When One Thing Leads to Another: Blog Traffic, A Book Idea and a Little Self-Discovery

As some of you know, I'm teaching about blogging at Mount Hermon Writers Conference in March. And I'm so glad that Marcus Goodyear will be at my side for one of the sessions.

Anyway, as some of you also know, I've not been one to be too concerned with increasing blog traffic. Today is my 200th-post birthday and at age 200 this blog has mostly grown through a commitment to write and through the friendly responses of people who stop by (I honestly believe that you all are part of what makes Seedlings work!)

However...

I have been feeling a certain obligation. People at MH are going to want strategies. So.

This past week, I tried a few new things and I doubled my blog traffic. Yes, doubled. At this point I'm still trying to figure out exactly which button I pushed that resulted in such an amazing phenomenon. (Okay, so I've been a bad scientist. I tried too many things at once!)

Two things I want to share in particular are the new Socialize It button at the base of each post and in my sidebar. This button leads to a site that features all the major social bookmarking services like digg and del.icio.us. These may sound like something you'd find at a kid's party, but they are powerful ways to either remember, share, organize or celebrate favorite posts and blogs.

I also opened a Squidoo account. It has nothing to do with marine life, I promise. Instead, it's another way to create a presence on the web and drive traffic to your blog. This is where, for me, one thing led to another. I started innocently enough, by creating a "lens" called Writing Like Annie Dillard. But by the time I was finished, I'd decided to create two more, one of which features a new book idea.

Why did I do that? Well the last post I wrote on talking to editors and publishers through blogging got me thinking. People do get book contracts through blogging. I may not end up being one of them, but the simple act of putting the idea out to the world was an act of finally admitting that I'm ready. Stone Crossings is on its way and I want to put my pen (keyboard?) to a new task.

I was going to tell you how all this led to a little self-discovery, but this post has grown rather long. So I'll save that story for next time. In the meantime, you can try socializing and squidooing. And if it doubles your blog traffic, please let me know. So I can tell my seminar participants exactly which button to push.

Bridge photo by J Barkat. Used with permission.

5 Tricks to Finding Fabulous Writing Ideas

Recently, I revealed what yawning guys and ladies with letters have to do with why I write.

Today I just want to talk about how we can get fabulous ideas, once we've found our reason for writing. Here are 5 thoughts:

1. Exercise. I say this because I got the idea for Stone Crossings somewhere between a leg lift and a push up. This probably had less to do with the kind of exercise I was doing and more to do with mental space. That is, when we give ourselves the time and circumstance to simply drift in our thoughts, we find little places to dock. Some of these little places might turn into a letter to Grandma, but some might turn into a blog post or a book.

2. Draw. The artwork you see above is the beginning of my daughter's tale about fairies. It's a great story that includes the surprising revelation that fairies are born when they pop out of blooming flowers. When the time is right, they fly up to the sky to get their names, which come to them on a sunbeam. The takeaway for us writers is that it's good to sometimes begin in pictures, without any preconceived ideas about where we need to be going.

3. Stand on your head. (see 5)

4. Pour water over your head. (also see 5)

5. Bang your head against the wall. Okay, so three through five are really the Frog and Toad approach to finding story ideas. When frog and toad had done all these things and more, they found they had a story to tell. The moral? Sometimes we just need to be open to experiences, no matter how mundane they seem on the surface.

Just 5 tricks. Now let's trade. How do you get your story ideas?


Fairies Hiding artwork, by Sara. Used by permission.

Unauthorized Advice from Scot McKnight

What follows is unauthorized advice from Scot McKnight... Lifted without guilt from his book The Jesus Creed. (A new personal favorite of mine, by the way, so prepare to receive posts.)

I heisted the advice from chapter 9, which I like to call the "chutzpah chapter" (because McKnight says that the Gospels "clearly show that [Mary] had a significant impact on [Jesus'] teachings," (p.88) ).

Anyway, here it is. McKnight has a whole chapter on Mary. And do you know what he did? Rather than leave her there in the chapter, he moved forward to write a whole book about her. Called The Real Mary. Which officially makes him the mega-chutzpah man (because Mary is not exactly a non-controversial figure in Christendom).

This also officially gives us some very sage advice: we writers needn't necessarily find radically new topics to pursue as we go along. We can just dig deeper into subjects we've already tackled. And maybe pray for a little chutzpah.


Virgin Birth photo, by L.L. Barkat. Corn Husk woman in photo, by Sara.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.