Welcome to WeeWebWork 2009! I hope you had a wonderful New Years and you’re ready to get working on some of those New Years Resolutions. I have decided as one of my goals that I want to work a little bit everyday in becomming a better blogger. I sat down, read my notes on becoming a better writer and put together 5 Wee Steps that I can use everyday to become a better blogger.

You’ll find that Wee Steps are also a new item here on the site. Every blog entry will wrap up with some Wee Steps: tasks that can be done in less than 15 minutes that will help you get better at whatever the article topic of the day is. My hope is to provide you with an entertaining read followed by concrete actions you can take to improve productivity, jump start your writing, or learn a new skill or service. In less than 15 minutes.

1.) I will get to know my audience.

I’ve never been much of a stat person, but statistics are a good way of finding out where the interests of your audience lie. Finding out what motivates your audience is key to being able to provide them with the information they want. If you can’t anticipate their needs, it will be difficult to capture their attention with something amazing. It’s like a pinata: swing and a miss, swing and a miss, and then a dull thud as you hit something but get little response. Get in touch with your audience and it will be as if you took the blindfold off and you know exactly where to hit to produce the candy.

Wee Steps:

Time: 10 minutes.

2.) I will read at least 1 post a day on another website and comment on it.

Bloggers don’t operate in a vacuume. We’re all part of a community that shares and grows. We get inspiration from each other and we inspire each other. We also reach out to, in many cases, the same audience. I follow several blogs and sometimes I notice a bit of overlap when it comes to subject. But each blog, each writer, offers a different perspective or has a different tip to offer.

Wee Steps:

Time: 10 minutes.

3.) I will brainstorm ideas for 5 minutes a day.

If you’re writing from scratch everyday you’re sure to run into one of those days when the well is just plain old dry. Nothing’s inspiring you, nothing is sitting there on the tip of your tounge. It’s just a blah writing day. That’s where brainstorming every day comes in handy. It helps beat the blahs by encouraging a happy habit of creation and, just in case the blahs take over anyway, you have a plethora of ideas to fall back on.

Wee Steps:

Time: 5 minutes.

4.) I will write everyday.

It doesn’t matter what I write about, or how good the content is. All that matters is that I create a habit of writing something from scratch each day. I won’t edit any of this “free writing” but I will keep it, save it for later. Then I will take it out at a later time to polish it and care that beautiful statue out of the marble.
Creating a habit out of writing is my goal. To loosen the floodgates of creativity. I will probably start out with only 10 minutes of free writing, to a timer of course. I’ll try to type, but sometimes good old fashioned hand writing might be used – it’s easier to set up and get going sometimes. Remove the distractions and delays. Get to the point of the exercise.

5.) I will edit everyday.

This is a completely seperate exercise from the writing. Why? The point of this is to create a habit of seperating writing from editing. I have a habit of editing as I write – which is a surefire way of stopping myself from writing anything. So I need to seperate the two. Preferably a few hours from when I wrote the piece.
The second reason is I want to become a better editor. I want to take a completely analytical approach to the work. Fine tune the grammar, care off the superfulous, use strong verbs and nouns. Become more aware of the nuances of the English language that I have taken advantage of all these years. Work on integrating a SEO in a non-invasive manner.

TIME:

So there it is folks, the beginning of 2009. Small steps, broken up over the day, so that when 2010 rolls around I can look back and say, why yes Emma you are a better blogger than you were a year ago.