11 Things I Learned From Blogging

I’ve Met My Goal, Time For Change

Around April-May of 2013 I made a goal.  I wanted to see what would happen if I consistently posted something on my blog, every week, and really dedicated myself to building up my blog for 6 months.  I’ve met my goal, and not it’s time for a change.  But before that, here’s a bit about what my experience has been over the past 6 months.

I first decided on a very specific and consistent format for the posts that I thought would give readers the most value (twitter summary, principle, make a connection, and so what) and I stuck to it.  To sustain this format I’d prepare blog posts topics a month in advance and have to put in ridiculous amounts of preparation to maintain a consistent flow.  I also focused on building up my twitter following, making a mailing list, and doing everything I could think of as a best practice.  I slowly chipped away at perfecting the blog layout and narrowing down the market I was targeting.

I also felt like I had a great business model in mind if I could get my audience to scale, if I could make sufficient growth.  I saw myself overseeing a small team of 3-4 writers, a social media specialist, and I would personally continue to do interviews and work with my team of writers to release great content.

Money would come from advertising, writing posts on new book releases, sale of ebooks I had planned to write (I have one in mind I still hope to release some day in the next year), and hopefully getting some speaking gigs in the future.  I knew new financial opportunities would present themselves as we continued to grow.

It’s now been more than 6 months.  I’ve met my goal to just stick with it as consistent as possible and here’s a list of the top 10 things I’ve learned.  Bottom line: I’ve decided to stop dedicating myself to building the blog in this format  because the amount of time I spend at it does not justify the returns (intrinsic, internal, external, or financial).  If I had 3-5 years to really focus on this format I think this could really grow into something awesome.  But, as my brother-in-law said, “this is a seed that will take a lot longer to germinate.”

My plan is to continue writing when I want, about what I want, in a more free flow format without the pressure of so much preparation.  I’m not going to primarily focus on books anymore and I’m excited about not having such confining demands on how and what I write.

But I thought it would be helpful to share a list of some of the things I’ve learned about blogging from the past 6 months that I’ve dedicated to this process.

Top 11 Things I Learned From Blogging Consistently for 6 Months

1. Adsense is not a viable means to earn an income, unless you have a large catalogue or library of content for people to sift through and get lost in.  I earned around $10 in about 6-7 months.  Adsense works like mutual funds, not day trading.  You have to be in it for the long haul and not the quick sale.

2. Gary Vaynerchuk is at the forefront of all things social media and business.  Read everything he writes, watch all of his YouTube videos.  Ignore him at your own peril.

3. In today’s internet/social economy every business must focus on these three priorities:

   a. Develop long lasting relationships, genuinely serving your customers needs.  This means providing a lot of value to the customer without expecting anything in return.  You’re not going to be successful by making a lot of small meaningless transactions that don’t convert to long-term fans because you treat them simply as a sale instead of a relationship.
   b. Knowing yourself (you or your company’s strengths/talents) helps you develop long lasting relationships because that is how you decide the method you can best serve and help others.
   c. You MUST learn to leverage social media appropriately regardless of your market so you can develop  relationships through effective story telling.

4. So many people in the blog world write about “live their passion, follow their dreams, quit your jobs and escape the cubicle nation.”  But one of the biggest problems I’ve found is most of us don’t know ourselves well enough so we CAN live like that.  So many of us thought our degree or our parents were supposed to tell us who we are.  We need to learn that we all have stories within us that tell us who we are and what our strengths and passions are.  Then we can start to live them.  There is a journey to self-awareness that so many of us have missed because we left it up to others.

5. There are a lot of people “living their passion” who don’t have a wife and kids like me.  Trying to figure out a way to escape the cubicle nation is going to require more serious planning that outpaces what I can do on this blog by writing alone.

6. Because of the books I’ve read and written about during these 6 months, I’ve come to more clearly know who I am, know what my passions and talents are, and I feel like there are a lot of people who could benefit from hearing about my experience.

7. Followers, fans, and likes are all BS and you can become addicted to monitoring those stats daily.  You can’t control what happens to your post after you hit publish and share it appropriately.  Let it got.  Obsessing over the number of people who read your stuff can steal time away from those you love.  Developing a few deep relationships instead of a ton of shallow relationships is of much higher priority to me now.  Especially because each person has their own market these days and that multiplies my reach if each relationship is deep and not shallow.

8. Cold calling or cold emailing people you think are beyond your circle of influence can yield some amazing results and interviews.  In other words, I’ve made some new friends with people I never thought I’d meet and solidified older relationships.

9. There are a lot of people out there whose lives you can positively impact if you use the strengths and talents you already possess.  You’d be surprised who will send you little thank you notes, write nice comments, or like your content.  The opposite is true also; there are a lot of people not benefitting from your talents because you aren’t using them to serve others.

10. Resumes and educational systems have gone the way of the dinosaur and most of us don’t or won’t admit it.  You no longer need a degree to earn a living or a traditional resume to get a job or be useful in this world.  All of this is because you can start making a living as soon as you can provide something of value online.  A massive revolution is coming and it will have a crippling effect on the educational structures – because so many people are proving you don’t absolutely need them anymore.

11. The posts that had the biggest impact on others (most views, shares, comments) seemed to be the ones that I put in the least amount of effort preparing to publish; they’re the posts that were inspired by something that caused me an emotional reaction and I took the time to write about it immediately.

My experience is unique to my situation, so please don’t think everyone will have the same outcome from trying to blog consistently for 6 months. There are a lot of opinions out there on how successful blogging can and can’t be.  Hopefully you’ve found some of my posts useful and some of the things I’ve learned over the past 6 months provide potential bloggers some guidance.  I’m looking forward to what I decide to write about in the future!  So here’s to new beginnings in 2014 and goals accomplished in 2013.