It has been a while since I have punched a heavy bag with any real intent. The last one was at my Dad’s house before I was married 12 years ago. This weekend I went and bought a heavy bag. I hung it up in the basement and proceeded to punch the crap out of it.
Apart from being very satisfying and realizing that my technique is poor right now, I was thinking how those few minutes with the bag equate to blogging. So here goes.
1. There is nothing more satisfying than landing a good hard punch, straight on and powerful. If you throw it right, you can feel the power coming from your legs up through your back, shoulder and arm. Pavel Tsatsouline says that a kettlebell snatch is the closest thing to throwing a punch. I am not sure about that yet, but I know that I can punch harder since starting with the kettlebells.
Like an actual punch, there is nothing more satisfying than a blog post that hits right in your target market and blows people away. There is power in words that can move mountains. There is however the question of how to judge effectiveness. A punch is immediate, and gives instant feedback. It is either good or not. A post must wait for page views and comments.
2. You can also hit a glancing blow on the bag that just causes it to spin and has not real power to it. There are post like that, they are there, you know they have been written, but they are weak. If your whole site is like that it will fail. There has to be a learning curve, a few great posts, a few bad posts, then a bunch of knockouts.
3. If you hit wrong, you can do damage. If you don’t learn and continue to hit wrong, you can do permanent damage. This is much the same with your posts. I’m not saying you cant be wrong, or that you will not be wrong. The point is, if you are wrong, admit it or don’t but learn from it and change. If you keep posting bad posts (aka wrong technique) and you don’t change it you can have your blog fizzle out and be only a statistic.
4 Good technique is the only thing that will help you. With boxing, kettlebells or writing, good technique will keep you safe and show results. With writing, and blogging, good technique will keep you afloat and will keep readers coming.
I hope that I am using that good technique. Yesterday I posted late because of other things. It was interesting to note that as soon as that post notification was sent out via twitter I checked the post and went to my daily count. In less than 20 seconds there were 16 visitors online at the same time. That tells me my goals are coming and my blog is growing.
Dont forget to check out my Pre-Writing Challenge page! We start Friday!
Thanks for reading this far. There will be no quiz today.
Justin
