4 Blog Tips from Stuff Christians Like.

Michael Hyatt is a blog expert. Seth Godin is a blog expert. I think of myself as a blog experimenter. I don’t always know what to do, but I have the patience to try it again and again in this lab of a blog until I get it right.

And lots of ya’ll are the same way. You’ve got a blog and have ideas and have had failures and successes just like me. I’d love to hear what they are today. I’d love to hear what you’ve learned about the blogging world. I’ll go first with 4 things I’ve learned.

4 Blog Tips from Stuff Christians Like

1. Get out of the way.

“Building a community” is a pretty popular blog goal. And it’s possible, but it gets hard if you force yourself into every conversation that happens on your blog. You wrote the post. That was your piece. That was your moment and now it’s time for your readers to talk/react about it. It’s great to be present in the comments, but things break down if you dominate the comments. People start having a one way conversation with you instead of talking amongst themselves. Five people or five hundred people are suddenly lumped together as “reader” and you’re “writer” and all the questions are posed at you instead of fellow readers. Get out of the way of the natural conversations that occur if you want to grow a community. Be part of them, be invested, but don’t suffocate them with your opinion.

2. Don’t get immune to your own blog.

I’ve said before that when you write about God, you run the risk of treating the Bible as a source of research not renewal. You run the temptation of confusing “writing about God” with “spending time with God.” I think we can do both, but when we lean on the writing, our personal walks fall apart. Same with the content of your blog. At some point, you’ll get into a rhythm and it will be easier for you to quickly churn out content. That’s not a bad thing unless you get “immune” to what you are writing. I ran into this last week. I got a phone call a few minutes before speaking to a group of folks about a post on patience. And the phone call was not good. A situation had gone poorly and I had to slow some plans down. That’s OK, I was about to speak about patience, I could just listen to my own advice, right? I wish. I got mad that I had to be patient in my own life. I wanted to tell God, “Whoa, I want to teach about patience on the blog, not live it. This is whack.” I was numb to my own blog. Be careful about this. Don’t ever lose the raw emotion and hurt and hope you started your blog with, no matter how big or small it gets.

3. Don’t chase people on the highway.

Someday, I hope my wife will write a blog. I say that because she is constantly dropping wisdom on me. (Hott wisdom in fact.) And one of the things she said is something I can’t tell you about enough. It’s a thought on hate mail and troll commenters. For a while, when someone would anonymously slam me on this site, I would sit at the dinner table completely absorbed in trying to understand why this stranger hated me. I’d miss moments with my family as I obsessed about the mean comment. My wife snapped me out of it when she told me, “Look Jon, you worrying about why some anonymous person hates you is like following some car on the highway that flipped you off. It’s like you knocking on their window when they pull over and saying ‘Hey, I saw you flipped me off back on the highway. I’m actually a pretty good guy, could I tell you about myself please?’” I’d never do that on the road, why should I do that online? Don’t chase people on the highway.

4. Just publish.

I learned something simple a while ago. When it comes to blogs, 80% perfect and published will always change more hearts than 100% perfect and stuck in your head. We forget that sometimes and get bent out of shape manicuring and fixing our words as if perfect is possible. It’s not. Perfect is a myth. It’s a poisonous myth. Don’t give in to it. Just publish.

Those are four things I’ve learned in the last two years about blogging. How about you?

What’s your best blog tip?