writing tips

Beware Of Too Much Positive Feedback

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Good Vibes Only May Mean Your Friends And Family Don’t Care To Critique Your Work

One of the aspects of passive listening is constant agreement.

You know–endless nodding, smiling, lack of meaningful input.

That’s when you know it’s time to change the subject or–better yet–just stop talking. The person you’re talking to clearly isn’t hearing you.

This happens often whenever people present their work to friends and family–and makes presenting one’s work to friends and family a problem in itself.

In our culture of toxic positivity, no one wants to be the one to rain on your parade. Most people who love or respect you think it’s great you’re venturing out and doing work outside your 9–5 and are probably not going to tell you what they really think about that work.

The “everything is awesome” culture will win most of the time.

Some people will be honest and tell you if what you wrote stinks–people who respect your potential more than your feelings. But most people are so used to others’ wearing their feelings on their sleeves that they’re loath to provide negative feedback.

To be fair, this isn’t entirely their fault.

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3 Things To Communicate Before Blogging With A Partner

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Just as some entrepreneurs form partnerships, some bloggers like to combine their efforts.

Two is better than one, right? If friends want to blog about the same or a similar topic, why not join forces and reach their goals twice as fast?

They each bring their own friends and social media followers — potentially doubling initial readership. They both write posts, so they produce twice as much content and drive traffic twice as fast.

This sounds good. But two people working on a project doesn’t automatically translate to ‘twice as fast’.

If one has a steep learning curve, he can slow down his partner.

Maybe one has a strong ego that would help him succeed solo but prevents him from matching that success in a partnership.

Finally, some partners simply haven’t learned the Law of Comparative Advantage and mismatch each other’s skills.

These are serious conversations that blogging partners should have before discussing blog names, WordPress themes, or social media accounts.

Here are three specific things to keep in mind before buying that domain name with someone else.

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