What about your first myspace update?

First tweet?

First Facebook update?

Most of you might have said something less than memorable. Maybe, “I’m here!”

Or, “What is this all about?”

And now we’re getting Google+.

It’s yet ANOTHER chance for you to get out in the world of social media and say something.

There are tons of jokes in the other mediums suggesting people are already struggling with making that first step into the ocean of this new forum resonate.

So, what is it going to be? You get yet another chance to start fresh, create a space, have a voice.

How do you proceed?

While we aren’t exactly taking the first steps on the moon with this or anything, it is fun to know that you could be the beginning and success of something new, of finding a new way. I’m always jealous when I see the creative side of a new idea, and wish I’d thought of it first. I can’t wait to see what people come up with for Google+.

How about instead of blogging every day – which used to be a litmus test for success – if you can’t do that, you just do something great once in a while? No one really sticks to the daily method if they are awesome – there is just too much going on in life to find the time, if this isn’t your full-time thing. Right?

I tried Friday Fives for two years, Whatever Wednesday ONCE, and tried all this other garbage to reignite the flames here – a new hobby (the cooking crap), teaching about what I know (the yoga crap), the laziest method ever (camera phone photo crap). It’s not working. I just have to do what I best. Stop by when I need to share!

Last weekend in Vegas, in fact, it was SO awesome I couldn’t even concentrate on looking at my phone to tweet something about how awesome it was. I was too busy loving the moment to get away from it to get online. And it felt good. I felt that way at SXSW too. I wanted to be the guy NOT needing to look at his phone. And I felt like I kept it check. And all my friends did too.

Oh, here’s the article for you to check out.

http://www.copyblogger.com/impress-instantly/

This leads me to wonder if I should try Tumblr – any thoughts? Lately I’m thinking more along the lines of in response to other sites and articles, so it’d be great to just put up a link and my quick thoughts on it.

This space shouldn’t be a burden to bear, so maybe I need to down size. Is that what a move from this blog to Tumblr would be?

And in closing, a picture of all my friends in moustaches:

I dropped blogger immediately, thinking it was rather hokey looking. This wordpress site is completely free, and it offers a lot, but there are also things I can’t do. Like get rich. But come on. That’s unrealistic. I wanted to journal and share not because of some unique perspective, but just because the only way to get better at writing is to write.

Writers write.

So my struggle after a funny video was my blogging over at Ski Utah. I COULD just journal, but I wanted it to be much more than that. I wanted what Copyblogger says to gain: followers (and comments!!). Using a call to action. A great headline. Great content.

It was harder than I ever imagined. I run around telling people to check out the site, and try to provide value. My gimmicky video to win aside, I am a huge defender of Utah, skiing, and trying it if you never have.

I want people that don’t have Utah or skiing on their radar to visit/even move here and fall in love.

I want to be the reason for that.

My argument was that there are 10% phenomenal skiers, 10% beginners, and everyone else is somewhere in the middle.

I wanted to reach out and connect with those people in the middle, and I gained a platform to do so. And then the work was hard.

What to you blog to get people’s attention?

I tried to educate as someone learning everything for the first time. About gear, about the resorts.

I hit a wall when I started skiing.

That might not make sense, but the truth is good writing takes so much time.

Learning how to REALLY ski took up so much of my time, every day. Then you get home, put on sweats and turn into a zombie. Until last month, when I was finally good to ski all morning, and then go workout, work, do whatever after. No tiredness. Then I hurt my foot, and that slowed me down. I got a little depressed. I realized it is a PAIN to try and take pictures, and film on the mountain. I just wanted to ski.

I learned what I know about skiing, and what I’ll never understand. I hate making videos while skiing. You miss a lot of skiing. So despite labeling myself the wordy one, well, that’s what I am. Gotta do what I know how to do!

The good news- to me-  is I’m back to writing and have posts outlined  for over the summer and into the next ski season that I can be really proud of. It just took time. I’m so grateful for this opportunity and hope to bring my love of skiing to more and more people. With exceptional content!

