Potential (Five Minute Friday)

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Here I am again waiting until the last minute to write last Friday’s Five Minute Friday post. Some would say I am squandering my potential. I might just agree with them on days like today. On other days I ask myself why I bother to write blog posts at all, it seems my audience of maybe 10 people is pretty well set and even they don’t read my posts regularly, but only occasionally when they remember. Then I remind myself that when I first started blogging the only way I could get myself to post at all was to tell myself that nobody was ever going to see what I wrote and it was basically anonymous. I didn’t tell anyone what I was up to for the first couple of years except my hubby and kids and they only seemed marginally interested at best.

I read multiple articles about choosing a niche to blog about, and I’d tell myself I’ve done that. My niche is sharing all the wisdom I have gained through experience as a member of the 50 and over club. But in the back of my mind, I know that is not what the articles meant. “They” (yes, the infamous they) think I should choose just one thing to write about on a regular schedule for the rest of my life, or at least the rest of my blogging life. How monotonous! I can’t, I know myself that well, at least. Then, defiant me comes rearing its ugly head saying it is MY blog and I can write what I want to. I think we are at an impasse.

I found myself posting willy-nilly, whatever struck my fancy or a nerve each week. So, a while back, I came up with a schedule to help me know what to write each Thursday and not post similar things back to back. I even made myself a printable and hung it up in my office to remind me I had a schedule to keep now. Then I made it the background on my laptop’s desktop so it was there as a ready reference because I rarely write the Thursday posts in my office at home. Do you want to see it here? I guess I could show you.

So, now you know my secret schedule. You can go back over the last few months of posts and see how closely I have followed it. It actually helps me to focus on any given week to know what I am supposed to be writing about that week. It also keeps me from bombarding you with all the posts at once when I write in batches as I seem to do sometimes. (Gotta write when the muse nudges you, right?)

The potential to be consistent and organized in my posts is all contained in that one graphic that I created on a Thursday when I was procrastinating on actually writing and squandering my potential yet again. How do you decide on your blogging niche? Where do you get your ideas? I just consider the Five Minute Friday posts to be a bonus for all of us, because sometimes this ends up being my best writing and seems to be the one way that new readers find me.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Potential
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

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