Empty Canvas: Starting a New Blogging Strategy

Starting over with an empty canvas. (Photo by pmo)

As far as this blog goes, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for quite a while. I’ve been toying and tinkering with ideas a little too long and I haven’t posted any meaningful content for more than a year.

I kept telling myself that I needed to keep watching, learning and stealing from the best bloggers. I kept telling myself that I needed a water-tight strategy and execution plan before putting my content out into the world.

Well, I was wrong. I just needed a half-baked strategy and a fearless, flexible attitude toward the blog. I need to participate in the blogging community more, which means more reading and commenting on other blogs.

And most of all, I need to crank out good content on a regular basis.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that if I try to plan everything so perfectly, I’ll always be in planning mode and never in execution mode. Now I’m teaching myself to live in a perpetual mode of half-planning and half-execution.

Hopefully it doesn’t come across as totally half-assed.

Here’s the “plan” so far:

I’ve set up several platforms for posting content about topics that matter most to me: media, technology, communications, politics, hyper-local news from my neighborhood, restaurant reviews and work stuff. Here’s the breakdown:

• foleymo: Media (especially social media), technology and communications.
• The Torch Times: Libertarian politics.
• Seattle PostGlobe: Hyper-local news and events.
• Yelp: Food and restaurant reviews.
• Thinkers and Doers: Work stuff.
• MichealFoley.com: An aggregator to repost blog content from all these sites, as well as content from other web tools such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, 12Seconds, etc.

Of course, I reserve the right to alter or abolish this strategy at any time for any reason. Use as directed. Results may vary.