Doing It Passionately
Posted on November 4, 2010I've chatted about this before, I think, but when I was training guides in the desert I had one thing that I tried to bang into everyone's head. Let every one of your guests have a meaningful experience.
Today is our kids year end show, so I don't have that much time to sit and write, so I thought I'd throw one quick one off the top of my head. I'll get back to my scheduled post by Monday. Tomorrow I'm giving blood - the vampires have been calling - Namibia needs my fancy O+ blood. I try not to write on Fridays anyway, I spend the day organizing and finishing the stuff I didn't do.
Well, there's nothing I enjoy catting about more than passion. Passion matters.
[ Image by Audrey Sel | License ]
Sandcurves could have been nothing more than a personal blog to throw stuff at as personal therapy. I'm not really sure why, but from early on, this site's had more traffic than anything else I've worked on before, so it has been somewhat of a fun ride. Perhaps it was a significant retweet, I don't know? The traffic is still small compared to many bloggers, but it's enough to get me excited.
It has also made me feel somewhat obligated to do something with it. I just feel jabber on about nothing much when I have real readers is a wrong.
What's more, you guys are spending around 8 minutes on average on this site! To me, you're crazy (and awesome)! Clearly some people do read on the internet (or you just open my page, get so bored that you leave the browser open and go make coffee)????
[Google Analytics for Sandcurves showing the time on site]
I've only stuck analytics on here for just over a month, so it's not much data to work with, but the stats for this website are far and away the best I've ever experienced.
What's that have to do with passion
I enjoyed building the site. A lot! Building up a website from the blog engine is, well, cool. If you blog with blogger or wordpress you select some stuff, choose a password and five minutes later, Bob's your uncle you're blogging. But if you made it yourself, even if it's somewhat sucky, it's yours and it's therefor awesome!
I also love the name, Sandcurves. I've spent hundreds of hours in the dunes, walking, sitting, riding awful quad-bikes and driving tours in 4x4s through the dunes. I wanted a name that related to me, had some connection to pizazz and sounded cool. (Just for reference, my companies name is 'Frantic Naturalist').
What I didn't realize right away was that I was seriously passionate about just producing content and growing the site.
What's that got to do with your site
I've been reading blog. A lot. There are some amazing blogs that I can't wait to go back to, and then there are others that I think "why bother". Both of those are easy to deal with. But there are also those sites that I feel like I need to read to keep up with everything in the 'how to blog' space.
Sometimes it's hard work to get through those blog posts. It might be a popular blog that has lost some of it's initial pizazz because of simply relying totally on guest posts, or it could be stuff I want to learn.
There's something to having a unique selling point (or however you refer to it). Of course, that matters a lot. But, I think unless you started blogging with a brilliant idea that is so unique that it's going to get Steve Jobs talking, you're going to have to start with an idea and sharpen it up from there until you find your niche.
You know there are a lot of blogs out there and if you want to be read, it needs to have something. You can strive for uniqueness. But uniqueness isn't the only game in town - you can still take some of the spotlight with a healthy dose of passion! What's more, it helps you get off your butt and keep working on your site!