Write Epic Sh*t.

Three little words. It makes it sound so easy right? You came to the internet, bought a domain, got a little space, and it was the same as a blank piece of paper and a pen in front of you.

With 1,000 people/day looking over your shoulder.

No pressure!

You’re a writer. So write. And write with an impact that will blow minds, save worlds, free countries, change lives.

Or post pictures of food you’re cooking and yoga you’re doing.

Not everyone can spend the time it takes to learn about and provide SEO tips (or explain to little people like me that SEO doesn’t even matter on a wordpress hosted blog).

But man is there a market. There are so many bloggers out there if you are looking for them, telling you tips, tricks, and ideas to grow your Twitter followers, your Facebook brand, and your website. It’s easy to get too caught up in it all.

For the most part, they have it all wrong. This article tells you to stop trying those little “tips”. No amount of strangers on Twitter are going to click a link they don’t care about. I’ve met some neat internet buddies, for example thank goodness for Gina Begin and Stephen Weiss (and HOW I MOUNTAIN!). People, internet people, who take action on your message. I just need to take that message from mediocre to epic. Got it. Working on it.

My tip would be don’t forget to return the favor! That interaction, with others who are writing and trying to make a site work, that matters! If someone reaches out to you, take the time to say thanks in the best way you can. Comment on my blog, and I’ll try to comment on yours. I’m not always coming up with something relevant, but it’s always at the back of my mind. I’ll hit refresh on your photos. I’ll forward something cute to my mom.

And you’d do the same for me. That’s a good way to grow!

UPDATED to add How I Mountain. Too funny to read her post today!

Is it just me, or is the whole starving artist thing highly overrated?

Yes, there’s a certain romanticism to being a penniless vagabond, sacrificing material goods in the selfless pursuit of art.

Yes, it’s fun to fantasize about everyone suddenly realizing you’re a genius after you’re dead and auctioning your once-soiled toilet for nearly $20,000.

Yes, it’s hip to take a stand against evil capitalists and proselytize about constructing digital economies based on currencies of cool.

But eventually, it gets old.

I know, because I’ve been there. In college, I was the epitome of the starving artist, winning poetry competitions and acing English classes with ease and then bumming gas money to get home, but eventually I realized three things …

• No matter how good your poetry is, girls think you’re lame when you take them out for a romantic dinner at Taco Bell
• After sleeping in your car for a week, you don’t feel like writing a damn thing
• Pretty much the only job available to English majors is to become an English teacher, and they’re some of the most underpaid, under-appreciated people on earth

Sooner or later, you begin to reconsider. I mean, no, you don’t have to be rich and famous, but would having your own apartment and being able to afford food be so bad? Hell, it might even help your writing.

So, you embark on your quest to make some money.

You try to write some articles for magazines and newspapers. You hire yourself out as a freelance copywriter (even though you probably have no idea what copywriting is). You start a blog and wait for the world to beat a path to your door.

And if you’re lucky, you survive. No, you’re not sitting by the beach drinking margaritas, but you have food and a bed and a car, and people don’t worry about catching weird diseases when they’re standing beside you in the elevator. It’s nice, but you still haven’t “made it,” and you wonder why.

In my experience?

It’s because you don’t have your mind right. You have these nasty little demons sitting on your shoulder, feeding you lies about the relationship between success and art. You probably picked up some of these ideas from your parents, others from your teachers, and still others from fellow writers and artists.

And if you let them, they’ll cripple you. You’ll go through your whole life knowing you’re talented but never quite making it and forever wondering why.

We can’t let that happen.

Below, you’ll find some of the most common beliefs that hold writers back. Take a look, and see if any of them look familiar:

Crippling Belief #1: It’s all about you

The most heinous lie to ever infect the mind of a writer is the belief that your work is all about you.

You believe your writing is a form of self-expression, an extension of your mind, a little piece of your soul imbued into the page. To write well, you just need to be authentic, and if the world doesn’t like it, the world can go to hell.

