“Blogging is a discipline“! That was the point of argument with a friend of mine, an entrepreneur in spirit and practice, who argued that blogging is a side activity, at best, for entrepreneurs.
His main point was that a businessperson should not do a lot of things and shouldn’t scatter his/her resources on many levels.
My position was clearer: blogging is a discipline and a basic function in any entrepreneurship venture!
How All Have Started!
On 12/12/2015 was the 3rd birthday of my blog (takisathanassiou.com).
After 3 years of blogging and 256+ posts in this blog alone (and several more published on other sites, to my other blog and elsewhere as in the LinkedIn Pulse, the Medium, the BizSugar, the Quora, the My Ezine Articles, the AboutLeaders, to mention only a few!), I thought it was the time to evaluate my approach and check out how exactly blogging benefit me in my life and business!
Researching the topic, I communicate with some friends of mine to discuss some points I wanted to develop in the post. One friend of mine, though, an entrepreneur actually, was very negative about blogging, considering it as a waste of time. I have a completely different view on the topic.
I have a completely different view on the topic.
My Personal View On Blogging
Blogging should always have a purpose! And this purpose is to serve the people for which it has been developed!
I consider blogging a core component of my business strategy and my content management workflow! Writing is an everyday activity for me, either for business or for personal recreation and the practice of blogging is a useful channel for discussing ideas and approaches and developing privileged communication channels with people share the same interests with me!
Furthermore, I believe that blogging is a discipline and as a discipline has certain requirements and obligations in order to yield the intended results! In every discipline, you should first cultivate certain things before they start to provide results! As in blogging! For instance, in blogging, you need a long presence and a proven record of sharing useful things to the public before you expect your blog to start making some money!
Focusing, today, is a major asset for anyone, and blogging if you do it right, have the tendency to make you see a problem, topic, issue, from different perspectives, while, due to the multiplicity of ideas shared on a topic, can support you into developing more ways to do something you consider as impossible. All that by researching, writing, communicating, sharing and interact with people (who later maybe become your clients!). It is huge!
Blogging On Purpose
When I started I run and develop my blog as a startup. As a business, if you like, even then I had a faint idea of what startup really meant (and entails)!
I copy and adjust all the business processes used in my previous business in the design and development of my blog and I run it as a real business (minus the compensation or the salary of course)!
I invest heavily in my blog adding it new features, buying new themes, developing new sections, attending related seminars and reading books and reference about blogs and blogging while I tested every technology and idea I could use!
The result is the blog exists today, and its goals are pretty much the same as the original ones:
to create meaningful and readily applicable approaches, schemes, etc, providing insights, interconnections and tools that, I believe, can create a positive difference in various areas, and empower the people in their everyday personal and professional life. I try hard and (I believe!) smart to give you the concepts and the resources that can help you develop yourself and your business!
claiming that:
if you want:
– To develop yourself & your business,
– To plan effectively your personal and professional path
– To do more things better
– To lead effectively your way in life, or simply
– To achieve your objectives,
you are in the right place!
This direction has not changed too much, after 3 years!
How blogging benefited me
Blogging for me was a personal wager, after a long time in different (and strict) business environments. I started blogging as a way of sharing ideas, tips and approaches about topics I was interested in long before the blog was a mainstream, and today, after 3 years of running a personal blog, I run a blog with more than 3.000 attendees!
Blogging initializes a mode of operation very helpful in my line of work (consultancy!) and cross-fertilizes all my relevant business activities with features and habits very useful for success in our online connected business.
In few words, blogging makes me or lead me to:
- write almost daily, to express verbally and written my ideas and research different approaches
- tracking my progress, ideas, habits, economics, and processes
- set clear goals and means for their achievements
- to structure my thoughts in a logical and consistent way
- to write simple, clear and comprehensible
- communicate with many people for various subjects (some outside of the field of my expertise) and interact with them
- provide me a creative outlet for my consulting practice by exploring and write about difficult or controversial topics
- keep me up to date with modern trends, tech, approaches, and tools
- test various ideas and schemes
- develop many new assets, resources, skills, competencies for doing better my job
- to gain more influence, subscribers and followers
- research in-depth many ideas, concepts, approaches and communicate it effectively to a large number of people
- develop a platform, a lot of new media channels, a community, and an audience
- develop a new business
among many other things.
