Tag Archives: Blogging

The Cree should have a flip-chart easel ceremony. No, just kidding.

Woods

THERE’S AN EASY WAY to tell you’ve been spending too much time with the Cree, and it’s this:

When you find yourself saying, “No, just kidding” every time you are just kidding.

As in, “Three guys walk into a bar. No, just kidding.”

If you know any Cree people, you know what I’m talking about.

And speaking of the Cree…

…a long, long, long time ago, the indigenous people of this land had an important right of passage.

When a young man, or a young woman, reached the ceremonial age, all of the people in the community would gather at a sacred spot.

Maybe in the woods, or at the centre of the village, or in the longhouse near the fires. Every nation had their own, sacred spot.

They would call the young man, or young woman, before the gathered community.

It would get very quiet. Electricity would pass through the crowd. Everyone would watch transfixed.

Because the special day had arrived to present the young man, or the young woman, with his, or her …

very own flip-chart easel.

Okay, I made this up. But the point of the story is that today I bought a flip-chart easel.

And owning my own flip-chart easel makes me feel all grown up, or something.

It’s not my company’s flip-chart easel, or my team’s, or my business partner’s. It’s MINE.

And there are so many uses for a flip-chart easel that I can’t believe everyone doesn’t have one of his, or her, own.

I think that’s because there are no decent flip-chart easel ceremonies.

Anyway, from now on I’m going to do everything by flip chart.

Christmas cards, love letters, and tax returns can all totally be done on a flip chart, and why they aren’t already is truly a mystery to me.

You can even set it up on the bus, during the ride from Staples to the subway home, and do a team-building workshop. Trust me, I thought about it.

Here’s just the first of many uses I have found for my flip-chart easel.

flip-chart-1

So, yeah, I think I’ll do only flip-chart-Twitter from now on.

And here’s another use, which will finally resolve something I’ve been meaning to tell my son.

flip-chart-2

No, just kidding.

Yes, it’s true. I have a new website.

I wasn’t going to announce this until it was official, but what the heck.

I have a new business-oriented website.

twitter-banner

There. Now it’s out.

Actually, this has been some time in the making.

You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about streamlining my life, so that it feels like everything I’m doing is pushing in the same direction, and not in the 20 directions I was going.

I’m guessing you can relate to this.

And, if you’ve been following this blog, you know I’ve been spending my time going back to the books. You know, the proverbial drawing table.

It’s been a time of learning, of reflection, and of intense planning. The fact is that I have some big ideas, and I want to give them a chance. But to do that I have to make some changes.

I won’t bore you with all the details. Let it be enough to say that while I’ve been away, I have developed a plan, and I’m very excited about it.

The business website is not going to replace this site, not yet anyway. I’ll still be writing here, but the truth is I don’t have the time or the energy to blog here to the degree I have in past years.

I’ll be focusing on developing my business. The new website is part of that focus. Because it’s a business site, the primary interest will be my communications work. However, there will be lots of other stuff too—about writing and personal growth and pursuing your passions.

Gradually, over the next couple of months, I’ll be making the transition. The business pieces of this site will be stripped away, leaving only the personal writing I’ve done on this blog.

I don’t know what will happen to this blog long-term. That will depend on how things go with my business!

My business site will officially launch in the Spring. Most of my time will be spent at the new website, which is:

spearcommunications.com

I do hope you’ll visit, find it of interest, and bookmark it.

Thanks for visiting. I hope to see you soon!

-Wayne.

 

 

I’m tired of being a crappy blogger, and here’s what I’m doing about it

old-typewriter

If you are a blogger, the odds are you have been going through the same experience as me. If that’s the case, keep reading. There is good news and hope at the end

IF YOU’RE A REGULAR VISITOR, you’ll have noticed my site has changed a lot these past months.

Here’s why.

But first: Thank-you for giving me your time—for reading my posts, for contributing your thoughts, for your company. A few of you even share my posts on social media. I want you to know I try to return the compliment, by reading your work and posting it on my Twitter feed. This website is meant to foster a community.

Now, back to this change business. There’s a lot to cover, but I’ll be as brief as I can.

