How Blogging Helps Your Career #12 – The Garden

(The roundup for the “How Blogging Helps Your Career Series” is here)

Last week I wrote about how you could use your blog as a rough draft for your work.  It’s a pretty great way to try things out and find out what works.

The flip side of this is in that many cases your blog already has a lot of great material.  This of course,is because your awesome, or at least because I assume you are, run with it.

Think of all the material you made as part of regular blogging.  Think of the posts, analyses, and charts.  Think of what you can do with that.  Think for a minute about how much you may have forgotten, or how much you did.

You’re out there planting seeds all the time, almost haphazardly.  Any one of those can grow into a book or a class.  A lot of them could be bundled together in a publication.

Your blog is a garden.

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How Blogging Helps Your Career #11 – The Rough Draft

(The roundup for the “How Blogging Helps Your Career Series” is here)

Show me a person who never edits their writing, and I’ll show you a liar, an incompetent, or someone who walks on water recreationally.

It simply doesn’t happen.  We have to try things out and screw them up.  We have to experiment.  We have to get writing out of our head so it’s out and then we can improve it.

Show me a person who writes but never has to just “get something out of their head” and I’ll show you a rarity.  I have to keep a book of ideas just to keep myself from getting preoccupied.

We have to get our ideas out of our head.  We have to see them.  We have to look at them once they’re not rattling around inside our skulls.  Once they’re out we can refine them.

This is where a blog comes in.

Your blog is a rough draft – and a socially acceptable one at that.

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Behold The Marketer: Your Unexpected Future In Gaming

So as I watch the fallout from the PS4, watch Kickstarters rise and fall, and eagerly await my Ouya so I can play Sela the Space Pirate since my phone is old, I’m speculating on the games industry once again.

I’m not even sure we can call it one industry anymore.  it’s kind of like lumping Pengiuin, Lulu, Kinkos, and the Canon printer division together and calling it “Publishing.”  Yes, technically true, but you’re really dealing with a pretty broad range of subjects.

But that industry, as broadly as we define a place where Angry Birds and World of Warcraft are lumped together, is one that’s important.  It’s one that’s growing.  It’s one that we professional geeks want a piece of.  It’s just hard to know where to find that piece when Ninjas can fight fruit or each other.

But one piece some of us should look at is marketing.

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