Doogie Would Have Made A Great Blogger

I’m betting you don’t remember Doogie Howser. Do you? Doogie Howser, M.D. was a TV show that ran from 1989-1993. It starred Neil Patrick Harris as a genius teenage doctor. Each show would end with Doogie typing in his take on the events of the day into his computer journal. Whether you loved it, hated it, or don’t remember it, here’s the point. Doogie would have made a great blogger. It didn’t matter what else was going on in his life, he made time to type a paragraph into that computer at the end of every single day.

You might not think the Internet would reward consistency. Chaos, right? But it does. The Internet loves consistency. People like to sit down and go through their bookmarks. What’s the latest at the Drudge Report? What’s Matt Cutts saying on his blog? What’s today’s weather? And if you’re lucky enough to catch their interest, some blog readers might be stopping by at your address. What do you have to say today? What’s your take on big events in your subject area?

Search engine spiders love consistency too. They get into a schedule. If you update every day, they come back around every day. Post every five days, they’ll take the hint.

Here’s the problem. What if you get tired of posting and decide to lay off for a few weeks? What if you get distracted by other projects and forget to write something new? What if you decide to quit posting and let the current content be enough?

People will stop checking in.

Spiders will stop crawling by.

And your blog will become yet another digital castoff, a valid address with dated content and no one at home.

Here’s how you can keep this from happening. Make a plan. Sit down ahead of time and outline a schedule of tasks. Find something that works for you.

For example, here’s how it works at Firepow. I type in my blog addresses. Then I figure out how often I want to post (it’s set to every five days right now). How often will I ping the RSS directories? How often will I submit an article? How often will I social bookmark a post? And then I click and BAM! Firepow makes a schedule. How slick is that? For the next three months, all I have to do is sign in to my Firepow account and there are my tasks for the day. Post to Blog X, submit an article for Blog Y, etc.

So that’s it. You need plan. Unless, of course, you’re a super-disciplined teenage genius like Doogie Howser was. If you are, send me your blog address. I need to be learning from you.