The Walking Dead & Blogging

“You take blogging too seriously, it would be more fun for you if you learned how to relax.”

The funny thing about a comment like that is how off base it is in relationship to my feelings about blogging and why I do this.

If I had thought the person who said it was truly interested in having a conversation about blogging I would have told them the first piece of advice I give about blogging is to have fun with it.

I would have told them to write for people and not for SEO and that readers can feel when writers are bored about what they are writing about but that wasn’t where this conversation started or was going.

“Josh, how many blogs are you going to write this week?”

“I know it is ticky-tack, but blogs refers to a ‘whole’ object. You write posts. It is like saying how many pies are you going to eat when you are referring to slices.”

The funny thing about the conversation is that when you look at that exchange it does sound like I am uptight, but that is what happens when you see a small excerpt and nothing more.

You miss the big picture.

The Big Picture Of Blogging

The big picture of or in blogging is to inform, educate and or entertain your readers or at least that is how I see it.

I picture a blog as being a community bar or barbecue. It is a place where you gather with friends and family to have conversations.

It is why I encourage comments and try to do what I can to build a sense of community.

It is not about how many readers, shares or pageviews I get nor how many comments.

Those aren’t the metrics that move my needle.

I like engagement and I like seeing that something I wrote resonated with people and made them feel something.

If you are among those who know me in real life and or are friends with me on Facebook you’ll notice that I am not the guy whose social media presence is built to portray something I am not.

You won’t only see things that make me look like I have a fabulous life and that it is filled with sunshine, rainbows and unicorns.

Nor will it all be storms and cloudy weather.

It is going to be a mix of both sides, good and bad plus a bit of silly ambivalence.

The Walking Dead & Blogging

If you are not a fan of The Walking Dead there is still a good chance that you have heard of it and are aware that is a very popular show.

What you may not know is that it is popularity doesn’t come from the gore and zombies that populate its episodes.

It is based upon the characters and the way fans relate to this.

That relationship between show and fan is something every blogger should try to emulate.

Fans root for the characters to succeed, survive and thrive.

And part of what makes the show so damn good is sometimes those characters die.

No one is truly safe, they’ll kill anyone off on that show, reminds me of Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad.

I love that about it.

Sometimes heroes fail.

Sometimes they have good days and sometimes they have bad days.

That describes all of us.

They are real.

Be real for your readers and you’ll find that good things come from that.

It Is Pure Blogging

Being real is what I like about Pure Blogging and part of why you’ll find me writing and reading there.

Dad Is Real

My son and I had a heart-to-heart about some tough subjects recently and I told him I am not very good at sugar coating some things.

“It is easier to figure out how to manage things when we look at what is going on and don’t pretend that things are something they aren’t.”

He nodded his head and I told him that the trick wasn’t to look at the glass as being half empty either.

There is a balance of realism that exists between those two positions and though I can’t tell you exactly where it lies I know it is there.

That is sort of the tricky thing to work with in life in general, remembering to focus on the big picture and to make like Johnny Cash and walk that line.

What do you think?