We constantly promote the idea of having a professional presence and attitude towards blogging, whether your posts are for business or as a hobby. Yet, we know that no matter how professional you appear on the web, life happens in the real world that impacts everything you do, including your blogging. Unless you have a team committed to maintaining your blog, when an unexpected situation happens that disrupts the process, you’re blog will be effected.
You have seen this from us this last week. Not only has the typical content of articles of youth ministry and technology become completely personal, but our consistency and frequency have been completely been disrupted. Life happened (and this time we loved that it happened) and it impacted our writing. So the question from her is, how will this change things?
One of the biggest things that I have been wrestling with the past several months is how much energy that I am putting into these articles. I love writing about youth ministry, technology, and social media (otherwise I would not be doing it), but I know that now that my son is here, something has to give. Along with that, I needed to also consider the fact that I am doing paid guest posting for a couple of websites that help cover the costs of this website that need to have priority too. When I look at the number of hours I put into blogging, it is clear that we need to make changes here:
- seventy8Productions
2 posts a day, everyday of every month at about an hour and half a day means that I spend about 45 hours/month on seventy8Productions. - YouthMin.org
~6 posts a month means that I spend 4.5 hours/month for them. - Churchm.ag
25 posts a month means I spend ~19 hours/month for them. - Social media for 78P
About a total of 5 hours a week spread across several social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and now Pinterest. - Overhead time
For those plugin and web design issues as well as other small tasks, I spend a few hours a month tweaking things.
That totals to a little over 90 hours a month blogging or more than 20 hours a week. This website was suppose to be a hobby and yet it is consuming time I could be having with my family. So, where do I make the changes?
In the past, we have polled what articles you love to read, I have compared this with the stats of the number of views on different types of articles, and I have looked at how you have interacted with the articles. It is very clear that while you do read the youth ministry articles on this site, the things that really drive traffic and promote interactions are free stuff, technology, social media, and web articles.
So that settles it, the rest of this year will play out differently. I will be reducing my mandatory articles a day to one. At the same time, I will be playing to my strengths and targeting articles of technology and web related articles while dropping the emphasis on youth ministry. Of course, everything that I write about will still be seen through the lens of a youth worker and Christian, but we will be having a much tighter focus here and hopefully this will improve our quality of writing and interactions with you, the readers.
So what is going on your head right now? What do these changes mean to you?
Chet says
Just recently found your blog, and I’m glad I did. FOCUS is so important. I live in the world of tech, family, with a bit of ministry towards youth where I can. Teens and their lives are a huge thing on my heart, but with a 1 year old and a 5 year old in my family and a business to grow, I’d be doing my life an injustice if I “focused” on that right now. Instead, kind of like you said, I think it flavors all aspects of my life… and when the rare family-focused tech idea that will affect teens rolls around, my heart SOARS.
Thanks for your writings, and I look forward to reading more.
Chet