I’ve been writing this blog for a month now and so far I have learned the following:
It takes a certain discipline. On many of the topics I am covering I could easily write a white paper, or at least a long dialogue. However, blogging forces you to keep things short. I have found that I will have to break some topics into a series of blogs if I want to cover them fully.
And the trick is in making something short is to not over-simplify it. I have already caught myself doing that. Some telecom topics are complex and can’t be covered adequately in three paragraphs.
So bear with me as I learn this new medium. It has been interesting to write this way and I hope the resulting blog posts are of value to my readers.
There are a lot of topics. When I got the idea of writing the blog my first fear was that I would quickly run out of topics. On the first day I sat and thought hard and made a list of forty topics. It struck me that day that if I wrote those forty blogs that I would be done with this blog after two months.
Luckily, it seems that every time I write something or read something on the Internet that I think of five more related topics. I also now seeing a blog post every time I read a telecom news story. CCG Consulting as a firm is involved in a huge array of telecom services. This gives me a really wide spectrum of relevant ideas to write about. I don’t know that I can crank out meaningful posts forever, but I think I can do it for years. We shall see.
Some topics are boring as hell. So far I have not found any good way to spice up a blog post about an FCC ruling or about the current nature of access disputes. But sometimes these are the topics that small LECS and CLECs most need to know about. So please just take my most boring blog posts like medicine and just remember they are good for you!
Dear Doug:
You are right, running a “blog” is not as easy as one might think. On the other hand, if the writer/blogger has something (or a few things) pertinent and/or appropriate to say, a “web-log” is better than other media available — but with much, much wider access.
I congratulate you on making the attempt. Now the important part — how to keep the blog fresh and relevant, how to keep your readers coming back. “Web readers”, folks that read material from the Internet and other electronic sources, have already developed some unique traits differentiating themselves from other readers:
* Web readers tend to have shorter attention spans. Their materials need to be shorter, with simpler language… It’s almost as if the whole group has an attention deficit disorder…
* Web readers tend to be technically more savvy. They have a better handle on technology, its applications and processes, and writers can speak to them at a different level than those that read in other media…
* Send out your messages using multiple access points, and use the access points that are easiest for your readers to access — otherwise, they’ll drop you like a potato knish. One blogger that I know originally used an e-mail program to send out his blogs, and then got the opportunity to use a fancy new blog site.
He trumpeted the new site widely, but found that — while he picked up a few new readers on the new site, he lost many more of his old readers, and ended up reinstating his old e-mail program in addition… He now uses both processes.
Congrats on your good start. Now keep it up!!
Ron