My five-year blogging anniversary arrives in ten days. In other words, I started waynekspear.com on January 21, 2010. At that time I was averaging 16 visitors a day. It was a fun time.

I paid no attention to traffic in the early days. That changed. I posted regularly, as much as four essays a week. After two years, I got curious. How much traffic was I getting? What did my audience look like?

The short answer is that I did a bunch of research, and I started collecting and analyzing data, and I concluded that I had no more than a few readers. I figured no more than ten people actually read a post, and that included my friends and family. After five years of blogging, the numbers are telling the same story.

So why is that a problem?

Here’s why.

Having ten readers is great. If you’ve got this far, you are one of ten. You are great.

According to the data, 92% of the people who arrive at this site leave in under ten seconds. And another few percent leave in under a minute. Nothing I write can be read in under a minute. So I think of my readers as part of an elite group.

The writing i did between 2010 and 2014—those hundreds of essays—represents a lot of my time. I could have been doing a lot of other things. Each article took about an hour, so over four years that’s 600 hours.

My intention has been to build an audience and to earn income selling books and articles and whatnot. So to reach more folks, I started writing for the National Post. Some months later, in 2012, I was writing for the Huffington Post. I didn’t get paid for this work: it was done for exposure. And it didn’t work. Sure, more people saw my name, but my traffic flatlined.

Fast-forward three years, to 2015, and my daily average traffic is now 106 hits a day. Each of my posts gets, on average, about 18 hits. Keep in mind only five percent of these hits represent a reader.

In 95 out of 100 instances, a person enters words into a search engine, arrives at my site, decides in under five seconds it’s not what they are looking for, and bounces. (That’s the technical term for the non-engaged portion of your traffic.)

Okay, I could go down the rabbit hole now, and talk all about WordPress stats and what I’ve learned about the blogosphere, but again I’m going to give you the crisp summary. It’s worth repeating why I’ve written this post: you’ve given me your precious time, and I want to show my respect for this by explaining the changes on my site—and by telling you that more changes are on the way.

Also, if you are a fellow blogger, the odds are you have been going through the same experience. If that’s the case, keep reading. There is good news and hope at the end.

You see, I spent 2014 doing a lot of thinking and research and soul-searching. Not making money from writing wasn’t really my problem. It was the realization that my work was not connecting, that people couldn’t care less about it, that it just wasn’t good enough. I looked around the Internet and I found bloggers who, after a few months of writing, had thousands of readers. People took time to leave comments and to tell their friends about this amazing writer they’d found. Well, there was no denying that I was not this kind of writer. Why not? What magical thing did they have that I didn’t?

I also discovered that most bloggers were exactly where I was, pouring their heart and soul into writing that maybe a few people would read.

Trust me, that is the crisp version. The long version was a lot of studying, and a lot of messy and unpleasant introspection. In November I wrote a draft blog post that thanked my readers and announced I would be writing no more.

But then I got thinking. What if instead of quitting, I changed how I write? Make it more fun and accessible. I noticed that popular bloggers often have lots of pictures in their posts, and that they break paragraphs into bite-sized chunks with sub-heads and call-outs and CTAs. They write in a relaxed and even jargony style. So I started to do that.

Around this time I came across a fellow named Jon Morrow. I read a bunch of his blog posts, but here’s the one that blew everything I was thinking and doing out of the water: 20 Ways to Be Just Another Mediocre Blogger Nobody Gives a Crap About.

Yep, that was me: the crappy blogger no one gives a shit about. I’d managed to do every one of the twenty stupid things in this post. This pretty much sealed it: I was a failure.

Except I wasn’t. I was just a guy who didn’t know what he was doing. And once upon a time so was Jon. He knew what all the mistakes were because he’d made them. And now? He makes boat loads of money blogging.

So the good news is I can do better. I signed up for Jon’s course Serious Bloggers Only. Jon says you shouldn’t even bother writing anything on your blog until you have 10,000 subscribers. Instead put your effort into connecting with the influencers in your blogging niche, build a network, and write guest posts. He says you should put a note on your website, directing your readers to the guest posts you’ll be doing on those popular blogs.

I’m going to follow his advice, because maybe I’m delusional but I really do believe in my work. I just need to be smarter and more effective. So I’m studying marketing and business and other things most writers avoid like spoiled milk.

