A week ago I joined up for the Ship30for30 digital writing course.
I have been writing and creating content for the internet for years. But I never really felt that I was any good at it. The analytics didn’t really encourage me to push it either. It is hard to get a big enough following on a personal blog to keep it up. Some of my posts has made it very well with 1000s of views and others has gone quiet into the night with only a handful of reads.
Audience size is not the most important for me. It will help keeping me motivated.
I found the Ship30for30 challenge and in this post I will tell you all about it. But first let us review why I have not been able to get my writing habit to be a habit.
The difficulties with consistency
To write often you need to have something to write about. This was, and is, my biggest challenge. I quickly run out of ideas of what to write about. Most of the ideas I wanted to write about was bigger, or broad enough, that made it hard to get started. It became too easy to procrastinate.
I didn’t know what did work. Personal blogs do not pull that much traffic. And you do not get data to understand what flys and what doesn’t.
Writing is a lone sport. You have to do all the work by your self. It is first after a lot of hard work your content reach the internet and you, the reader. There are many opportunities for procrastination and lost motivation in this journey and all of a sudden the blog has been quiet for way to long.
All these are natural human things to end-up with. But there are ways out of it. The Ship30for30 challenge may be one of those.
Become a better writer by publishing every day
One way to become a better writer is to write a lot. It common advice is to write a set number of words every day and the compound effect will give you a book or a novell. Even if a book is not your goal the continuous writing will help you gain experience and improve on your writing and on your ideas.
The problem is that if you have a limited following on your blog you will not get much feedback and have a hard time to learn and improve.
One of the things that Ship30for30 does is to push you to publish every day. This forces you to write. Publish means in this challenge publish to Twitter. This platform has a lot of users and there will be more opportunities to get feedback on you content. Faster than by only using your own platform.
I, however, still buy into having my own platform where I can publish my content in exactly the way and form I want. With out any limitations. Thus I will also post the stories from the challenges onto this blog.
I will not publish every day on this blog but rather compile a weeks worth of stories and put them here once a week or so.
Endless ideas generation
The obvious question now is of course:
Every day for 30 days, how till you find topics to write about?
This is one of my major struggles for all content creation I have ever done. I run out of ideas or I choose topics that becomes to complex and I never completes my writing since I don’t even know where to start. With the challenges there is also a course curriculum that gives you many tools to improve your craft.
The endless ideas generator is a tool in the course that gives you an endless supply of ideas. First you need to start gathering ideas – big and small. These can come from various different sources such as books, articles or discussions you are involved with. The important thing is to store them in a safe place so that you have them at hand when you want to write.
Alongside these gathered ideas there is a few frameworks, such as the 4A framwork, that gives you different angels to your ideas. The 4 angles are actionable, analytical, aspirational and anthropological. In combination with these angels you can use 11 different approaches such as How to, Trends and Examples. Combining these frameworks one idea can give you 44 different stories ( 4 x 11). 10 ideas could keep you busy for a while.
When you start to write and discussing with people online you will also get a lot of new ideas that you can move into your ideas log. It becomes a self fuelling fire.
Talking about people…
Community
Ship30for30 is not only a great writing course and challenge. It also has tons of great people both as teachers and participants. As a course participant you get access to the course community with all the other people doing the challenges and you can discuss with them.
This community is a great source of support and motivation.
Doing it you will get encouraged to do you daily writing and publish online. If you get into a dip or have a hard time finding ideas the community is there to help out.
Summary
The Ship30for30 is a writing course and challenge with a great community.
By writing 30 essays during 30 days you push your self to practice writing and to publish. It becomes a habit and you learn a lot about what work and what doesn’t work. Go check it out. And get back here in a week to see my first 7 essays!
Martin is not affiliated or get anything back from writing and publishing this article. Martin payed for the course out of his own pocket.
