When I read your posts, it makes me feel like my skin is turning a shade greener and I feel more like I’m going to puke than I ever did riding in the back seat as a kid when my step-dad was driving.  I’d rather go to the dentist than read another blog like yours.

Your posts are boring.  Your post titles are boring too and they lack any sort of creativity whatsoever.  In fact, your whole blog is boring.  It looks just like it could have been written by the same person as the last 10 blogs I read.  They’re boring too.  Your posts all follow the same type of format.  It’s obvious you follow every single piece of advice out there on how to run a successful blog- just like every other hopeful up-and-coming-blogger.

It makes me sad to realize there is a real person behind your blog, striving to follow all the advice, sticking to a posting schedule, writing everything in the same style, not making any waves or posting anything that could offend anybody.  Then I read your posts about how content creation is a struggle and your strategies for actually forcing yourself to write a post four times a week.  Well, no duh it’s a struggle.  Your posts are probably even more boring and tedious to write as they are to read.

Do you even remember why you wanted to start blogging in the first place?  I hope it wasn’t just because you wanted to make a boring blog that was just like everybody else’s.  Did you have aspirations to express yourself?  To create truly fresh, new content?  Did you want to have fun and enjoy what you were doing?  Did you want to bring some joy to your readers?

Yes?  Well good.  I thought that under the soul-less blog, there must be a creative, adventurous, passionate person or you never would have started a blog to start with.  How about getting back to the fun of blogging?  (Or putting in the fun that may never have been there for you?)

What’s that?  You’re worried about how many views you get and your search ratings?  Yeah, I get that.  Listen, I’m not a SEO expert, but I’m sure that having creative, fun content up will attract more of an audience and make them come back more often too.  I’m willing to bet that if you start having more fun with your blog, your readers will enjoy it more too.

Sincerely,

Kyla

P.S. I’ve attached some tips for you on how to have more fun blogging again.  Let’s spice things up a bit.

How to have more fun blogging

A short guide to provide a little inspiration and remind you that blogging -and life- should be fun.

Come up with a creative post title

First off, please, please, please, please don’t title your post ‘5 ways to…’ or ‘5 things…’ or anything else that starts with a number.  I am so sick of seeing those sorts of posts.  Believe me, I understand why you do it.  You want people to click and that’s an easy way to achieve that.  Here’s the thing: your ‘5 things’ list doesn’t stand out to me from any of the other four billion ‘5 things’ posts on the internet.

Challenge yourself to come up with a truly creative blog title.  Think of something that will spark curiosity.  Read through your post and look for that sentence or those few words that really resonate with you on some sort of poetic level.  Strive to create a title that will make people want to click even more than they do for your ‘5 things’ posts.  Try to come up with something that will stick in the reader’s mind later.

One of my personal favorite’s recently was The Benefits of Random Muggings.  How can you not want to find out what the benefits of random muggings are?  And guess what?  The author, John P. Weiss now has one of the few blogs that I have added to the list I actually follow recently.

Alternates for this post included:

• Your blog is F-ing boring.  Let’s fix it.
• P.S. Your blog sucks
• Dear blogger, Are you a robot?  -Kyla
• Maybe you really are the sort of person who needs a 9-5 job

Bring humor into your writing

Add jokes to your post (preferably funny ones).  Even serious, dry topics can be written about in a humorous way.  Try reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott for a good example of really excellent, funny writing.  It’s tips on writing, but it’s written in a way that has the reader cracking up laughing through the whole book.  I’d want to read it even if I wasn’t a writer because it’s enjoyable to read.

Draw a silly picture for a post

This little turkey was the result of my need to find a picture to go with a ‘Hoppy Thanksgiving’ post.  Drawing this turkey was the most fun I’d had all month working on my blog and was actually part of the inspiration for this post because it made me realize that I want to have more fun blogging.  I want to remember that the point of this is doing something I enjoy and creating content that others will enjoy.