My partner doesn’t agree at all with the posts I’ve been doing since about last November. She says I’m dumbing it down, and that I’m smarter than that. I see her point. What I realized is that it’s not actually about my writing, it’s about cutting through the noise and clutter of the Internet.

When I’m finished this course I hope to have a few things sorted out:

• what is my niche in the blogging marketplace?
• who do I want to write for?
• what is my strategy for writing compelling prose that connects with readers?
• how do I turn this blog from a hobby (let’s be honest) into an income generator?
• in short: how do I stop being Just Another Mediocre Blogger Nobody Gives a Crap About.

I’m not going to stop blogging at waynekspear, but I am going to do less of it until I have completed the course-work and the strategies given to me by Jon.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts. I mean, if you’ve stayed with me this far, wow. Your thoughts are extremely important to me. I’m kind of dying to know them, to be honest.

Tweet Quote

Now, here’s why this matters to you. If you are also a blogger—I know some of my readers are—and anything I’ve written above is speaking to you, I recommend you visit Jon’s site. You deserve to have a community. I believe we should all be blogging to make a meaningful difference. You don’t have to settle for anything less. It took me five years to realize I was doing everything wrong. If I can help even one person to not waste five years making mistakes, this post will have been worth writing.

Cheers.

Find me on Twitter. Check out my latest book.

like-share

Some tips for keeping warm in interstellar space. I mean, Canada.

IF YOU LIVE in Canada, or northern USA, you know how nasty Winter can be. Also, if you live on the moon or in interstellar space, where I hear it gets almost as cold as Winnipeg.

Like me, every Winter you ask yourself What on earth am I doing here? Okay, I also ask myself that in the Spring, Fall and Summer. In the Winter, I just add “…in this cold country.” Why do I stay in such an inhospitable climate, year after year, when there are places in the world where you can live on the beach, basking in the life-giving rays of paradise, until a beaver-sized scorpion bites you and you go blind, and then slowly die as thick yellow foam erupts from your mouth.

And that’s how I remember why I stay in Canada.

Read More

Make anything funny with this one simple trick

funny-trick
LAST MONTH my family went on a mission. It was my son’s idea, and it went like this: from a hat each one of us picked the name of a family member and went to the local department store with a budget of $10 to buy that person stocking-stuffers. There was also a rule that what you bought had to be either a) edible or b) practical. So, naturally, I bought googly eyes.

Read More

11 teeny-tiny, totally do-able things that are great for your life

flossing and health

WHAT IF I SAID you can change your life for the better, and that all you’ll need is a gazillion dollars, a whackload of planning, and years of back-breaking effort? “That’s not very helpful or surprising,” you’d say. Most of us have limited resources—not only money, but discipline and energy and time. Sure, it’s great to have one big goal for the year, but anything more than that and you’re courting disappointment.

Read More

Twelve things Millennials have amazingly never experienced

Millennials-Team-Building

Seeing a movie once, and only once, forever

Before the mass adoption of video home systems (VHS) in the early 1980s, the only place you’d see a movie was in the theatre, and the only time you’d see it was at the time of its release. Sure, you could go back to the theatre during the two weeks it was playing, and see it again and again. If the movie was unusually popular, it might be held over for as long as a month. Eventually the screening would end, and the movie would disappear into a black hole with no plan or expectation of a re-release. There was no option of renting or streaming. And since sequels (and prequels) have become commonplace only in the last couple of decades, chances are there would be no revisiting of the story, ever. You’d move on to the next movie, and your recollections would be the only thing you’d have.

Read More

Dear Mister Captain—please let me on the life boat

Ship-Captain

NOTE—This piece is based on a writing assignment in the book 642 Things to Write About, published by the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto:

“Only ten people will fit in the life raft. Convince the Captain that you should be one of them.”

MR SMITH? Hi!—sorry about the mister. I realize I should have said captain. I know it’s not the best time, with the boat sinking and all, but I’ve been meaning to say that’s a nice uniform. The contrast of black and gold is masculine, audacious even, and conveys authority—while also being stylish. So often these days dress is nothing but function. Or you have uniforms like on the Love Boat, which have no gravitas whatsoever. I mean, short-sleeves? Really? Captain Stubing was no Mr. Smith, if you ask me. Sure, he was pleasant, but is pleasant really what you want when the ship is going down? Which brings me to what I was hoping to discuss with you, and I know you’re a busy man. All I’m asking for is a minute of your time and that you’ll consider letting me on the life boat. This is my story.