Provocative, right? And like all the best lies, it has a grain of truth to it.

Yes, authenticity matters, but only to the extent people enjoy what you do. You’ll never find me auditioning for American Idol because, the fact is, I couldn’t carry a note to save my life. Yes, my voice is authentic, but it’s authentically bad, and that means I’ll never be a singer.

Writing works the same way. To be successful, stop worrying about who you are and start thinking about what your audience wants.

What do they like? How is it done? Only after you’ve answered those two questions are you ready to ask the third one: is it right for you?

I can’t overstress how important the order is. Them first, you second, never the other way around.

Crippling Belief #2: Building a following takes time

The last bastion of hope for any struggling writer is that building a following takes time.

Sure, life sucks right now, but if you’ll just hang in there, things will snowball, and everything will be all right.

It seems reasonable. After all, no one gets famous overnight, right? Everywhere you look, there are stories of successful people persisting when there was no hope, trudging forward one weary step at a time, unwilling to quit, clinging fiercely to their dreams, manifesting success through sheer power of will.

It’s inspiring… but it’s also deceptive.

Yes, building a following often takes time, but it’s not because people are slow on the uptake, incapable of seeing your brilliance until you’ve been around for a few years.

It’s because, when you’re a newbie, you do everything wrong, and most of us get knocked around for a few years until we figure out how to do it right.

In other words, you’re not waiting on the world. The world is waiting on you.

Yes, persistence is important. Yes, learning takes time. Yes, it’ll probably be slow and painful. But the sooner you learn, the sooner it will be over. So get busy.

Crippling Belief #3: You know what you’re doing

So, let me guess:

You’ve always been a pretty good writer, right? No, you haven’t won a Pulitzer or anything, but your teachers fawned over you in school, and your friends and family are awestruck by your skill with words.

Maybe you’ve even written for a magazine or newspaper a time or two and gotten some real credentials to put on your resume.

You believe all of that makes you different. When you start a blog or write a press release or hang up your shingle as a freelance writer, you believe things will be easier for you than all of the other bumbling writers out there. Unlike them, you know what you’re doing.

Heh.

It never ceases to astonish me how many writers believe this. They honestly think being able to spell, write a grammatical sentence, and make a few aunties and uncles smile is enough to make them a good writer.

It isn’t. The difference between writing for free and writing to become recognized as a worldwide authority is like the difference between taking a jog after work and running an Olympic marathon. Like running events, each type of writing is also quite different, and even a legend might need years of training to switch.

The bottom line: if you want to make a career out of writing, you have to be serious about it.

You’ll need to commit years of your life to mastering it, and even then, you’ll have barely caught a glimpse of everything there is to know.

Also, if you’re not willing to make that commitment, that’s fine. Just hire someone who is. It’s far faster and much, much less painful.

Crippling Belief #4: Writing can only be a labor of love

It’s about the art. It’s about the fans. It’s about the ideas themselves.

If you start trying to squeeze money out of it, you’ll just pervert it, commercialize it, transform it into a cold and hollow substitution for what it could have been. Right?

Well, yes and no. Once again, this one is dangerous precisely because it’s partly true.

Yes, all the best writers love what they do. The thing that separates Stephen King from a lot of other horror writers isn’t the gore or the suspense or the characters. It’s the joy. When he’s chopping off heads or destroying the world, he doesn’t just tell you about it. He revels in it.

Also, Stephen King is far from broke. I think he made something like $50 million last year.

Granted, we can’t all be Stephen King, but one of the greatest fallacies in writing is that art and money are mutually exclusive. If you love something, you can’t make money from it, or if you want to make money, you can’t love the work.

That’s just silly. You can have both. In fact, I would even say you need both, or you’ll never have the staying power to become truly great at what you do.

Crippling Belief #5: You’re a writer (nothing more)

Many writers take enormous pride in what they do, and rightfully so.

We use nothing more than little splotches of ink to communicate with people across the globe.

We speak the unspeakable. We snatch ephemeral ideas from the air and bring them to life on the page.

