Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers – Group Writing Project

This is a slightly long winded announcement post inviting you to participate in a ProBlogger.net project. For details of how to participate read on:

Today I set myself the task of writing a list article titled ‘X Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers‘ (the ‘X’ was going to be a number determined by the number of points I wrote).

I thought it’d be a fun article, written in the style of ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ that would outline some characteristics that new bloggers wanting to grow in their ‘success’ or ‘effectiveness’ might find useful.

I got off to a great start and listed off 10 habits that I’d write about.

The problem as that as I constructed my list of habits that effective bloggers have that for each habit I came up with I found both examples of bloggers who embodied the habit and also examples of bloggers who obviously blogged successfully without the habit.

I found myself arguing with myself constantly as I wrote and ended up quite frustrated through the process.

I came to the realisation that while I might desire to define or describe an ‘effective’ blogger that there are many ways to being one.

Effectiveness as a blogger can only really be measured on a fairly individual basis as one looks at a bloggers personality, topic of choice, style of blogging, intended audience, goals and circumstances.

I found myself realising that a list of ‘habits of effective bloggers’ would differ from blogger to blogger and I’m sure that there would be some similarities between lists but lots of discrepancies also.

ProBlogger Group Writing Project

As I pondered these things I thought it’d be fun for numerous bloggers to write the habits that they think make an effective blogger and to put them side by side.

It’s been a while since we did a common writing project so I’d like to invite you to write a post on your blog on the topic of ‘Habits of Effective Bloggers’.

I will still write my list of habits this week (in fact I’ll write it as a series) but want to invite you to write yours also.

Write it up on your own blog (if it’s not appropriate to do so because it would interrupt the flow of it see below) and then email me via my contact form to let me know where you’ve written it up.

I’ll then link to everyone’s lists/articles during the week ahead so that everyone can surf by and read our collective wisdom. You’ve got until Friday to submit your post.

This is of course a voluntary thing. If you don’t have time, energy or desire to do it – feel free to not submit anything – but if you feel like reflecting upon what makes a successful blog successful or effective then I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My list will not be a generic one size fits all kind of list but rather a list of habits I’ve developed over the last few years and others that I’m working on. Feel free to take this approach also – or to tackle the topic in any other way you’d like to (humor, rant, short post, long post, series of posts, poem, video post, podcast – whatever you’d like).

If you don’t feel it’s appropriate to write such a post on your blog (ie if your blog is about playing chess, hoola hoops, metaphysics or recipes and such an article would break the flow) I’m happy to publish your piece here at ProBlogger on a ‘page’ (ie it won’t be on the main blog but a standalone page on this domain which I’ll link to from this blog. You can include a link back to your blog).

To submit your posts this way I’ll need you to include your post, your name and a URL back to your blog and if you can for you to write it up ready to be posted in html (if possible – as this will save me time if there are a lot of these submissions).

Hopefully through this little group project we’ll see some interesting themes emerge between us all but will also see some of the diversity of approaches that we as bloggers are taking in our efforts.

PS: feel free to use the image in this post if you wish to tie your post in with other submissions.

update: See a list of readers submissions so far here.