These are the guiding lights for the blog Greet's Middle Ages...and also an example of what I believe are important concepts for any endeavor, whether it be for fun, as GMA is, or for profit. I offer this explanation in a spirit of transparency, for what I am doing with GMA, and also as a reference for myself, so that I can check myself to see if I'm getting off-track, and ask myself why.
Vision
(What will it be in future? A vision is unchanging, because change in vision would require an entirely new endeavor)
A journal of one person's experiences and experiments in historic cultures, found online from any computer.
NOT: 'Here's a place to make connections with others' aka a bulletin board, though some blogs are like that, with very interactive comment sections. I don't allocate time to keep up with comments, which is probably apparent from the state of my comment sections!
When I started GMA, in 2005, I had bits of spare time on several different computers. I needed a place to put what I was thinking about, and take notes on what I did and saw.
Mission
(What will it do? A mission does not change easily, as doing so requires revamping all the tactics)
Inspire and help the widest possible audience interested in activities taken from historic cultures.
NOT: 'I've learned how to do this really well, here's piles of them that I've made, and you should do it this way too.' That's not my personality. I optimize my talent: moving on to the next useful area of interest after fulfilling a minimum level, in order to have my relevant and beautiful whole environment improve in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
I exposed GMA to the world because of my admiration of the knitting blog community circa 2001-2005. The amount of benefit I got from those blogs impressed me re: the potential of the Internet for educational Good. As I dove into an entirely new way to 'dabble and dress up' that addressed my fascination and curiosity with the huge amount of human knowledge that is not currently used, I wanted to make what I found more accessible to others.
Strategy
(How will it get there? A strategy does not change easily, as requires revamping all the tactics)
Document projects I make or see in a way that gives others (which may include a future version of myself!) a path to their own experiments.
NOT: 'Look how great I am again' in/with this product, in order to build the blog into an outlet for product sales. Lots of blogs do this.
NOT: 'These are the things I saw and did' without instruction, or links to others' instruction, because then people (including FutureMe) have a harder path forward.
Tactics
(What tools will it use? Change as often as required to meet demands, constraints, and opportunities)
Some of the tactics I'm using in GMA are the following. Note that the reason for each should be easily traceable back to Mission and Strategy:
- Posting regularly, so people are rewarded for checking back to the site, and encouraged to keep at whatever they're interested in.
- Cross-posting to social media. So far, just Facebook and Instagram, because I haven't yet seen much adoption of Twitter for these kinds of content.
- Lots of images, to illustrate what I'm talking about.
- Links to others' work, to praise their shoulders that I stand on, and to expand understanding of the topic.
- Links to references, to expand understanding of the topic, and to further illustrate what I'm talking about.
- Analytics: to measure how wide the audience is.
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