Yes, my turkey looks completely ridiculous and for some reason, he looks kind of out of place sitting next to Hoppy.  But so what?  He makes me smile and hopefully he makes my readers smile too.  Let go of the need to look professional and perfect.  Be willing to have fun and be a little imperfect.

(No, my turkey didn’t take any artistic skill.  All I had to do was Google ‘How to draw a turkey’ and follow a tutorial made for 5-year-olds.)

Post a picture of you looking silly

Have fun in life too.  Smile.  Do silly things.  Lighten up.  Make a funny face.  Go to the play ground.  Wear a funny shirt.  Find a ridiculous looking hat.  Put it on.  Take a picture.  Put on blog.  Be vulnerable.  Let go of fear.  Take an itty-bitty little chance.  Don’t be so fricking serious.

Try something you don’t know how to do.  Shamelessly make mistakes.  Share about it. 

Try something you’ve never done.  Go into it knowing that you won’t be good at it (at least not yet).  Share about your experience and the funny mistakes you made.

Challenge yourself to write a post in 15 minutes

Set a timer.  15 minutes.  Done.  Post it.  Don’t care that it’s not perfect.

Add a poem

Change up the pace.  Write a poem to add to one of your posts.  You will think your poem is dumb.  Whatever it is about poetry, practically everybody thinks their poetry is dumb.  (Oddly, the few people that think their poetry is good seem to be the only ones with really dumb poems.)  Everybody else will love it.  Even if it doesn’t all rhyme or the lines aren’t the same number of syllables or whatever else you think is wrong with it.

Share a story

Anybody can put together a ‘5 ways to keep the house cleaner’ list.  Only you can share stories of experiences that you’ve had.  Post about something that is uniquely you.  Share a story- something, funny, sad, or thought-provoking.  When was the last time something made you cry?  Or laugh?  Or share about something nice you did for somebody else that left you feeling good or about something nice somebody did for you.

Email another blogger and tell them how much you love their work

We all love when we know we’re making a difference.  So why not take the time to just make somebody else’s day in the blogging world?

Share about fun things

Write a post about your favorite comic book, the funniest movie you ever saw, your favorite comedian or make a compilation that includes all of these things.  Share something that’s ‘only’ value was that it made you laugh.  This is more valuable than we realize.

Get a pen and paper

Break up the routine.  Get off the computer.  Write the old-school way with a pen and paper.  Let the cat curl up on your lap or get outside or go to the coffee shop.  Draw silly stick figure pictures in the margins.

Forget about writing for the blog.   Write for you. 

Write what you’re thinking about.  Write what you’re feeling.  Write about your day.  Write about somebody you love or somebody that annoys the crap about you.  Write about your goals for the year.  Write about something that inspires you.  Write about why you started a blog.  Write a letter to somebody you care about.  Write a letter to your future self or the 15-year-old you.  Write about something you learned today or about something that scares you.  Imagine life was exactly how you want it to be and write what you’d write then (like if you were rich or you blog had a billion readers or whatever you dream of for your life).  Write about whatever.

Make a cartoon

Don’t worry about how well you can draw.  Just aim to capture a moment of humor.  Stick figures are fine.

Create a space just for creativity

Start a category or a page on your blog just for creative pursuits.  Post poetry or short stories or artwork or silly drawing or photography or whatever.  Share about a hobby- gardening or sewing or something else. Forget your niche.  Post about something you’re passionate about.  (This one is high on my list of things to do with my blog.)

Take your own pictures

If you rely on stock photos off the internet, think about taking your own pictures.  One of the great things about photography is that there is so much room for creativity and expression.  Even though you’re probably taking a picture of something you didn’t make, what you choose as your subject and how you take the picture offer so many avenues for expression.  I love to see the pictures that people take- even if your sunrise isn’t Photoshopped to have the same brilliant hues as the stock photo, it lets me see a glimpse of your world.  I always take my own pictures or create my own graphics and it’s a really fun aspect of blogging for me.

Make your own list. 

