/frekur/blog/

About a month ago I had a conversation with Corman on how to handle the two blogs the BG and I are starting. I haven’t really mentioned it here too much but we are going to be launching two sites; one will be logging our year-long road trip through the US and Canada and the other will be about building the cob house and starting the farm. Here are a few tips we discussed:

Don’t try too hard; our story is unique. I truly believe we have a wonderful dream to share with the cob house and farm. Living off the grid in an earthen home is not what I would call a typical American dream, and it’s been tough to find information regarding the technical aspects of energy-independence (everyone seems to run petroleum-based generators or is hooked into the grid as a backup). This means that a lot of the work is up to us. Since we’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of conservation, self-sufficiency, construction, organic farming and financial responsibility, I believe anyone with an interest in any of those areas could gain something from our articles, even if they have no intention of actually building a house or starting a farm.

Get used to public life. What I find successful in blogs and articles is a sense of honesty and vulnerability in the author. There are no tricks to what we’re going to be doing and since neither of us has *any* experience there are bound to be fuckups. Embrace them and write.

Write often and on a regular basis. In order to attract and maintain consistent traffic we need to offer fresh content several times per week. If the story is compelling enough, people will come and read it, but their interest won’t be limitless. We gotta keep em’ coming back for more!

Start now. It takes a while to come into a writing style, and although the BG and I write personal blogs we do so not necessarily to gain popularity. There will be some adjustment, whether consciously or not, on style, rhythm and story-telling.

Utilize supplemental online tools. Twitter, Flickr and similar online community-based sites can help widen and support our reader base, especially since we will be photo- and video-logging all our adventures.

Most importantly, and this is something we need (and I want) so badly right now: a schedule. There. I said it. We need to have it in our heads that on this day we write this much, or on this other day we edit video and we get it done. It needs to be structured yet flexible. I don’t suspect we’re going to be successful going into it thinking anything else.

I can’t tell you how excited we both are to get started. Currently I’m still designing the house/farm blog and when it’s complete I’ll use it to create the template for the trip blog. My sincere hope is that we do it. Actually, truly do it, because one thing I’ve noticed about the BG and I is that we’re full of ideas and our plans change all the time, but man do we have some attention deficit issues. Our flexibility mostly serves us well but sometimes leads to an endless list of things to do and research and who can get anything done in that state?

It’s time to weed out, organize and focus!