As I mentioned
in my previous post, I have wound-down my writing for BierBuzz, as I published
my final post for the publication today. It has been a great experience
writing for BierBuzz these past several years, beginning in earnest with a post in March 2016,
a
post in April 2016, with hundreds more posts to follow.*
Gaining Great Experience
Throughout my writing time
for BierBuzz, I not only gained a lot of writing experience, having
published over 300 posts, but I specifically gained a great confidence in
dealing with press releases. While I composed several press releases for
BierBuzz events in my first year, which furnished me with valuable experience, I
was able to develop an eye towards evaluating the hundreds of press releases I
then saw come my way – I could discern the quality ones from those lacking in
quality.
I also developed navigating
around press releases and utilizing them in ways that I saw fit. Sure, I loved
dropping in my tasting notes in a paragraph and running the press releases for
the rest of a post, but I rarely did that, as I liked to move the content
around in the press releases and provide the information in different ways.
I certainly developed a
certain writing style when it came to beer, but also learned a lot about the contemporary
craft beer scene, as well as various trends, such as light IPAs, hazy IPAs, the
rise of canning, especially 16oz cans, and more.
One of the most valuable takeaways
for me was developing a lead-generation system and method for tracking both beers
out there, as well as following-up with breweries (whether their internal
marketing people or their PR firms), and then developing my internal
time-tracking of when beers would arrive and how many days it would take to
publish their reviews.
Another aspect of my
experience that really could be applicable to all of my blogging experiences
was gaining a comfortability with meeting people who are in different walks of
life than myself, as well as meeting people and having conversations that I
never would have otherwise, which was so enlightening and pushing me out of my
comfort zone.
Gaining Great Beer
Okay, let’s be honest, there
was more that I gained than simply the experiences, skills, and connections,
but there was also a lot of beer. While I attended some festivals and visited
some breweries and received a bunch of free beer, there was also a lot of beer
that came my way for review purposes. During the first few years, I was reactive:
if there was beer offered and/or a press release came my way, I would request
review samples. However, in the past 11 months, I realized I could be
proactive.
In these last 11 months, I
have had a lot of beer and wrote a lot about it. In fact, of the over 300
articles I published on BierBuzz since March 2016, I published 175 of them in
the last 11 months, alone, with 165 of them being beer review posts(!). It
ended up that while over 100 of my posts were on beer news, nearly 200 of them were
beer reviews.**
This increased activity has
been great for my experiencing of the national landscape of craft beer, not to
mention the amount of beer arriving at my front door step (yes, literally), and
it was so much that I had a few events to host folks to help me drink the beer,
as it was more than I could drink.
Moving On
The big catalyst for me to
cause me to realize that I needed to move on from writing for BierBuzz was that
I was spending time every day writing and publishing posts for the website, but
was that really how I wanted to be spending my time? I looked at how I was spending
my time every day and realized that I was spending a consistent amount of time
writing about beer, yet not on writing about other interests of mine (e.g.
Talmud, Star Wars, etc.).
Let’s be honest, I am going to publish written
content online, why not something I really desire to have me be seen as an
expert? Furthermore, it hit me one day after this realization that consistently
working on something day in and day out is a great way to become an expert at
something, but do I really want that? It’s basically reverse-engineering the
notion of working at something for 10,000 hours and becoming great, but what if
you have no intention of becoming great and end up becoming great at it?
What if I can deploy that
time elsewhere in my writing and develop my writing expertise elsewhere?
What next?
For now, I have no plans of
continuing on as a beer blogger, but will it stay that way?
As I mentioned in the
previous section, dropping beer-blogging out of my life frees me up to write
about other passions of mine, which is great. Also, I sometimes have a feeling
of being pressured to drink beer, write about, and publish the material. Sure,
sometimes, it can lead me to drink beer when I wasn’t planning on it just to keep
up with what’s coming in, which is really unfortunate, as one should want
to drink beer rather than feel compelled to do so, in a quasi-obligatory
fashion.
That having been said, beer-writing
is something I know how to do, I know how to get the beer, write about
it, and publish about it. And, best of all, I can get not only a lot of beer,
but some really tasty beers out there that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise buy.
If I were to return to
beer-blogging, it would be to write in a niche, as I have shared my
thoughts elsewhere on a couple of possibilities. Nevertheless, I need a
break from it for now.
Stay tuned….
* My first post was
published in October 2015, before officially joining the publication.
** Which means that, prior to
11 months ago, more of my posts were on beer news than beer reviews.
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