Come up with your own ideas.  Think about what would make blogging fun for you.  Think about the blogs you really love, the writers with a unique take on the world that inspire you.  Try some different things.  Play.

Remember, it’s supposed to be fun.

The post Going to the dentist is more fun than reading your blog – a guide to making your blog fun again appeared first on Live Hoppy.

Early on, I had little interest in doing that.  I felt like most readers probably wouldn’t even know or care if I posted according to some schedule or not.  I wanted to post the things that I felt creative and passionate about and I didn’t want to be limited by a time frame or post something because I felt like I needed to stick to the schedule.  To some extent, these things still hold true.

However, I have started sticking to a posting schedule for the last month and I have seen many benefits from it.  Tuesdays are when my Hoppy Living posts go out and Fridays are travel posts.  I’ve also just started doing Best Books posts which I am going to aim to publish every other Sunday.  I might have to modify this one if I run out of truly fantastic books to feature as I really don’t want to post about books that are just good.

There are other series I’d like to start- things like posting more creative stuff like poetry, art, etc.  Or perhaps doing more journal-style posts that are a little less ‘formal’ and more of an insight into me.  These ideas can sit on the back burner because I want a schedule that I can maintain long-term so I want to start with a couple of posts weekly and see how that goes.

So, why the change and what have the benefits been?

No shortage of ideas

I found that there were a couple of topics that I had more than enough to write about and I wasn’t going to have to stretch to write regular posts about them.  I can still write when I’m feeling creative or have the time, then schedule the posts to publish when I want them to.

Privacy

In addition, I do worry a certain amount about privacy and in some ways I feel better when I’m writing about where I’ve travelled knowing that the post about it won’t show up right away.  This way people don’t know exactly where I am.  Maybe I worry too much, but I don’t want people to know when I’m away from home.  I feel like it’s saying, “Please, go rob my house.”

Consistency

It does create regular new content for repeat visitors.  Let’s be honest, I don’t have all that many readers at this point.  Which is OK.  I think the readers I do have (you!) are the most fantastic people ever.  Early on, I wanted to grow my site, to attract a following, to do all of this amazing stuff with it.  And I still have those goals in mind, but now I accept that it is going to take time.  Now I am comfortable with that idea and actually appreciate that it gives me the freedom to work on making things better, figure out my voice and my topics, change things around and not worry.  Some day, I do hope to have more readers and I want to set up the process now so that when I get to that point I have new content being released regularly to keep people coming back.

Sticking to the writing process

It helps me stick to a process of writing.  Sometimes constraints inspire creativity.  I’m starting to appreciate that there is a certain process of creating posts and if I stick to it, then things work out.

I have a pipeline- listing ideas, thinking of the things that I want to write about.  Keeping notes on the topics I’ve thought of.  Figuring out what I want to write about next for my series.  Developing a rough draft, getting some thoughts down.  Figuring out what pictures I want to use and get them ready.  Putting it all together and playing with the layout.  Scheduling the final version.

In addition, I’ve heard some tips for success from a couple of sources lately that discuss this idea of focusing on creating systems to do the things we want to.  This means focusing on the actions that will get us there rather than the results.  Hal Elrod for example talks about this in relation to sales.  For him, it was about focusing on making the number of sales calls he needed to make each day such that over the year he would make the number of sales he needed.  A day when he made the calls was a win, regardless of how many calls that day led to sales.  Another example is that eating healthy each day is  a process.  Losing 10 pounds is a goal.  Focusing on the process means that each day you eat healthy is a win.  Focusing on the goal means that you don’t win until you get there.  I want to put my focus on the process of writing for my blog, not on the number of readers I get or some other measurement of success.

Demonstrating dedication

Being serious about blogging.  I have big dreams for my blog. I want to really create something amazing that will provide value to others.  I want to share the best of what I have to offer with the world.  This isn’t going to happen with occasional effort.  This is going to happen through consistent, persistent effort.  Having a posting schedule makes me accountable to this goal.  Plus, writing is something that I really enjoy and this helps me to ensure that I don’t let it get moved to the back-burner.

