The Reasonista Diaries

I’ve been writing The Reasonista Diaries for a while.

Most of this diary is in an electronic folder on my computer. Other parts are on paper, captured in a physical folder. There are other ways, but this works for me, for now.

I find that writing a blog is a door to more ideas. More flow of ideas through my mind. And the more there are, the more good ones there will be. More solutions, more possibilities.

I’ve heard Oprah writes a journal. And, if the movie “The Queen” is representative, so does Queen Elizabeth.

Writing a blog post by hand on paper is one way to “park the mind” – at least the conscious mind – so that the subconscious, intuitive part can come through. This is not the only way. And maybe younger people are just as comfortable doing this via a keyboard.

Or maybe it’s just a habit, which can be chosen, practiced and developed.

I’ll date myself. Back in the day, a theme was something you wrote out on lined paper and turned in to your English teacher. As you made your drafts, you rewrote. You could use index cards to write the parts, or you could literally cut up the papers and tape them together. Still, I had a callous on the middle finger of my right hand, where the pen rested. You get the idea.

Technology hasn’t changed everything about writing. Some of the best ideas come when I’m doing tasks:

• Washing dishes
• Moving the lawn
• Waiting in a restaurant
• Sitting in traffic (I don’t try to multi-task when my attention is needed for driving)
• Planning my day, week or month

When the traffic starts to move, or I get to the knives in the bottom of the sink, or I’m mowing near the street where there could be a rock, I need all my attention for the task at hand.

Otherwise, having something nearby to capture my thoughts – whether a small notebook and a pencil, or perhaps a dictation recorder – comes in very handy.

Whatever works. Capture first, edit later.

The Writing Group Circles Around

Every time I’ve pushed myself to try something a bit different – or color outside the lines – it has paid off. It might not be obvious at first, but as the activity goes forward, the picture becomes clear.

I saw this again about a month ago, when I finished the prior #blog30 challenge. So here I am again, this time on a brand new blog. Blogging leads to good things for your business, even if that’s not evident at first.

Every time I trust my intuition and start, things make sense as the story unfolds.

One of the best things I’ve done – and didn’t know it at the time – was create a writer’s group with a few people I’d met in a seminar.

For a year, our small Royal Oak Writer’s Group (usually 3, sometimes 4 people), met every few weeks at a local library. We talked about the pieces we’d written. It was great to have a relaxed atmosphere to experiment and talk about drafts and “green” work.

Having to produce an essay – polished or not – on a regular basis was freeing. Practice helps the flow come more easily, even if it’s not what you call easy.

When I was a teenager, I chose writing as my career because it could take you anywhere. Writers can write about any subject. It was a choice that held lots of possibilities.

Time has passed, and I’ve had several careers since then. Funny, though, how things cycle back around.

Today I’m four years into my Internet retail life. In the online world, that’s pretty long. I’ve sold vintage dinnerware to people in all 50 states and 26 other countries. It’s a career that didn’t exist 40 years ago.

Now I find myself writing multiple blogs, along with article marketing, Squidoo lenses, and everything else that feeds the Internet crawlers. I’m thankful for that traditional writer group experience. Something to draw on, and use in a new venue.

I’ve thought for a while that the online retailers who come from technical fields, like programming and developing, have a competitive advantage, because they understand computer languages and HTML. They know how to weave the web together into different kinds of Internet cloth.

Now I think there’s a premium spot for the writers, too. When you can crank out copy, you seed your presence on the Internet, cooking up spider food for the search engines to find you. Traffic is king with everyone who sells, and good content brings it.

It’s been easy enough for me to create new kinds of written pieces that have their roots in traditional, print-based methods of promoting a business, like news releases, package inserts and ad copy.

Blogging has gotten easier with practice over time. And that’s just one example.

Add the new twists in marketing in the world of e-commerce: Everybody’s talking about email autoresponders, optin pages and posting on social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

Then there are article marketing sites – there must be a zillion of those, too – which want you to write several versions from the same material, to give the ezine publishers more choices. In order to get traction, they tell you, you need at least 10 articles available under your “author” banner, and a stable of 250 articles is better.

At 14, when I thought that writing could take me places, I envisioned traveling to foreign countries and meeting interesting people.

I could not have imagined the World Wide Web, which starts at the point where my fingers touch the keyboard, and circles the globe.

Everything really does circle around. In the days of the writing group, who knew?

If you choose to accept it, doing the June 2010 blog challenge will help you polish your writing skills, which you can use, in turn, to add to your business.