How I Blog: Trudy Schuett

On June 27th, I will have been doing this for three years. I’€™ve gone from one blog devoted to a single issue, to a maximum of 11 on varied issues, from food to men’€™s issues advocacy to local tech issues. Now I’€™m back to one blog, but all kinds of subjects.

This seems to be the best way.I’€™m convinced that bloggers need to do something else beyond the usual online things to promote their blogs, so I often write articles for news-oriented websites, as well as responding to queries from professional journalists looking for input on subjects I know something about. It’s helpful to have a foot in both worlds.

I get up very early — often 2 or 3 a.m. AZ time. I’ve been doing this for years, as once I worked with a guy in the UK, and that’s midmorning over there. I’ve found I can often pick up on something really interesting from the WaPo, and be the first or close to first to link back.

Then it’s on to the aggregator, to see who said what the night before. At one point I was reading 300+ blogs a day, but I’ve cut that in half in order to focus on the blogs and subjects that are more important. I spend an hour or so reading and commenting at other blogs, and then I get to my e-mail and phone calls.

That brings me up to about 8, when my anti-virus goes off, so I stop, have breakfast and plan the rest of the day. I try to leave afternoons open for the mundane activities of daily life, like cooking dinner and whatnot.If I’m writing a long article, a lot of that happens in my head as I do laundry or run errands. I may not blog at all for a few days if I’ve got something important going on in another area.

I’m mindful of the “long Trail,” that Jeff Jarvis write about awhile back, in addition to the “Long Tail” that is pretty much universally recognized. Since I’m not a current-affairs, political sort of blogger, I find that I get readers looking at stuff I wrote 2 and three years ago all the time.I don’t feel the compulsion to get something — anything — up there, just because. I know that other things I do benefit me and the blog, and (surprise!) the general public doesn’t miss me if I leave a good one up top. It often takes anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks for the traffic to a specific post to drop off.

I know I’m in this for the long haul, so I take it easy on myself, and on my readers.

As I’€™m 54 and have experienced and researched and learned a lot of things, I can take all that accumulated knowledge and apply it in all kinds of creative ways. When I was in college, I really wanted to be a newspaper reporter, but life intervened, and so that never happened.

I’€™m really glad things worked out the way they did!