Order

There is something about things being ordered that I like.  One thing that I’ve noticed is that I like the feeling of being prepared.  When I see that I have a few finished posts written ready to publish it makes me feel like I’m on top of things.  In order to be consistent about having posts go out on schedule, I know that I need to be a bit ahead of things because some days or weeks I might not have as much time to write.

So far, sticking to a schedule has worked out well.  I know I can always tweak my posting schedule down the road if it becomes too much or add more series if I’m really on top of things.

The post Starting a posting schedule appeared first on Live Hoppy.

When I went searching for the perfect domain name, I thought about Travel Hoppy.  I knew that was too limiting and soon switched to Live Hoppy- a name that would hopefully encompass anything I could find to write about.  A good thing too, since my RV plans haven’t gotten out of the driveway of my house.

I started analyzing the successful blogs that I was a fan of.  I was looking at how some of these people became real writers from blogging, going on to publish books that their followers wanted to buy.  Most of them seemed to have one thing in common: their blogs stuck to narrow topics- minimalism or cooking or finances.  I have a lot of passions, but I knew I didn’t want to be stuck writing about the same topic.  I realize that as a business decision, this might not be the smartest.  If the successful blogs all seem to have one thing in common and it’s not something I want to do, where does that leave me?

Do I even want to make money from blogging?  This is a complicated question for me.  I certainly see opportunities along that line.  What writer doesn’t dream of making money from their writing?  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to leave the day job and just write for a living?  The thing is that when you do something for a living, it can stop being so much fun.  Would I want to have to write just to pay the bills?  Would I want the financial insecurity that comes for most people that try to make a living writing or doing art?  It would be nice to make some money from my blog some day and I want to keep that in mind as a possibility.  Still, that’s really not my motivation and I have other priorities.  I’d a hundred times over rather write what I want to and not get paid than write for the sake of trying to make money.

So why then do I write?  Is it for fame?  For notoriety?  I have mixed feelings about this too.  Maybe I want to leave my mark on the world, to say “I was here.”  But the truth is that I’m a private person.  I don’t have a Facebook account.  I don’t like having my picture taken.  I feel vulnerable sharing details about my life publicly online.  I don’t like to cause controversy.  I’m not really the sort to say what I want and not care what others think.  (I think maybe I’m not even supposed to admit that I care what other people think.)  Maybe I even have fears about opening up and blogging.  Maybe I think I’ll grow by working through those.

Maybe it’s just because when I go places, when I do things, I have a voice in my head narrating it, as if I’m telling a story.  I feel as though there is this writer within me that is thinking of what to write as I go through my every day life.  Like early this morning as I was walking down the river trail in Tulsa.  To set the scene, the Tulsa river trail is nice (by which I mean, very developed and also well-traveled).  There’s a side for foot traffic, and one for bikers that sometimes are joined and sometimes split apart like a divided highway with trees down the center.  There’s playgrounds and parking areas and restrooms and drinking fountains and streetlights and even park security that occasionally drives by in a little miniature car on the trail.

Everybody on the trail seemed somehow the same: bikers and joggers all out to get their exercise.  Some had nicer bikes, some had fancier workout clothes, some were skinnier or fatter, some of the men weren’t wearing shirts and I’d watch their fatty bits jiggle as they ran past secretly thinking they should wear a shirt and then thinking maybe there was some excuse for them considering how hot it was,  some would cheerily say ‘Good morning!’ as if it were a command and others wouldn’t.  But they all seemed the same, except one guy I came across.  He was jogging beside the trail rather than on it and he had his dog with him.  He didn’t have a standard leash, but rather a length of rope 20 feet long or so.  His dog ran along, but several feet off the trail, down where the weeds were tall.  I watched the rope dragging over the tall grass and weeds, pushing them down as it went over them before they’d pop back up behind the rope.  Then the dog ran over to the guy and he bent down, offering it water, pouring it straight into his hand for the dog to lap up.  And I thought, “This guy is authentic.  He’s real.  He’s not like the other people.”  He wasn’t like the people jogging on the trail with their dogs on short leashes to make sure they didn’t go off in the weeds.  He wasn’t like the people that watered their dogs at the little doggy bowls built into the drinking fountains.  I could see that he cared about his dog more- thinking not just about walking it, but about letting it explore where it wanted to.  He knew that was important to it.  He didn’t care if the dog slobbered on his hand when he lapped up his water.