It’s delightful. Amazing. Humbling.

But if you think it’s your only responsibility, you are horribly mistaken.

The best way I know to explain it is, imagine a mother carrying a child for nine months, religiously taking care of her body, doing everything a good mother does, and then the day she delivers it, she leaves the hospital and sets it on the side of the road. “Goodbye, sweet thing,” she says. “It was a pleasure, but now I have other things to do,” and then she walks away.

It’s a horrifying thought, right?

Yet, as writers, it’s something we do every day. We finish working on a piece, publish it, and then prop our feet up, praising ourselves for a job well done. “Finally, I’m finished,” we think. “On to the next project.” And then we watch from afar as it struggles to gain attention, weakens, and finally dies.

It’s a morbid metaphor, I know, but this point is absolutely essential for you to understand:

If you want to be successful, you can’t be a writer and nothing more.

You also have to be a constant caretaker, a shameless promoter, a fearless champion. You have tofight for your ideas the way a mother fights for her children.

Your job isn’t over the day you publish. On the contrary, it’s just beginning. More than likely, you’ll spend weeks, months, and years fighting to get your words the attention they deserve, and it’ll be the most tiring, nerve-racking, and yet unquestionably rewarding experience of your life.

Don’t neglect that responsibility. Don’t try to outsource it to someone else. Don’t rob yourself of the experience.

The truth is, the joy of writing isn’t the writing itself. It’s seeing your ideas spread. It’s seeing them touch other people. It’s seeing them take root within the minds of those people, where they continue to grow into something more wonderful than you could have ever imagined.

Do you want that?

If you do, then be more than just a writer. The world already has enough of those.

What we need are more warriors. What we need are more heretics. What we need are wordsmiths with the courage to change the world.

Words aren’t just words, you see. They’re the medium through which writers accomplish change.

Great writers don’t just inform you. They don’t just entertain you. They don’t just persuade you. They change you, leaving you a slightly different person than you were before you read their work.

If you ask me, change should be the standard we hold ourselves to, not merely scribbling words down upon the page.

Then again, what do I know?

I’m just a writer. Nothing more. 

About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger. If you’d like to learn more about what it really takes to become a popular writer, check out his free videos on guest blogging.

MK has put it simply that he wouldn’t hire someone who couldn’t be counted on to be consistent and professional, and writing well is part of that, even if it’s not the main focus of that person’s job. He tells me as an advertiser he’d quit giving a site money if it made mistakes too often (thank goodness he’s not an advertiser here!).

Maybe not everyone has time for someone to help proofread their work. But it is starting to drive me totally crazy that so many people who have an online presence are simply terrible at spelling. Grammar and writing style are one thing. Sometimes I’m trying to convey something funny or snarky and write it a certain way that may not work for you. That’s allowed. I won’t pick on you for that. But if your ‘career’, no matter how serious, has you posting online, I think you should spell or have someone proofread your work.

Does it matter to you if you get a work email that is barely legible? Not a quick text from a friend written more to convey an idea than tell a story, but something that is supposed to be professional. I’ve been seeing some blogs, Facebook business pages, and Twitter accounts lately that have typos that hurt my brain. What would you do? I’m tempted to find the equivalent of the online ‘red pen’ and go around correcting people. But I’m betting it won’t make me many friends…

This new ‘job’ of mine will only be a success if you find me and are struck by my wit and banter so much so that you come back over and over, increasing the traffic to the site. At least, that’s how I’d measure my success. Not sure if the metrics over there will even tell them it’s my hard work increasing site traffic. I have a few skit and post ideas I’m really excited about executing over the winter, and hope humor and my concept of ‘skiing for the average masses’ connects with readers and helps promote skiing in Utah.

I’m supposed to start with an about me, where I plan to stress that this skiing thing seemed totally inaccessible to me not all that long ago, and then BAM!, here I am now, writing to others to tell them how to break the wall of ‘brosef’ and let skiing come to them in a whole new way.

