How much did you write when you started blogging?

When I started blogging I wrote with no aim in mind except that of writing. Because I simply had to write. Needless to say my posts were long, not to say rambling… One of my first ‘Blogging impressions’ posts was about getting a sense of focus into a blog post, for good reason 🙂

The prescribed treatment helps if you’ve written a blog post and you’re wondering if you could have made it shorter than 1000 words… and whether you should make any alterations, and how.

How to get to the point

Recently, I read this post on Problogger which is very useful to compose a compact, powerful blog post by planning what you’ll say and how you’ll say it. If you know what you want to say before you start writing. A brief summary:

1. Write down your main point
2. Explain your main point
3. Write down the arguments you’re bringing to the table to support your point

I was working on this post at the time and decided to have a go, and I think it worked.

Blogging in order to get (to) the point… or possibly to connect the dots

However, for some posts this doesn’t work. Specifically if you also write to think. Which basically means you start writing about a topic and let it take you to whatever next thought pops up. I suppose to a professional blogger, if you take this approach you’re not blogging. You’re writing, without a specific audience in mind (apart from you).

The blog posts I wrote in this way I sometimes needed to take apart, give a new title, et cetera, much in the way I describe in that early ‘focus’ post I mentioned. In some cases though, I rewrote my text less extensively because the value of the post lay in the way several topics were interrelated… These posts may seem less coherent, less shareable, and they may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But they do their specific job by giving you a chance to think along while I try to make sense of things.

How do you blog?