 Hi, everybody. Y'all don't need this talk, right? You're expert bloggers. You work a full-time job. You exercise every day. You manage your household. And you still publish regularly on your blog. You publish exciting content every single day. And you never run out of ideas for things to write about. Am I right? Yeah, me neither. Days go by, and then weeks. You think about how good posting would feel to write, to publish, to get those likes and comments. But you don't actually do anything about it. The longer your blog sits there untouched, the more you feel like you have to write something awesome to make up for being a slacker. Which means you now have writer's block, because really, who can write under the pressure of having to write something amazing? So you don't publish. Your visitors leave. Your views trickle to zero. You feel like a terrible blogger. And you go cry in a corner. It doesn't have to be this way. I found a way to make room in your life so that you can not only blog, but so that you have something to talk about, to write about, every time you sit down at your keyboard. My name is Andrea Badgley. And I've been blogging on my personal site at andriabadgley.com for about four years now. When I first started my blog, I was a stay-at-home mom. And I published on a pretty regular basis. I had a decent online following, and I was gaining more friends every day. But when I started working full-time, I no longer had time or focus for my blog. I stopped publishing regularly. My visitors and my views dwindled. I felt really bad about myself for neglecting the blog that I had not only grown to love, but that helped me find my job with automatic in WordPress.com. So I tried to figure out what it was that was keeping me from blogging. And I determined that I had two blockers, time and topics. During my blogging drought, I would think I just don't have time anymore to blog. Or if I did find some time, I'd sit down and think, I don't have anything interesting to say. So I figured out a way to make time. And I devised a tool that ensured I would never run out of topics. So first, let's talk about time. I was once a member of a writing group who met every week to write together. And when we got together, we'd do what's called timed writes. We'd set a timer for 10 minutes, right until the timer went off without lifting our pens from the page. We just kept writing. And then when the timer dined, we stopped writing. And we'd share what we wrote with each other, raw and completely unedited. So to make time in my life for my blog, I thought, I'm going to iterate on this idea. And I decided to carve 10 minutes out of my day, every day, to write. 10 minutes is so little, y'all. You can do it in the morning after an early morning walk when you've gotten some fresh air, and exercise has gotten your creative juices flowing. You can do it at lunch, or you can do it with a cocktail. The point is that it's a small enough amount of time you can really squeeze it in anywhere in your day. To really make this work, here's a pro tip. Create a queue. Decide on a time of day that you want to be your writing time, and create a trigger for that. Set an alarm so that when the alarm goes off, you remember, oh, this is my writing time. And then give yourself a reward for following through. I give myself coffee when I write. So by pairing a trigger, like an alarm, with a reward, like coffee, you'll be able to build a habit of writing every day. The 10 minute write takes care of the time issue, but what about topics? Again, I'm going to turn to a writing group strategy. When I got together with my writing group, we would always have a box in the middle of the table that was filled with slips of paper. At the beginning of each rewrite, one of us would pull one of these slips of paper from the box. We'd read the words written on it aloud, and then we would all write on that topic. This same idea works for blogging. To create your own prompt box, take a sheet of paper and cut it into about 30 slips. On each slip of paper, write a word or a phrase that has meaning for you. Examples of some of mine are marshmallows and reading on sailboats. Those are the kinds of things I'd like to write about. If you write for a business site, you could use your employee names or anything about your unique about your business or the way you run it. Once you've filled out all those slips, put them in a box, and the next time you want to write but don't have anything to write about, pull one out and start writing. So to break down that writer's block wall and start publishing again, pair the timer and the prompt box. During the time of day that if you carved out for your writing time, grab your timer, grab your prompt box, set your timer for 10 minutes, write until the timer dings, and when the timer dings, stop writing. That's it. You're skeptical. I can tell. It can't be that easy, you're thinking. What about editing? In April, I decided to publish a 10 minute free write every day on my blog for the whole month of April. Every morning, before I woke up, or before I went to work, not before I woke up, before I went to work, I would pour a cup of coffee, pull out my timer and my prompt box, write for 10 minutes until the timer dinged and then I'd stop writing. I did a quick scan for spelling and punctuation errors, and then I'd schedule my post to publish the following day. The scheduling delay allowed me a little bit of extra time to edit if I wanted, but I ended up not really doing a lot of editing, and the reason was that I learned to live by the creed during that month. Perfect is the enemy of done. Publishing this way is so liberating. You don't worry about every thought and whether or not it's good enough, or you don't worry about every sentence being perfect. Perfectionism is a blocker. With publishing this way, not all of your blog posts are gonna be huge successes. I'm not gonna lie, but some of them will. It's like shooting 100 frames to get the perfect photograph. 99 of those might be crap, but the one, because you were behind the lens and because you were practicing and because you were ready, when that perfect moment came along, you were ready for it and you got it. By using the timer and the prompt box, I was able to publish every day in the month of April, and during that time my blog became active again. My visitors climbed 26% and my views climbed 45% from 3,700 views in March to 5,400 views in April. My blog, like I said, was active and readers really loved the spontaneity of the prompts and in fact they started sending me prompts. And when I would write from a reader's prompt, I'd thank them at the end of the post and link back to their site, helping build community. By giving yourself meaningful topics to write about and by carving time out of your day every day to write, you can not only get practicing again, you can get publishing again. Your blog will become active. People will start coming to your site. The hardest part is getting started. Once you get started and you write that first post and you publish it, that writer's block wall starts coming down. So how do you get started? When do you get started? Right here, right now. Make a list of 20 things you love. Schnitzel, chocolate cake, plugins, fonts. Start taking notes at talks here at WordCamp Europe. If you hear a talk that sparks an idea, jot a note for yourself so you can write about it later. Whenever you're out in the world, whether you're eavesdropping in coffee shops, which is a great place to get ideas, or watching couples on park benches, make notes of the things that you see. You can record a voice memo on your phone or ink the idea on your hand. When you get home, put these in your prompt box. And then write. If anybody has any questions, I'm on Twitter at Andrea Badgley, and I posted this talk with some more notes on my blog. And thank you.