What I’m wondering is if I’ll see just how effective a blog can be to media and marketing. Why would anyone go to that site? Well, the weather reporting is the bomb. To me, if you live here or have internet access while you’re here skiing, the site tells you where you should be that morning. And that’s valuable. I hope to produce content that makes you just want to hear from me, I think that’s all I can do. Any one else think there’s more to it? Let me know…

I went to WalMart and got him the only other card they had besides the one I got him last year, and some Orbit gum. He’d rather have money in the bank than cheesy gifts that end up in the storage room.

We both got nice new hairdos and since it was no biggie we went out to dinner with MH, who I totally missed while we were gone! It’s hard having such great friends in so many places, I’m always missing someone. We went to a bar afterward. And saw the strangest band. Of all time. Of ALL time. And I’ve seen many bands.

Quite often, if MK and I both drink, we fall back in to the old ways we have only just gotten rid of – where we bicker about each other. It started out of love and was all a big joke to us, but not to people we did it in front of, and we worked hard to knock it off.

But you know what the ass kicker was? He brought up this. My blog.

He called me a wuss.

And you know what? He was right. I am such a freaking wuss. For someone who talks so much I have so little to say. I am so scared. While I was getting my hair done, the super lovely hairdresser seemed surprised that I was terrified of karaoke and daring fashions. But what you might not know about me is that I am so worried about what people think (or maybe I wear that on my sleeve and am totally blind to how obvious it is).

Trying to be a writer made me observe everything. Since college I have become so aware of my surroundings sometimes I can’t even focus. I hear others conversations within ear shot. I have a hard time taking it all in. But I think it goes both ways. I have panic attacks if something embarrassing happens. If I say the wrong thing in front of someone I analyze it for hours afterwards. It can be impossible for me to sleep if I’m stressed about what someone I might not even know that well thought about me in passing.

 I give up too easily. I take the easy way out. As much as I love blogging, I write about how fun my day was instead of how worked up I am that my genius husband won’t take to the internet and tell everyone what really happened to the market on May 5th. Or that I hate lipstick. Or what a terrible driver my bother is.

Because I’m too worried MK might ever see this. Or that you LOVE lipstick. Or that CH won’t still love me if I tell him to not be so aggressive in CA in that BMW of his. And that you’ll think I’m stupid. That you’ll actually fail to realize that my great ideas never happen when my hands are on the keyboard. That you’ll think  this writing at odd quick moments is what my book might look like. What ever happened to that thing…?

So I’m going to give this another go. And take the wuss out of this site. But only a little bit, I’m still nervous to lose you. I have such a wide range of friends, family, and strangers here I really don’t want to fight!

In case this whole entry is a little too retarded for you, check this out.

Another awesome idea (I wish I’d thought of first).

My sales pitch might be the problem. “Tastes like chicken” might not be the most thoughtful tagline. I’ve been thinking about what to put on my resume for how lazy I’ve been the last three years – I never thought “housewife” could be me until I watched those Bravo shows and realized you don’t need to do crap to be called a “housewife”. We joked about getting business cards- Realtors keep asking MK for one and we both laugh. What we he do with those? Build card towers? It would have his name and email, which is his name. And maybe his phone number, which ironically is also his name.

from toothpastefordinner.com

Can you tagline yourself? What would your tagline be? “Hard worker”? “Mother of 18″? “Boisterous”? “Business oriented with a goal of success and growth in an emerging new media industry”? Tell me in the comments.

What I have done, since high school in fact, is buy a planner every year and keep track of what I do day to day. Even if it’s laundry. It was so fun to go back around the time we got married and remember all our dates. As the years go by, I’m less meticulous, some weeks accidentally go empty as I draw a blank when I sit down to jot down notes. But for the most part, there is my life, at least the events that comprise it, in a hard copy, on paper.

I would readily suggest to anyone with a terrible memory like mine to try journaling. A dream journal, or a day planner. Maybe even one quote a day that you find and like. Taking pen to paper just feels more rewarding than the laptop sometimes.