Content Brew and Thinking Inside the Box

I am a firm believer that you can learn almost anything through practice, failures, and google searches.

When starting this blog, I relied heavily on resources, blog tips, and tutorials from many veteran bloggers, writers, and marketing mavens.

And then I launched and found that trial and error is just one of the things that comes with the territory. And if I’d like to take this whole writing, blogging, expanding my platform thing seriously, it was going to take some hard work.

There is so much content available for anyone who wants to learn to be a better writer, blogger, and social media guru, but it all takes time to process, implement, and experiment.

And time is something I have less of.

Being a home school mom of 3, a business owner, a wife, and occasional socializer with actual humans, I have to be more efficient with my time or this blog will detract  from my life rather than be the overflow of it; which defeats the purpose and is one surefire way to get burnt out quickly.

That being said, I tend to write as a discipline but often junk my words because they are really not suitable for human consumption. Just random musings and jumbled thoughts, some of which evolve into blog posts.

I tend to stew on topics for a long time before they ever make it to the published page. Anne Lammott calls it the writers crappy( but with a more colorful word) first draft. And she says we all need those to get to the place where it  falls into place, after lots of edits and cuts and rewrites.

So when people talked about scheduling posts and editorial calendars, it always seemed a tad restrictive and formal to my mind. How could someone possibly know what they want to write about in 3 weeks or a month or a year?  I did try to use an editorial calendar plug-in and uploaded some posts when I was in a particularly wordy-idea-filled mood but for the most part my writing seemed to get more and more sluggish and thoughts farther apart.

Could I really be burnt out after blogging for only 7 months? Maybe, I should have stuck to journaling scribbles in a private diary and left the blogging for the visionaries?

So when I heard about Momcomm’s Content Brew course and how blog saving and revitalizing it was, I signed up.

Here’s the thing, I have read a lot of ebooks on blogging, listened to a lot of podcasts, and own almost every book on writing that I can find, but there’s something about Melissa’s very practical content that has changed the way I look at blogging.

Her content calendar ideas alone helped to get me out the rut and instead of always trying to gather thoughts and think outside of the box, the practice of filling in the boxes and ideas gave me a structure with which to build.

I always thought of myself as a sort of  free-spirited life blogger. Writing about whatever is trying to escape my scrawled ink dance,  but I realize I lacked focus.

I would participate in Five Minute Friday’s over at Lisa Jo’s and I could always (or almost always)  just crank out five minutes and they were decent. Granted, they may have been better if I had the time to edit and rewrite but for the purpose of the exercise, I usually just read the prompt word and the pictures formed in my mind and arranged themselves in neat rows of type across the page.

But I know now  that one tiny word prompt, although interpreted freely, gave me a framework to build my story.

And sometimes no matter how free you think you are in writing, you can get lost without a good direction.

So, here’s to a new page or post in blogging and to avoiding burn out and time suck while I gather my #$@&^% first draft.

These were my thoughts and I am getting no kickbacks, boxed chocolates, or wink winks from MomComm but I seriously recommend taking a Content Brew course if you need some blogging oomph. We’re only on day three, and I’m loving the information so far. Do you have any blogging tips, advice, or practices that have helped you overcome burn out or make you more efficient? I’d love to hear what works for you. 

I love it when you help spread the word and share with friends.