Click for more

An open letter to Stephen King

stephen-king
I‘VE JUST FINISHED On Writing. It’s been years since I’ve read one of your books, and I enjoyed this one enough that I’ll be reading another soon.

We have some things in common. Like you, I started a satirical magazine in high school. Mine was better received by staff than yours, owing I suspect to the principle that satire is a mirror in which we see the reflection of all faces but our own. I stopped writing satire for this reason, which from your perspective will appear as an irony. The point is that satire will either provoke your targets or it won’t, and whatever the outcome you’ll wonder if the buck was worth the bang, or lack of it.

Read More

My Grade 11 English Teacher, Mrs. Joyce, Marks Christmas Carols

f
Jingle Bells

Obviously the bells jingle: that’s what they are made to do. Try “bells, bells all the way.” (See Strunk and White, “Omit needless words.”) Also, does the protagonist have some sort of objection to a multi-horse and/or closed sleigh? If so, explain; if not, cut. C-

Let it Snow

Do you really mean to say that the weather outside is filled with fright? If so, this is a pathetic fallacy. And who exactly is going to “let it snow”? Who could stop it snowing? Use the indicative mood to invigorate your prose. C

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

What is the significance of the chestnuts? You open the scene with them but don’t do much else. Remember: if there is a gun on the mantle in act one, it must be fired by act four. Perhaps the roasted chestnuts could explode and disfigure Jack Frost, or the reindeer could eat them and lose their powers of flight. This would create an interesting narrative problem for Santa to resolve. “Yuletide carols being sung by a choir” should be “a choir sings Yuletide carols.” Avoid passive voice. D+

Little Drummer Boy

What on earth is a pa rum pum pum pum? Does the drummer boy suffer from some kind of compulsive tick? Is he trying to communicate an important message. Is the pa-rum-pum-pum-pum akin to the “ou-boum” of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India? Explore. D-

Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer

If the nose is said to glow, then it is implicitly very bright. Show, don’t tell. D

Silent night

Silent? With the quaking shepherds and the streaming glories and the singing hosts. Do you know how many people are in a host? And they’re singing. Try editing this one with a view to making it about a rowdy night. C

O Christmas Tree

Twenty-four lines to establish that it’s a nice tree, because it has green and sparkly branches? Remember: brevity is the soul of wit. D-

Winter Wonderland

Too much going on here. First there are bells, then glistening snow. Why has the bluebird gone? And what is the significance of this “new bird”? Why even bring birds into it? Clearly this story is about a couple who are so eager to marry that they’ll let a snowman “do the job,” as you so vulgarly put it. The rest is just confusing. Cut. C-

Away in a Manger

The baby is either away, or else in the manger. I don’t understand how the protagonist can be in the barn, and then looking down from the sky—all within a few lines. This is fine if you are writing in a genre, such as science fiction, that allows for teleportation. Perhaps you could re-write this as an extra-terrestrial carol about futuristic travel. C

humor-tag

Find me on Twitter and, also, here is my new book.

like-share

Reasons you should start a blog. And me destroying them.

blogging-dont

I GOT CURIOUS about my odds. The biggest lottery in Canada? I have about a one-in-15-million shot at that. Weirdly enough, there are smaller lotteries in this country where my odds are only half that, or one-in-twenty-eight-million. It’s far more likely that I’ll be abducted by extra-terrestrial thespian sharks. I’m glad that’s the case, because there’s nothing more terrifying in this universe than the menace of shark power combined with the narcissistic bitterness of actors.

I can has more? (Click for more!)

5 common mistakes made by writers

PAPER-AND-PENCIL

IF YOU READ this little website of mine, you probably know I’m a fan of science and that I talk about sciency and logically things all the time. My partner Nicole follows IFLScience, where they have some science gift ideas that are cool and that you should definitely check out, for that special science nerd in your life.

I can has more? (Click for more!)