You Never Know …

… where your next great blog post will come from.

Yesterday, Sue Waters, the Edublogger, wrote a wonderful post for the “new to Twitter” teacher.  The post was called “Hashtags, Twitter Chats and TweetDeck for Education“.  Pass it along to those who could use it.

Now, I’ve never met Sue face to face but certainly have communicated via Twitter on many occasions.  Yesterday was another time – both publically, and privately.

This was part of the public conversation.

In private, we chatted about a bunch of things and I commented that this post of hers would get a lot of traction with the Twitter community who are trying to bring colleagues along for the ride.

In part of our discussion, she mentioned that she didn’t know – that no blogger ever knows which post will be popular with readers.  

That’s really an interesting observation.

I thought about my own blog posts.  I’ll be honest – not all posts are created equally.  Some come as the result of hours of learning fraught with trial and error.  In that case, the post might be a procedural one and take forever to write, it seems.  The last thing that you want to do is omit something important.

The other type of post comes very easily.  Something sticks in my craw and I just sit at the keyboard and fire from the hip.  It can take minutes to write and click to publish the post.  Sometimes, I even feel a bit guilty about it.

I took a look through the statistics here and there’s one post that’s far and away the most popular.  It required zero research.  I needed no screen captures or step by step procedures.  It was just something that I needed to write for supportive reasons.  The post?  The Folly of Legislated Extra-Curriculars.  I just felt like I needed to say something about the topic.

It’s the type of post that might generate negative responses.  “Yah, and it snowed more back then too…”  And yet, somehow, it resonated with a bunch of people who decided to read it.  When I wrote the post, I had no idea that it might be popular.

So, I think that Sue was absolutely right.  You never know!

Except for one case … the poorly read post will be the one that you don’t write.  You’ve got to at least give it a chance. 

While Sue’s original article is a great bit of advice for those new to Twitter, I think that’s the best advice you can give to potential bloggers … you’ve got to start, you’ve got to write.  You never know how it’s going to be received.