This guest post is by Nate St. Pierre.
There’s too much of the same out there. A hundred million blogs, most of them saying the same thing: “I’m boring.”
Yours should be better.
Your blog is a tool to break through the established structure of this world, a way to clear the existing landscape of monotony to make way for creativity and newness of thought. Your blog is a wrecking ball, and you should use it as such.
When a wrecking ball wakes up in the morning and goes to work, it’s not thinking about the number of links in its chain, the color of the paint on the cab, or how many hours there are until lunch. It just gets out there and starts swinging. It knocks into things. That’s its job.
Just for today, stop worrying about how many subscribers you have, how you’re using SEO, the conversion rate of your sales funnel, and your website stats. Just for today, sit down and write something amazing.
And guess what? You don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s the right fit for your audience if you create something that the world will love . . . and more importantly, something that you will love. If you can do that consistently, your perfect audience will find you, and the rest will fall into place.
I did this last month on my own little blog, something just to entertain myself because I was bored with all the same tired old articles shuffling across my screen. I told the world that Abraham Lincoln invented Facebook, and the world believed it for a day. I did it because I wanted to write something interesting and have some fun, and it turned out to be the biggest thing I’ve ever written.
Whether you agree with the concept of pranks or not, the point is that this article got out into the world and changed things. In this case, it made journalists think twice about the quality of the stories they write (or rather, share).
Your work should challenge the status quo and make people think. But that doesn’t mean you have to be controversial. It just means you have to be so good that the world can’t ignore you. And you can only be that good when you’re writing for yourself and the things you believe in.
The longer I write, the more I realize that if I’m not putting out stuff that I’m proud of, each and every time, I’m missing the point. I’m not going to hit it out of the park every time. None of us are. But we need to try, and even if we fail, at least we can be honestly proud of the attempt.
We all have the ability to use our platforms to help shape the environment around us. Wherever I am, when I sit down to write, I say to myself, “I can change the world from this desk.”
I have done so. And you can, too.
Nate St. Pierre is a web marketing consultant with a background in web-based philanthropy. His goal is to build projects that change the world. You can follow him on Twitter at @NateStPierre.
