way too many blog categories
How you get a successful blog is something I’ve been wrestling with lately. I took a few weeks off at Christmas, and I just feel out of the groove now. The ideas aren’t flowing like they were before the holidays.

Lucky for me (and you really) Tom McFarlin is doing a podcast season on how to blog. During this short season of shows, Tom is going to share what has worked for him with his blog.

He’s not selling you anything, it’s not some 5 step program so you can have a blog bringing you in gobs of money. It’s 5 episodes to talk about getting your words out there.

One highlight out of episode one is, write. Don’t tweak the site theme. Who cares what plugins you’re using. Sit down and get content out. If you have no content, then it matters not what the site looks like.

Second limit those categories. On this site I’ve got way to many categories. Some came in when I closed down 2 former sites, but the site was already really fragmented. I need to tighten my topics up this year.

Episode 2 is out now as well. From how he’s tagging it you should be able to get all the episodes by hitting this tag

8 responses to “Some Blogging Advice”

  1. Tom McFarlin Avatar

    Wow – thanks for sharing this. The response on the site has been mediocre at best, so I’m really stoked to see this from you.

    Always appreciate your input, Curtis.

    1. Curtis McHale Avatar
      Curtis McHale

      How many people are you trying to reach? I found it useful to hear, and judging from some of the other comments here I’m not the only one.

      1. Tom McFarlin Avatar

        I’m late following up on this post (clearly), but I’m mainly just trying to reach the readership of the blog and anyone that retweets or links to it.

        I received enough questions that I felt like I had enough material to share it over the course of four or five short podcasts, so tried to do just that.

  2. Ryan Avatar

    I am guilty of putting site tweaks before my writing sometimes. And I don’t know how many half finished posts I have in my Dashboard… Good post!

    1. Curtis McHale Avatar
      Curtis McHale

      I think we all are guilty of that. I’ve thought about moving to some other platform I don’t know well just because I won’t be able to hack on the code. Means I’d have to focus on writing.

  3. Eric Davis Avatar

    I agree with the Category, I only use one (General) and just use tags for grouping things. The only downside is that you don’t have as much flexibility with your urls (/category_name/post_name).

  4. carrie Avatar

    Hey Curtis, thanks for pointing out the podcast – I’ll add ’em to my queue!

    Over the holidays I went through Headline Hacks (http://headlinehacks.com/). There’s an exercise involved – go through and just write post headlines. It actually helped me spark the thought process for post topics. Just an FYI if your well runs dry. 🙂

    1. Curtis McHale Avatar
      Curtis McHale

      Thanks. With the book launch this week (and all the work leading up to it) I am feeling a bit dry right now. I’ve been running so hard for a few months now.