# Why and how to write things on the Internet
source: https://ift.tt/s3DeLnq tags: #literature #inbox uid: 202301152336 —
In my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.
Write to make stronger friendships 202301012159
Most people dramatically underestimate the impact that their writing has on others.
So: lower your bar for what’s worth writing about! My personal standard is anything that I’ve said more than once in a conversation.
Note from Jeff:
There is a tradeoff here, though: my signal to noise ratio is low enough that many people ignore all my posts even though if I only published the best 5% of them they’d happily read them. Except, at least for me, this isn’t a real tradeoff: I’m not able to just write the 5% of posts that will be the best. When I try I end up just not publishing anything for months. I wrote about this some a few years ago: https://www.jefftk.com/p/blogging-thresholds
Here are my top two pieces of advice for writing things on the internet:
Publish consistently.
Notice and pay attention to feedback.
In fact, my suggestion is to make all your writing-related choices to optimize for this. If something seems like a good idea in principle, but would make it harder for you to write consistently or slower to get feedback, don’t do it.
Finally, blog posts are one of the ultimate examples of searching for outliers—the best ones are massively better than the average. And one of the best ways to improve your chances of getting an outlier is just to take lots of shots on goal.
This is why you should build a consistent writing habit.
The most important thing here is to write about whatever you’re most excited to write about (n.b. not what you think you should be most excited to write about, or what you’re most excited to have written about), since this is the most likely to generate consistent output.