some additional information about the statement we’ve just made. Go find it. When you put an asterisk on the word “WYNGZ” and then need to disclaim it, I get nervous.

3. #
One asterisk wasn’t enough! There’s a secondary message you need to know about that couldn’t be contained in the first message. This is getting scary.

4. APPROX
Seriously? You’ve already told me 7-8. You’ve already told me “There are two additional messages you need to know about.” And now you’ve thrown in the “APPROX” disclaimer too?

There are four disclaimers. And that’s not even counting the way they spelled wings. When someone puts a Z at the end of their name they are being playful. E-Mealz, for instance, one of the biggest sponsors of this site, uses a Z because it’s fun. But when someone has to spell their name with two fake letters, I get nervous. What are WYNGZ? I feel like that might not be chicken.

There are too many disclaimers on this box to make me trust what is going on. And the same thing happens sometimes with blog posts.

When you write a blog post, it’s tempting to try to anticipate the way people are going to react to it. What will they say? What will they think? If someone comments on it, what will their comment be?

And sometimes you want to prevent them taking what you wrote the wrong way. This comes from a noble place. You want what you write to be clear. You want people to get the idea you’re trying to communicate. Which is a great thing. I edit and edit and edit with the hope that my main point comes through. But, if I’m not careful, I add too many disclaimers to my post.

Just last week I wrote a blog post with this opening line:

“When your business manager marries a stripper, that’s a tell.”

The post was about trying to build relationships with people who love you enough to know your “tells,” those signs you might be going off the deep end.

When I used that opening line, I thought about including a disclaimer right after that that said, “I’m not trying to criticize strippers. I know there are a lot of people that got into that industry because they got hurt and there’s sadness there. I’m not saying that a stripper can’t get married or find love or have a redeemed story.”

I wanted to write a stripper disclaimer.

Then I thought about sharing one of my own “tells,” which is weight gain. When I’m not making great decisions, when I’m teetering on the precipice of some foolish choices, I put on weight. My weight fluctuates by about 20 pounds. As I thought about sharing that, I worried that I better disclaim it. I wanted to say, “If you struggle with weight, I’m not judging you. I’m not saying everyone who gains weight is making a horrible decision. I’m not hating on people who have a hard time with their weight.”

Which I wasn’t, clearly. I was writing about a personal challenge I personally struggle with. But in my desire to make sure no one could possibly ever misinterpret something I wrote, I threatened to fill my whole blog posts with disclaimers. And few things ruin a blog post like a disclaimer.

Disclaimers water down your thought.

Disclaimers break up the momentum of a post.

And worst of all, disclaimers tell your readers you don’t really believe in your idea.

Be clear. Communicate strong ideas with strong clarity. But don’t choke your writing with disclaimers. It’s a great way to ruin a blog post.

How?

Well, on Wednesday, I wrote a post titled, “Who likes you enough to help you get better?”

But that wasn’t what I originally wanted to title it. I initially thought about naming it,

“Who likes you enough to say that you suck?”

I thought that title might drive better blog traffic. It felt dramatic and exclamatory. I once wrote a post called “Please, shut up,” and that one did well. Maybe that “in your face” style would have the same impact here. There was only one problem though, it wasn’t true.

The post wasn’t about someone telling me that I suck. It was about someone helping me get better. And, although I could stretch and exaggerate my way to somehow make the post fit the title, that would mean I was allowing traffic to dictate what I wrote. I don’t want to change the truth of my content in order to drive more traffic.

I named that one post “Please, shut up,” because despite it being an exclamatory title, it fit the truth of the post. Shutting up was what that post was about. Other times, I will soften my title because the desire for traffic is wounding my larger desire for truth. There’s a fine line there, and I honestly can’t tell you exactly where it is. It’s not always an either/or decision. Sometimes truth drives far more traffic than all the crazy, exaggerated content would.

Regardless of what type of blog you have, whether you write posts, share photos, or video the type of meals you’re cooking, etc., we all face this tension. The tension between truth and traffic. And how we respond to it is the difference between a good blog and a great blog, a viral site and a vital site.

Question:
Have you ever worried about the traffic numbers of your blog?

Photo courtesy Flickr/chris.loxton

It allows you to amplify who you are or hide who you are.

Choose wisely.

Question:
Have you ever struggled with being someone different online than you are offline? (Funnier, smarter, meaner, etc.?) I have.

But the answer to why people don’t read your blog is actually pretty simple. And it’s a question your readers would ask, if you gave them the opportunity. Here it is:

“Why should I loyally read your blog, if you won’t loyally write?”

Blog readers don’t set reminders to come back and check if you’ve posted anything new today or this week. If you get sporadic with posting and then go through a long period of silence, they won’t always notice one missing space from their RSS feed, especially when you’re first starting off.

You have to be loyal to the reader before the reader will be loyal to you.

You have to be committed to the reader before the reader will be committed to you.

You have to go first.

If you won’t consistently create content, readers won’t ever consistently engage with your blog.

When I first started Stuff Christians Like, I was posting up to 5 times a day. I turned on a fire hose of content. I committed to writing on the days when I had an idea that was easy and fun to write, like chasing a unicorn through a field of cotton candy. And on the days when writing my blog felt like going in a salt mine and chipping away words with that useless little screwdriver that comes in Swiss Army knives. (These days far outnumber the unicorn days, but that’s part of the hustle.)

Want readers to read your blog?

Give them something to read or look at or engage with.

Over and over again.

Question:
How often do you post on your blog?

If you have a blog, you have one.

You got one the minute you got your first reader.

And the challenge is that it’s invisible. It’s built based on every blog post you write, every comment you reply to, every link you share. It’s your unstated, but powerfully communicated, commitment to meet the expectations your actions promise.

