November 18 2012
A reader of The Market Perspective asked me about blogging and writing. He really got me going, and I decided to share the response to him with all of you.
We are moving to a portfolio based assessment program here at TAMUSA. This might be a good time to start your own blog. As you can see in my response, blogging has introduced me to many people I would not have otherwise met.
My response to a reader about writing on the markets
I have been around this business for decades and wanted to improve my performance which in the past has waned from fabulous (not a brag but a fact, but gee why can't I just be that good again when I want?) to not so good, and I decided putting thoughts to paper would force me to really think about what I was doing. I believe I will accumulate more readers but I also need to get busy and put my thoughts on how this should be done to paper, and by that I mean an e book using apple ibook, that would give the blog more credibility.
Richard Russell has some 10,000 subscribers I think and people enjoy his writing. I am a bit of a media guy with a weekly newspaper column and I used to do a daily radio show and tv spots on the economy and oil markets. so this is a natural for me. I have read other letters and thought I could do as well. This was an outgrowth of writing for Barry Rosen at Fortucast. A couple of his subscribers urged me to do this on my own and well here we are.
There are many bloggers on lifestyle and personal tastes, blogging means you never need the approval of your local newspaper editor to get your letter printed, and that I think is why people blog. You can have your own magazine just as Enzo Ferrari had his own car company, no Board of Directors, no stock holders, you steer your own ship.
I suggest you enjoy investigating who is writing what, look over the various options, blogspot, typepad, whatever, but before you start decide on the following
Vision – what is it that drive you to write, what do you want to share with others, if you are at an inflexion point, what is going to change as you go forward with your life and what do you want to say about it, in the forward to a Pirate Looks at Fifty, Jimmy Buffet sums his life up in 400 words, you might read that for a start, if you cannot sum up the reason for doing this in 400 words, well work on that until you can, otherwise you will wander without a focus
Mission – that mission should drive the format and content of your blog, when I log on to your blog what should I expect?
Outcome – Your blog site will provide statistics on the number of hits and there are other services that allow analysis but until one gets into four figures I don't know that it matters that much.
Let me know what you decide, hmm, not a bad response on my part, you got me going! Please stay in touch!
Professor Elam 
Leave a comment