On Writing 2,500 Blog Posts

This post is 2,500th post I’ve written on this blog. Here is some of what I have learned writing and publishing every day. Well, almost every day. There was that one time . . .

I didn’t need to take off time writing to visit Tibet. In 2010, less than a year after I started blogging, I had the chance to go to Lhasa. I decided not to blog while I was in-country. I soon discovered that if there was one thing I had, it was time to write. China Mobile was impeccable. It turns out, nomads don’t use a lot of mobile bandwidth. I had a clear signal from Basecamp 1 on Mt. Everest and could have hit publish from there. How cool would that have been?
The discipline of writing has improved my thinking. Writing requires that you have a dialogue with yourself about your subject. You ask yourself questions, and you answer those questions. You also consider what your readers need to know and what questions they’ll ask. You don’t know what you really know or believe until you start writing.
The act of writing a daily post has helped me become a better writer. I’m not sure anything else would have had the same effect. When I started writing, I wasn’t very good at it. I’m a bit better now. I was sloppy. I typed in WordPress (horrible idea). I wrote and edited at the same time, learning the hard way that those are two very different disciplines. Doing something every day brings improvement.
Writing here has opened relationships with people around the world. I have spoken in 10 countries. I have friends in all of those countries, and more. I have relationships with businesses across the globe, and we found each other here. I’ve also made a lot of friends in the space where I play, some of whom are more like family now.
This blog helped me with a publishing deal. I was going to self-publish my first book in January of this year. I wrote the book, paid to have it edited, and I was working with CreateSpace to publish it when Portfolio sent me a direct message on Twitter. How did they know me? Yes, this blog. At the end of last year, I signed a two-book deal, the first of which goes on sale October 11, 2016, with the second a year later. I wrote The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need.
It has provided me with the opportunity to develop content that I am using in other places. It’s amazing how often content you create for one purpose ends up being useful for other projects and clients. It would take months and years to develop this content if you had to stop everything and create it from scratch. Big chunks of content were first created here, including some of what I believe to be my best ideas (along with some of my worst, no doubt). Ideas that started here also sparked content that I have never published here.
Writing has produced way outsized business outcomes. On December 28, 2009, I decided to step onto this path. I told my wife I was going to write every day and within a year, I would be keynoting. I was delivering keynotes within ten months. Where’d that company find me? Right here. I even know which post caused them to pick up the phone and call me.