Plans – Feb-May, 2014

This is my personal plan for spring. I’m changing the way I deal with these planning posts, and have a few remarks about that at the end. Here are my priorities:

1. Post, post, post. Post as many things from as many different contributors as we possibly can for the next two and a half months. That’s where our strength is. We’ve generated a mighty stream of content over the past three months. If we can keep it up, all the other priorities will fall right into place.

2. Deepen our network. That means nurturing the relationships we have, and forming more with people who share our interests. It means keeping up with bloggers who comment regularly on our threads and interact with us outside WordPress. This as a long term project. It’s more important to have 10 friends who will read and give you constructive criticism once a week than 1,000 who read everything you write and and never say a word. That is the whole difference between “deep” and “broad” networks.

3. Keep finding ways to use social media more effectively. Our “Blogs with Fan Pages” feed on Facebook is valuable. What we’re doing on Twitter and Stumbleupon is valuable. Diana’s Pinterest presence is also valuable. The trick is to keep making incremental progress with all of those, without letting any of it interfere with our posting.

4. Practical things: The Writing Catalog needs an overhaul in the worst way. I need more Twitter lists. I need to find more blogs with fan pages for the Facebook feed. The A to Z Challenge must be completed.

It will keep building, but slowly. We’ve exceeded my expectations in these first three months by quite a bit. If we can keep posting, I’ll have more free time as the year wears on, and my plan for the summer will be awesome.

Rather than create separate plans for each blog, and give every plan its own page, I’ll edit the titles of my original planning pages and add these posts to them as updates a few days after publication.

Just to be clear, these posts are for me. I don’t tell people what to do, or even ask people to do things very often. But, I am working very hard to encourage collaboration. The way I do that is to give people notice of my plans, and trust the friends who wish me well to help it along.