The following guest post was submitted by Easton Ellsworth from Visionary Blogging.
It’s not the ability to produce excellent blog content.
It’s not the ability to build a strong blog community.
It’s not the ability to monetize every page view, click and pixel.
It’s not even the ability to improve your content or your community or your monetization or anything else.
The greatest blogging skill is:
Meta-improvement.
Meta-improvement is the improvement of improvement.
It’s not just self-improvement. It’s self-self-improvement-improvement.
In other words: Becoming a better blogger faster and faster.
Why Meta-Improvement?
Picture 3 runners in a race. All start at the same speed.
Runner #1 never changes speed. Flat line. No improvement.
Runner #2 speeds up at a constant rate. Upward slope. Improvement.
Runner #3 speeds up at a constantly increasing rate. Upward curve. Meta-improvement.
Guess who wins?
3 Keys to Blogger Meta-Improvement
Self-Awareness. (See Metacognition.) Consider your personal efforts to improve your blogging skills. What’s your routine? Do you madly surf the intertubes for tasty blogging tips on how to boost any skill about which you’re momentarily feeling insecure? Or is there more of a method to your madness? Begin now to think about how you think about how to improve.
Focus. This meta stuff can be overwhelming. Take it one step at a time. Each week or month, consider your blogging skills one by one: content creation, design, community building, monetization, email ninja-ness, etc. Pick the one that you need to improve most urgently in order to meet your blogging goals. And keep that sucker in your sights until it’s licked.
Relentlessness. Never give up trying to become a faster improver. Lather, rinse, repeat. How quickly do you apply the blogging wisdom that you discover? How easily do you let your skills relapse?
The Blogger Meta-Improvement Motto
“I will do my best to improve more today than I improved yesterday.”
Meta-improvement is hard. It’s much harder than improvement alone. But it’s also worth the struggle. Your struggle is its oxygen.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Dive beneath the surface and you’ll find a never-ending series of layers: meta-meta-improvement, meta-meta-meta-improvement, etc.
Your mind can probably only wrap itself around that first submarine layer. But take the dive; it’s well worth it.
May this help you begin to see yourself in a new way and become a better blogger – faster.
Photo: Upward spiral by gerriet