Here’s what an excerpt of what mine might look like for my blog Stuff Christians Like:

• I will post six posts a week.
• Five of those six posts will fit the concept of Stuff Christians Like and be presented in numerical list fashion.
• Four of those five posts will be a funny reflection of some aspect of faith. (If the item is something everyone likes, such as “pizza,” that will never be on the site. That’s not unique to “Christians.” Everyone likes pizza.)
• On Wednesdays, I will write a “Serious Wednesday post.” This will not be a satire. I will not post it on Thursday or Tuesday. I will not post serious posts back to back.
• On Fridays, I will share the platform with another writer and encourage people to do a guest post.
• On Saturday, all bets are off and I will post short questions, videos of songs I like, and a whole host of randomness.

That’s not the whole contract, but that’s definitely a start. The challenge, though, is that it takes time to figure out what your contract is with readers. And sometimes you don’t know what it is until you’ve broken it. That’s what I did one time.

About two years ago, I started another site. I decided I would do a month long writing exercise on it. When it started up, I posted an excerpt and a link to that other site everyday on Stuff Christians Like. Everyday, for a month on SCL, I posted something like, “I just wrote a new post on my other site. Here’s the link.”

I did that because I honestly felt like people who read SCL would enjoy the other site I was writing. But towards the end of the month, a handful of people started to express their frustration. They wrote comments like, “I subscribed to SCL, not that other site and don’t love getting told about that constantly in my blog reader.”

And they were right.

I had broken the unwritten social contract. I had committed to keeping SCL about SCL. It wasn’t designed to be an aggregator of all things Jon Acuff. An occasional link to an article is one thing. But, for 30 days in a row, I cluttered the conversation I had committed to on SCL with posts for another site.

The good thing is that, although the social contract for your blog is invisible, it is fixable. When you make a mistake, you don’t have to reprint an encyclopedia.

You apologize.

You thank your readers for the reminder about the social contract.

You move on.

And the next time, you’ll know what to do. That’s why I don’t post a link to every JonAcuff.com post on Stuff Christians Like. Do I think it would help drive traffic? Absolutely. Do I think there are some people who aren’t reading JonAcuff.com on SCL that might like this blog? Absolutely.

But at the end of the day, the social contract I have with the readers of SCL matters more to me. I might occasionally share a link between the sites or make sure people on each site know the other one exists, but I’ll never post every link again.

Question:
What sort of social contract do you have in place with your blog readers? What do they expect from you?

After he went home and my wife and I were getting ready to go to bed, I wrote a tweet that said, “Great day with @__________, an artist who inspires me to be a better me.”

Then I asked myself a three letter word that has the power to radically improve every blog and tweet you ever write:

“Why?”

Why was I tweeting that? Why was I writing that and sharing that thought with people? What was my real motive behind that simple sentence?

The truth is, I wrote that tweet so that people who follow me would see I had dinner with someone cool and would then by nature of association think I was cool too. That was an ego tweet. Even worse, it was dressed up as if it was a compliment to that musician. In addition to hiding my true meaning behind the tweet, I also got to pretend that I was being kind to him at the same time. But that’s not true, because if I wanted to thank him for inspiring me, I could have sent him a direct message or a text message.

And I wasn’t tweeting his name so that other people would get exposed to his music and discover him. If that was my motive, there was no reason to mention that we had spent some time together. I could have added a link to his site and said, “I love the new album by @_______, if you haven’t heard it you need to!”

I didn’t send the tweet that night and I didn’t because I took the time to ask “why?” I stopped to ask what my real motive was. There’s been other times when, despite brilliant books like Start with Why by Simon Sinek and a history of ego driven mistakes, I’ve just tweeted or just blogged without asking why I was really doing that.

Want to improve your blog posts?

Want to improve your tweets?

Want to improve your conversations with neighbors?

Take the time to ask yourself “Why?” You might not like the answer, but why always pays dividends if we’ll take the time to listen.

If you haven’t seen the episode of the Office where Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) leaves the show, you’re about to learn the ending. But, there was a tremendous blogging tip hidden in that episode that I don’t want any of us to miss.

As you know, the premise of the office is that they are filming a show within a show and all the cast members are constantly talking to the camera.

In the last scene with Michael Scott, he removes his microphone at the airport and hands it back to a cameraman. The world goes silent. He mouths a single sentence and then walks away. From off camera, Pam, his secretary runs into the airport and they have a silent conversation. They hug. Michael walks away.

That was brilliant.

What they did in that moment was allow you to write the scene. Can imagine the impossibility of writing the perfect last conversation for Michael Scott to have on the Office? Should it be goofy? Should it be heartwarming? Should it be drawn out or quick? No matter the direction the writers went, someone in the viewing audience was going to have unmet expectations. Unless, they allowed the audience to write the scene.

By creating silence, they allowed each person to write their own dialog. To imagine what was being said, to fill in the space with their own words and hopes and dreams. And the reason this is so brilliant is that the writers of the Office don’t have access to your words. Remember that beach you used to go to in Ipswich, Massachusetts? Crane’s beach, with the castle on the shore and the way your bike tires felt in the sand the closer you got there? You could see a thin sliver of the ocean from the roof of your house when you’d sit up there with your dad. He was painting houses and going to seminary and life was full, but it didn’t matter because you had the beach. A real life, north shore, clams and seashells, New England beach.

You don’t remember that because those are the words I have in my head for beach. And if you write a blog post that has “silent moments” and isn’t so full of your story that you don’t leave any room for mine, those are the words I’ll use.

At the end of the episode, Pam summarized her conversation with Michael, but there was a sense that she didn’t say everything. And neither should you when it comes to blogging. Leave room for the reader. Leave space for the reader. Leave silence for the reader.

And I promise you, they’ll find an amazing story of their own inside yours.