Getting Back on the Field and Accepting the Challenge

The past few articles I’ve posted to this blog, rare as they may have been, were focused among other things, on the difficulty I’ve had over the course of this past summer in keeping up with my personal goals for content development and readership growth on Jcyreus dot com. The excuse that I’ve been using has had to do with time. Whether it be lack of time or preoccupation with other more pressing issues in my personal and professional life, or the simple fact that I have done a complete lifestyle 180 with this move from the arctic north to hot, humid, rainy Florida…and loving every minute of it :-).

Fact of the matter is, I’ve become a lazy blogger and I’m not very proud of myself for it.

Blogging is not difficult by any means. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying to you or simply isn’t doing it right. That’s not to say that everyone and anyone could be a great blogger as it does require some degree of skill in terms of writing ability, but not much more than any high school graduate (or at least an average H.S. Junior) should already posses. It also requires a certain amount of dedication in terms of setting aside a certain amount of time each day to generate quality content, or as one of my favorite Internet strategists Jeremiah Owyang calls it, “paying yourself first”. This is where I have failed myself lately and more importantly, failed my growing base of loyal readers.

So now what?

Well, after coming off of a couple of trips to our old stomping grounds in Birmingham, AL and Milwaukee, WI and hearing from more than a few old friends how much they actually enjoy the stuff that I post to Jcyreus dot com (yeah…you know who you are!) my very first RSS subscriber (my wife) finally issued me a challenge to pick the pace back up to daily content production and see if I can still reach the readership goals I set for myself when I launched this blog back in January 2008.

I have finally accepted her challenge and made a conscious decision to abandon the time-crunch excuses I’ve been leaning on since April and begin once again to pay myself first. Later this week I will post some of the current readership stats that I use to track how well (or poorly) I’m doing toward reaching my personal goals. Those stats will be used for progress comparisons later this year.

For those of you whose summer was as unproductive [blog-wise] as mine was, I challenge you to do the same with whatever it is that you’ve been putting off for the last few months and promising yourself that you would make more time for.

Feel free to comment on this post as to what that might be. Good luck and remember to always “pay yourself first!”

Cheers.