And me?  I was thinking about how to put it into words, how to describe the scene.  Could I convey the feeling that I was left with?  Could I make somebody else feel the way watching this made me smile?  That’s the way I think much of the time.  That’s why I write.

The post Why blog? appeared first on Live Hoppy.

I want to just start sharing the things that are important to me, the things that are getting me fired up and making me feel passionate about life.

One thing that comes to mind here is the idea of perfection.  I want all of my posts to be perfect.  They’re public, anybody can read them and I want them to be just right.  The thing is that if they never come to actually be because I’m waiting until it’s perfect, it doesn’t help anybody.  The truth is that they are never going to be just perfect anyway, and that whole idea of striving towards that is based on some assumption that ‘perfect’ is the same to everybody else.  I can’t please everybody with my writing and may not ever even have a popular site.  That is what some part of me wants to strive for, even though it’s not my real goal with this.

There is a lot of fear involved with it as well for me.  Fear is a topic that seems to be coming up in my life a lot lately, and I’ve started becoming super aware of it.  It’s an area where I think I’ve been growing a lot lately.  Where I used to just avoid things that made me feel anxious or afraid, I am making a conscious effort to face these things and overcome my fears.  I am trying to do things that make me afraid so that I can expand my comfort zone and grow through them.  Thinking about this has made me realize just how much anxiety and fear play a part in my thoughts.

I’m afraid people won’t like my writing.  I’m afraid nobody will want to read it.  I’m afraid it won’t be good enough.  I’m afraid it won’t be perfect.  I’m afraid that the things that I have to share aren’t compelling enough.  I’m afraid that I won’t get traffic because I don’t want to spend my time caring about SEO topics (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the topic of all of the little things one can do with a website to increase it’s ranking with search engines, or in simpler terms to make it show up in the search results on Google to drive more visitors to the site).

I want to overcome the fear of perfection.  When I started this site, I knew it wasn’t like it was going to appeal to every person on the planet, and I figured that if I let my personality shine through my writing that the people that would like it would be attracted to it and I shouldn’t waste my time trying to please the other people anyway.  I want to open up more and put myself, my thoughts, my writing, my soul out there… imperfections included and editing limited.

I want to challenge myself.  I thrive with challenges.  I expect that limiting time will increase my creativity and productivity.  Sometimes limitations actually force us to grow and create things that we wouldn’t otherwise achieve.

I want to not put off writing at all because I “don’t have enough time”.  And instead to leverage a small amount of time.  It’s not unreasonable to think that I could fit in 15 minutes a day.  Granted, I don’t plan to post every day just for the sake of posting if I don’t feel that I have something to say.

I do hope to continue with some of the themes here: figuring out what my goals and approach to blogging are, examine and work through things I’m afraid of, think about ways to be more productive and to be creative with my time, letting go of perfection, and letting go of worrying so much about what other people think and doing the things I want to be doing instead.

So, this is the first of my 15-minute posts, but I hope to write more of them, to open up and have the courage to be vulnerable and present a less-polished version of my work.  Anyway, the timer has gone off, so this post is done.

The post 15 minute posts appeared first on Live Hoppy.

Anyway, I wanted to share the evolution of my cartoon Hoppy attempts.  It was a ton of fun working on this.  It makes me feel like I don’t dive into enough artistic endeavors these days.  In a way, it makes me feel like I’m six with a big box of crayons again.  It is such a joy to learn new skills.  So much of the time, I aim for perfection.  In this post, I want to share the progress along the way- the versions that are far from perfect.  I hope to convey the fun from the process!  It’s not always about being perfect, but about learning and growing.

