Don’t Waste Your Time (and others) By Publishing Crap

In terms of article titles, this is about as risque as I get. Perhaps I was inspired by a few of Danny Brown’s recent titles (especially since his blog, which is awesome, gets more traffic than mine!) or maybe I’m just using today’s as an experiment since it’s a bit out of character for me, but no other title I considered using for this post seemed to get to the point as appropriately as this one does.

We’ve all heard the expression “think before you speak” and I think the same can be said for posting content on a blog/YouTube channel/Facebook page/wherever. Whether for yourself or for a client, too often we move quickly to publish something because its been so many days since we last said anything. So what happens? You rush through the production and the content ends up taking a backseat. The result is something that provides nothing of value to the community simply because you wanted to get the job done and failed to consider whether or not what you had to say was actually going to help anyone.

How many of you have been in this position or have done this before? I know I have, and it’s wrong. For example, I try to stay on a schedule and post informative content at least two times a week on this blog. But there have been times that I’ve been up late at night struggling to try and decide what to post on this blog for the coming day, and often I get blogger’s block (the equivalent of writer’s block) and wonder what I’m going to do. Unfortunately, this had led to a few instances where I ended up posting something just for the sake of it and the result was a subpar article.

I’ve come to accept the fact that I’ve probably made some poor decisions at times and ended up posting content that probably didn’t help many people, but no longer will I make that mistake. I will especially take the lessons I’ve learned to help counsel clients and continue to stress to them that they “think before they publish” and not post anything that they aren’t 100 percent behind and proud of.

So the moral of the story is to slow down. Don’t get caught up in schedules and deadlines. Instead, wait until the time strikes, and it will, when you have an idea for a post that will benefit others. If you spend most of your time and energy worrying about frequency and getting the work over with instead of concentrating on the actual importance of the material being published, then not only are you wasting your time and that of your audience, but you are hurting yourself in the process because people will slowly stop listening to what you have to say.