Eating the Blog Frog

A saying attributed to Mark Twain is a good rule for blog content writers:

“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”

Productivity coaches Stefano & Sabine of Noisli.com explain the Twain saying as follows: “The frog is that one thing you have on your to-do list that you have absolutely no motivation to do and that you’re most likely to procrastinate on. Eating the frog means to just do it, otherwise the frog will eat you meaning that you’ll end up procrastinating it the whole day.”

Since the success of business blogging is so very dependent on the sheer discipline of continually posting new content, I was especially interested in some advice for writers I found in The Autobiographer’s Handbook. Author Anthony Swofford tells writers:  “Wake up.  Drink coffee. Write.  Ignore phone, ignore email, ignore world. Write.”

One of my own favorite marketing gurus, Seth Godin explains that “writing long-form content on popular topics in your niche will put your thinking on display and give your readers an opportunity to evaluate your expertise.”

The problem with that very good advice from both Swofford and Godin – maintaining a business blog requires what I call “drill-sergeant discipline.” From the very early years of Say It For You, it became clear that the key to business blogging success was going to be simply staying on task.

Psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson, who has spent twenty-five years analyzing high-flying professionals,says that elite performers in any field, he says, engage in deliberate practice, an “effortful activity designed to improve performance”. Momentum in the online rankings race comes from frequency of posting blogs and from building up longevity by consistently posting relevant content over long periods of time.

Content writers soon learn – successful blog marketing requires “eating the frog”!