As a side note, when talking to people about art, I’ve noticed that a lot of people don’t want to try any sort of artistic pursuit because they feel like the results won’t be good enough.  How many people will say, ‘I can’t draw’ when what they mean is that they can’t draw a picture that will look just like a photograph?  How will they ever get better if they won’t try?  And is the point really to draw a perfect picture anyway?

Back to the topic, here’s the original photo that I started out working from.

For my first attempt, I followed a tutorial at Digital Camera World.  A lot of the steps I could follow, but I’m not really sure what they are doing.  I made my best attempt.  One cool thing about this tutorial was that it was based off of a man that had these tattoos and included instructions for how to get the tattoos from the original photo to show through.  I was able to use that to get the monkeys on Mr. Rabbit’s shirt.  This first attempt took me a couple of hours one morning.  Here’s my first cartoon Hop.

I recently read a post on Steve Pavlina’s blog called Take an Inspiration Day advocating taking a day to really dive into a topic or activity that you’ve always wanted to try.  While Photoshop is certainly something that I’ve used before, I started wondering if I were to spend a day immersed in it, what new skills could I learn?  There are a handful of things that I know how to do in Photoshop and I use those limited things over and over.  If I expanded my skill set and learned a ton of new things, how much more powerful of a tool would it become for me?  So I decided to spend a full day on my next attempt.

I started in following the directions from Creating a Professional Cartoon Effect.  Some of the steps here were not well explained for my competence level and I found myself off exploring some other tutorials about Adding Light Streaks and Making Selections with the Pen Tool at Photoshop Essentials.  I spent a lot of time playing along the way, trying out different techniques.  Here’s a couple of the things I did while learning a few new techniques.

After learning some new techniques, I spent a few hours working on a higher quality version of cartoon Hop.  I wanted this one to look clean and tried to take the time to make everything look good.  There were some things about the original image I was using that gave poor results when following the tutorials I found.  In the end, I used the pen tool to make paths to outline the shapes.  I then used stroke to produce the black outlines and fill to color everything in.  This method worked well and had many advantages.  Most of the tutorials recommended some other steps for producing the line art which all then required going in to clean up the lines.  After that, they suggested going in to add color.  Basically this meant extra work.  Plus, drawing clean lines with a mouse is next to impossible- I suspect the authors of the tutorials had pen tablets or another sort of pen input that I was lacking.  There are a few things I would probably do differently if I did it all over again, but who knows, maybe I’ll mess around with those another day.  Overall, I’m really happy with how it came out.  Here’s my final version after one day of learning more and working on it.

I’m pretty thrilled.  It’s very close to the image I had in my head of what I wanted.  I feel good about my final version of cartoon Hoppy.  In a lot of ways, it looks like a simple cartoon, but it wasn’t so simple to make it.  It really was a lot of new techniques and tools and options that I had never used in Photoshop before, some of which I didn’t use for the final version but it took some experimenting to see what would work.  While I’ve done some basic photo editing, this was a completely different type of project.  I’m actually a bit proud of myself.  Plus, it really was fun to take a day to learn how to do something new.  I also explored a lot of new things in Photoshop and I’m sure my new tools will prove useful down the road.

Here’s the old banner design for the site and the new one with my new cartoon Hoppy added in to it.

I spent a Saturday working on this and really gave myself permission to fully focus the whole day on it.  (I did do a few chores and other things that I really needed to do.  Plus, I took some breaks because I think that helps my productivity.)  Beyond being really nice to just do something I wanted to the whole day, it reminded me of a few things about myself.  I really feel like I am at my best when I am focusing on one task.  I do my best work and make the most progress when I have several hours (or days) to dedicate to one thing and just work on that.  This can be a bit of a problem for me too because I can get so focused on one thing that the other things in my life are neglected.  I really work to find some sort of balance, but this reminded me of the benefits of really taking time to just focus on one thing.

The post Designing cartoon Hoppy appeared first on Live Hoppy.