What I Learn After 256+ Blog Posts
Besides the things the discipline of blogging provide me, there is a different kind of asset, blogging made me realize and further utilize in my life and business.
Useful lessons!
A lesson about how to develop something, to change what’s not working and focus on what’s important.
Not all the lessons blogging taught me were nice, benevolent or efficient.
Some lessons were difficult to grasp or implement, either by my inability to leave behind something that had served me for a long time in the past or because I had not the knowledge/skills to utilize it!
I learn a lot about my errors, mistakes and the interaction of the people followed my blog!
As it turned out, though, all lesson where valuable and make me think, re-think, evaluate and re-evaluate many things on how I was blogging, making business or interacting with people, systems or/and processes!
Specifically, the disciple of blogging made me realize that:
- Blogging is a discipline. You should treat it as one in order to produce the results you expected for your life and business!
- Writing is an everyday activity. You should practice it daily communicating new ideas and approaches in a clear and consistent manner and share more value with the people interested in your ideas. Writing is a cornerstone of many business activities, and as reading, you should practice it and perfected it via daily doses of personal and business writings (notes, journaling, white papers, e-Books, course, etc. all are activities need an elaborate, specific and consistent writing mindset able to adapt and adjust to modern online business requirements)
- Develop a blog is not a side project. You should see the development of a blog as the development of a personal business venture attending all the related issues (management, marketing, social media, content development, graphics, designing, outsourcing, communication, channels, resources, financial, payments, etc.) If you fail to do so, your blog, unavoidable, will wither!
- You do not make a blog get rich. Do not expect to make any money in the first 6 months of your blog operation. No, even if you got a plan and a strategy! Blogging it needs time to become your site known and trusted and start accepting some serious sponsors, advertisements, etc. You may, via your blog, promote certain things of interest to make some money (like affiliation links, commercials, etc.) but the general rule is the blog needs time to provide any financial results (> 6 months)
- You develop your platform along with your blog. Your blog is part of your platform, but your platform is something bigger than your blog. It relates to online presence, authority, and trust among other things! Part of your platform and of your role is to be a trusted “gatekeeper” or an intelligent filter for the people follow you in the order they can receive only the information they want!
- Design your blog as a business from the start and treat it as a startup if you want to have any success. When you start a startup or a business venture you try to find the applicability of a new business model! When you start a blog you try to reach a certain audience by using your ideas and approaches as leverage! The approach is similar! If you do not see your blog as a side project (check again point 3) and if you do not handle it as a startup company or business (with regular updates, professionalism, worthwhile graphics and infographics, 3rd parties services, etc.), soon your blog would have none for an audience!
- You need to learn and train yourself all the time and test your knowledge and skills all the time. Blogging is not an easy discipline. It needs skills, knowledge and competencies and a constant learning about many things, topics, and issues (in order to write for them effectively). This is the reason why when you start blogging you should always develop yourself, your knowledge and your skills investing both n yourself and on your blog!
- You need to experiment and hack a lot and often and use many techniques to see results. Attention is a hard to get commodity and you need various techniques to maintain attention on the topics covered in your blog and cause a significant impact on the people you are interested in!
- You need to have a vision, goals, and proper metrics to allow you to monitor your success and the achievement of your goals. Without vision, you couldn’t have a business and life and without a plan, you wouldn’t have suitable goals on a personal, blogging or professional level and without proper metrics, you would never know how close or far you are from your goals.
- You do not write for yourself. You write for your audience trying to provide value to your readers. You focus should always be on your audience and on the value you can provide them!
Question: What do you think? Please write about your blogging experience and the results you had, here!
