Pushing Publish: Why Write Every Day?

For the last few weeks, I've been pushing publish every day.

I might keep this habit up, I might not. Everything here is an experiment.

I've never blogged every day before. When I published at Far Beyond The Stars, the most I ever posted was 3 times per week. Though, when I worked at New York Magazine, I did photo edit anywhere from 48-64 blog posts a day. Which was a lot. I know from experience that my threshold for pumping out tons of content is quite high.

Now, blogging every day, I haven't done that yet. So, for the last few weeks I decided to come back to blogging in that way. It's been incredibly useful, to me.

There aren't many bloggers who blog every day, that I know of. Seth Godin is one of them. I tend to read his blog in spurts. I'll think about him, and then go read 5-10 posts at at time. I used to get his blog posts delivered straight to my inbox, when I was incredibly interested in Seth Godin's work. Having a Seth Godin post in my inbox was a great way to start the day.

A few people have pinged me to say thank you for blogging every day. To that I say: thank you for listening.

Here are a few benefits of blogging every day.

Blogging becomes easier. I'd gotten into the habit of stressing over every word. Every sentence had to be perfect, or I wasn't going to publish it. Now, blogging every day has forced me to relax around the words.

This doesn't mean I'm relaxing around the quality: actually, I believe the quality has risen because I'm writing more regularly.

More people are reading my work. My blog traffic is slowly growing, and more people are seeing my work. In the last two weeks alone, even though I've been very quiet about my posting here, an additional 4,000 new people have come to visit. According to my Google Analytics, many of these people are new visitors who have never experienced my work before.
More sales of my work. More people are supporting my work, even as I'm gradually phasing my old books out in order to introduce newer projects. This is great, because I'm a full time writer and I depend on your support to keep creating.

How to write every day.

Relax around the words. Being a perfectionist makes it hard to write every day. Occasionally, you'll notice mistakes in my words. My grammar won't be quite right. This is fine, because I know that I can't be perfect.
Just hit publish. Sometimes, after I've spent two hours perfecting a post, it still isn't ready to go. So, I just hit publish. I'm surprised how a post will do that I personally thought was a mess, other people might think is really great.
Write a few days out. When I first decided to write every day, I started writing a few days ahead of time. If I know I'm going to be head-down working on my book, I'll write a few posts and schedule them. This way, I don't have to worry so much every day about writing every day.

And finally, sometimes writing every day begets writing every day.

The momentum builds as time goes along, and pretty soon I even forget that I'm writing every day.