I’m at a bit of a loss. With the Falling Feather series it’s becoming increasingly obvious that blog posts are not the best medium for it. The sections are too long, I can’t split them any more without loosing a lot of clarity, and it’s taking me hours every week to make the post.
So while I was dutifully writing my monster post for today (It was going to be on Lighting and Texturing) I found myself grinding to a halt and looking at it. I’d written over 600 words before even making much of a difference in the scene. Memories of blog posts I’d read saying ‘Don’t overload people with information’, ‘Keep it simple’, ‘Remember your readers’ flashed through my mind and I remembered what my original plan for Wednesday posts was.
“Simple tips and tricks to enhance your 3D workflow and save you time.”
My first post about Mix Maps did this; none of the others since have. I got distracted by the project itself instead of stepping back from it and saying ‘ok, here’s what you can do to add a bit of extra polish’. I want to go back to that way of posting.
This leaves me with a few questions for you though;
- Do I continue with this tutorial series in posts before I revert back to tips and tricks?
- Should I stop the posts, go back to the original concept, and chalk this up as a lesson?
- Should I turn it into an e-book? (before or after continuing with the posts)
I don’t mind putting in the work however I think it’s important to provide what you, the readers, would like. My gut is telling me to stop posting the series, but use the hours I would have spent doing that to create an e-book with the entire project as well as continuing to write tips and tricks on Wednesdays.
What do you guys think?
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Heather,
I think that seperating the deep content from the lighter would work but i’m a newby. I would like to know what more experience guys, maybe like Allyn Hane would suggest. I know he does DIY for home improvement. I expect that those posts are detailed like yours.
That’s a good point actually Ralph, Allyn may have come across a similar problem before… I’ll have to go ask him.
Thanks for your suggestions, you’ve been a real help.
Heather´s last blog ..Review: Infernum The Art of Jason Engle
Hi Heather,
How about having specific days of the week where you post about a particular topic so that your readers know that for instance Fridays you will give them a more-indepth article about Falling Feathers, while the rest of the week you provide shorter tips and tricks. You can make every Wednesday Tip Day and provide a useful tip that you use and want to share with your readers.
If you talk about Falling Feathers every single day, then people not interested in it won’t be coming back – I would try interspersing the series with other topics that would garner more readers. Just an idea.
Karen
You can also start to engage your readers to see what kind of tips they they want or have to share and highlight a day for this.
Hey Karen!
At the moment all my tutorials are run on Wednesdays, with more general posts on Mondays and reviews on Fridays. Possibly I could change it so that it’s mixed in with lighter content; definitely worth thinking about.
A share and highlight day is an excellent idea – thank you.
Heather´s last blog ..Review: Infernum The Art of Jason Engle
Heather,
These are incredibly detailed posts that you put together. I think that you need to keep doing them because they are the piller content (I think that is the right term) of your blog. But I would organize it so that your posts are shorter things maybe talking about how your learned that technique or how you use it and referencing the full long block of information. I am sure that people with more experience can suggest how you organize the information but I think that a bunch of detailed instruction backing up a chatty, anecdotal blog with shorter and more personal posts would work. Interesting to see if you get other suggestions like this.
Thanks for the suggestions Ralph, I’d totally overlooked that.
I do like writing posts this in depth, I’m just wondering if maybe it’d be easier to compile them in another format. The reasoning was that I don’t want to completely overload RSS readers, or make it so long that people disconnect part way through.
From what you said though, do you think that having a separate section of my website for the longer posts/tutorials would work better?
Thanks again for taking the time to comment and let me know.