This is my 1000th blog post! Here’s how I did it.

In 2015 I read a book titled The Little Black Book of Connections by the self-proclaimed King of Sales, Jeffery Gitomer. One of the important tenets of the book is, Success is not about who you know, but who knows you. (Who knew?)

Gitomer goes on to share that the best way to have more people know you is to share your knowledge, expertise, ideas and experiences broadly. Which is what Kim Kardashian did with her first home movie back in 2007. And look how well that worked out for her.

Gitomer points out that platforms like blogs, vlogs, podcasts, editorial columns and books enable you to share your ideas with many people at once. In fact, it allows people you would never meet face to face to discover your ideas and be positively impacted by your knowledge and expertise.

What started with a single blog post has gone farther than I ever imagined.

Gettin’ Bloggy With It

In the fall of 2015, I began planning to launch a new advertising agency. So I decided to take Gitomer’s advice and start blogging to share my ideas about advertising, branding, and creativity. I also wanted to share what I was learning about entrepreneurship. Success leaves clues. And I wanted to share breadcrumbs for other entrepreneurs to follow. (It seems I failed to learn the downside of leaving breadcrumbs from Hansel and Gretel.)

I wasn’t sure how the whole blogging thing would go. I had tried it before. In fact, I had started 5 or 6 different blogs and quickly stopped. But this time I felt more inspired. I had Gitomer’s encouragement. I had a strong desire to succeed as an entrepreneur. (And I wanted to be able to feed my family.) I believed that writing a blog would be a great way to share my expertise, let people know I was starting The Weaponry, and share our growth and success.

I have always enjoyed writing. I started my career as a copywriter. So I figured that writing a blog would be fun. It would enable me to tap into my strengths. And most importantly, it would allow me to write funny things without a client or editor telling me no.

So I began writing in November of 2015. And like Forrest Gump, I just kept going, and people started to follow. I began slowly, with a blog post every week. Then I moved to 2 posts per week. And finally, I developed a 3 post-per-week habit, writing 5 days a week, and publishing on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, when Chick-fil-A was closed.

Today, less than 9 years later, I have published 1000 blog posts!

My writings have generally fallen into 3 buckets:

1. Marketing: This covers the topics of marketing, advertising, branding, creativity, design, writing and yes, blogging. Which is totally meta. (Non-Zuckerberg meta.)
2. Business: This includes entrepreneurship, startups, sales, network development, professional development, and my personal favorite, funny business.
3. Self-Improvement: This was unintentional. But I have written a lot about personal development and motivation. I have learned so much over the past 9 years about how to do better and be better (through trial and error) that I felt I had to share these lessons.

These are all the countries where my blog has been read. North Korea, Iran and the croissant in Africa are holding out on me.

What Do 1000 blog posts look like?

• 111 blog posts every year.
• More than 2 new blog posts every week.
• The equivalent of 10 full length 50,000 word books
• A minimum of 2000 hours of writing time.
• The equivalent of one full year of 40-hour work weeks spent writing blog posts.
• The equivalent word count of writing The Old Testament of The Bible. (Truly I say to you, this fact hath blown my mind.)

Blogging created a pathway to publishing books. And holding books I published.

5 Benefits Of Blogging

1. It provides original content I can share on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Medium and Reddit (Although Reddit readers hate everything, like Mikey.)
2. It provides a great collection of well-considered and well-organized ideas and stories that are ready to be adapted to books. The hardest work of writing my books happens in the blog stage. The easiest work is collecting blog posts with related themes to create chapters and books.
3. Blogging created a path to professional speaking. The blog posts led to a book. The book led to speaking opportunities. The speaking opportunities have created the best source of income in my Information Creation + Communication Ecosystem.
4. Blogging organizes great ideas, lessons and stories to share as a professional speaker.
5. The blogs have allowed me to share far more jokes and humorous asides than I would be able to share any other way. This is really the thing that keeps me writing.

I was excited to hit 200 posts back in 2018 when I was just a baby blogger.

6 Things I Want Everyone To Know About Writing 1000 Blog Posts

1. Anyone can do it.
2. There are no barriers.
3. There are tons of tools and templates that make it easy. (I use WordPress to write and publish my blog.)
4. The 2 key steps are: 1. Get Started 2. Don’t Stop.
5. To sustain a blog you have to create a regular writing habit. Write at the same time for a set duration every day, or every weekday, or every Friday or whatever works for you. The habit is how it happens. (Which is also how you know someone is a nun.)
6. Don’t do it for huge numbers of readers. You can’t predict who will read your posts, or how many people will read what you write. If you are like most people, including me, your reach and readership will always be lower than you would want. And my blog has been read in over 160 countries. But you can create good information that can have a huge impact on one reader. That’s the real win of blogging.

Key Takeaway

As the saying goes, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. And the best way to write 1000 blog posts is one post at a time. Find a topic or topics that you are really interested in. Get started. And just don’t stop. Write at a regular time each day or each week. And when people tell you they enjoy reading your posts, or somehow benefited from your writings, use that as fuel to keep going. The world needs more good ideas, lessons, and stories. You have them. So start sharing. You’ll be surprised by how many lives you can positively impact. And that is the real benefit.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

Originally published at http://adamalbrecht.blog on August 7, 2024.