… always have the worst shoes, so the saying goes. In other words, even the most dedicated professional sometimes fails to apply their skills to their own needs closest to home. I’m a web and IT freelancer who makes an increasingly large part of his living from blogging and social networking, yet I haven’t updated my own blog for nearly seven months.
Mea culpa. It’s time to sort that out.
The good news, from my point of view, is that I’ve had an incredibly busy and exciting Spring and Summer. I’ve been involved in a range of satisfying projects and continue to acquire business via personal contacts and word-of-mouth, which I hope means that people value what I do and are happy to recommend me to their own friends and business partners.
The need to keep my blog updated from a marketing point of view has therefore not been foremost in my mind. However, that’s not what it’s all about. Much of my own research and skills-building is based on the things that I read in other people’s blogs and I’m well aware that it’s been a rather one-way relationship. I’m not giving much back in return.
So, my “back to school” resolution for September is to make a point of writing much more about the issues that I encounter in my work. Earlier this year this blog focused on documenting specific technical issues that I’d come across, but much of what I do these days is based on the broader concepts of how you communicate with people via the web.
Sometimes I worry that if I describe the full range of the services that I can offer, I’ll come across as an unfocused dilettante. I don’t think that’s true. I’m not necessarily a jack of all trades, but I’ve mastered many. I’m driven by the idea that fellow blogger Steve Hardy (no relation) calls “creative generalism“. In other words, eclecticism is power.
I did a bit of brainstorming with a business contact recently and he offered the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that my core marketing message should be “I am the glue”. It’s possibly the worst slogan ever, but it does highlight the way that I connect things together into a larger whole. That’s the underlying theme of what I do and what I want to write about.