Me-Focused Blogging

The following is a transcript of the conversation I just had with Claudiu. It started out as me thinking out loud to try to unravel my thoughts, but pretty soon Claudiu chimed in with his typical wisdom and clarity.  He was multitasking with a computer game, so the pace of the conversation was slow enough for me to record everything for posterity!

Celeste: There’s me-focused blogging and there’s audience-focused blogging.  

Celeste: I can write about myself all day long and it’s fun, but I also wonder who cares.

Celeste: If I want to sell stuff to people, I should probably write about them and their problems instead of just me and my problems.

Claudiu: There’s overlap, if you think that your problems are relevant to other people and their problems.

Celeste: It takes extra effort to make the connection between my problems and other people’s problems.  I can put in the effort as the author as the post, or I can leave it up to my readers to put in that effort for themselves if they care to.

Claudiu: There’s an in-between amount of effort.

Celeste: There is?

Claudiu: Of course there is. Some of your water station posts were somewhat in between. You had helpful advice for other people; it wasn’t strictly narrative and strictly you-focused, but it was based on your story. That was in between.  Is that a good example?

Celeste: Yes! And that’s true because I realized as I was writing about the water station that I had multiple goals and one was about helping other people. So I split up the posts and one of them was definitely more audience focused. I had a numbered list of instructions, but I used my own stories as examples for each item.

Claudiu: For the series as a whole you hit the middle ground.

Celeste: Hold on, I think I hear Luke waking up.

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Claudiu: So there’s starting from a story and thinking about how it’s relevant to your audience and there’s starting from an audience post and using a story to enhance what you’re saying to the audience. Those are ways it can be in between.

Celeste: That makes a lot of sense. And the two extremes are “Here’s my story — me, me, me!” vs. “This is what you should think and do.”

Claudiu: Yup, that does sound like two extremes.

Celeste: I definitely want to avoid both of those extremes on my parenting blog, and I think I want the overall feel to be more audience focused than it’s been so far. I want to write about general parenting concepts using my stories to illustrate my points. But that’s hard because then I feel like I have to have credibility as an expert!

Claudiu: No you don’t. This is how you develop credibility, Celeste. 

Celeste: Oh. So I start by pretending and then I get it?

Claudiu: I mean you don’t lie about it, you just write as though you already have it. Does that make sense?

Celeste: Yeah, and I can do that on my Revit blog because there’s less at stake.

Claudiu: Why can’t you do it here?

Celeste: Bad parenting advice is more destructive than bad Revit advice!

Claudiu: Celeste, you can always change it later. That’s important. You’ve got to really internalize that.

Celeste: Yeah. I guess I can save the worry about the impact of my advice for when I actually have people reading by blog.