On writing this blog for you for 3 1/2 years… ish

I had another post half-written when I got this urge to write about writing for you.

When I started the Maximum Customer Experience Blog, back in 2007, the first thing I did was to write for a couple of months before… actually starting the Maximum Customer Experience Blog. I wanted to be sure I enjoyed the routine, and I wanted to be sure blogging was a medium that suited me as well as talking and teaching and consulting about Customer Experience suits me.

Turns out blogging is a lot like talking (if you want to come off as a human being), and so it suits me fine. And the routine… ah, I’m an old letter-writer, journal-keeper… in fact, I’ll write just about anything, from client work to songs and poems to giant research papers about my hobbies, if a piece of paper’s in front of me, so the routine of concentrated writing a few times weekly on one subject was easy to slip into.

I get asked, now and then, how I keep writing week after week, year after year. Well, one thing is to go easy on yourself. If you’re in it for the long haul, strange computer voodoo and Internet connection issues and illness and life and all sorts of things will come at you. If you don’t blog for a day or a week, the world will not cave in around you. Some folks get pretty rigorous about the schedule, and then they get pretty down on themselves if they can’t keep it up. To me that’s not a way to integrate blogging into your life long-term.

The other key is to act as if you have all the time in the world.

When I began the Blog, I blasted out a series called Experience Design 101. I’m still quite happy with how it turned out, and I occasionally revisit that “go for broke” writing style, with series like Naming Your Business 101 and Experience Design 201: Customer Profiling for Maximum Sales. Those series try to tell you all you need to know about a subject, going broadly over it and deeply into the most critical issues for your company to tackle, as well.

Most of the time, though, I write about tiny topics, and if you’re considering writing a blog for your company, I recommend you do the same.

Perhaps you’re a long way from considering yourself a “thought leader” in your field. If you decide to write day after day, week after week on one topic, you’ll find that’s just what you become—one thought at a time. Too much smashing your readers over the head with heavy articles that feel like homework is not likely to turn your readers on, and it will probably burn you out as well. Even with folks that manage to keep their writing light, so many blogs that I’ve really loved for their insightful content have died early deaths because they ran out of things to say… by dumping all the contents of their wonderful brains at once.

There are a thousand little angles on what you do for a living. On your main website, yes, you want great, timeless writing with broad strokes and some amount of completeness of thought. But for writing a blog, where you breathe life into what you do for a living, where you create trust and develop relationships and answer questions, paint the picture with a small brush, as if you’ve got all the time in the world to reveal the complexity of your field to your reader.

Come back next week for the post that this post interrupted, another little story about the ways Experience Design can make your small company grow big.

Grow and be well,

Kelly Erickson