Twenty years ago today, I published my first blog post.
I came across the idea of blogging in Seth Godin’s ebook Who’s There?. It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2006 the idea of publishing your ideas on a business website, instead of just sales copy, felt like a radical step.
A well-meaning friend, who had a lot more business experience than me, gave me a dire warning about ‘Giving away your valuable intellectual property for free’.
Others tut-tutted and wondered ‘Where do you find the time?’ – the implication being it was clearly a waste of time, and I couldn’t have much else on my plate.
In fact, I was insanely busy. But I decided to make time – by getting up an hour early every morning to write.
I chose to ignore the people I knew in person and listen to people on the internet.
First Seth, then Brian Clark, whose recently-launched Copyblogger website had me at the tagline: How to sell with blogs, email and RSS.
Within a few weeks, I looked at my stats and saw I had readers scattered all over the world.
Within a few months, my blog was attracting not just subscribers, but coaching and training clients.
Within a couple of years, I was in partnership with Brian Clark, and learning the craft of writing for an audience first-hand from his mentoring (and judicious editing of my blog posts!).
With Brian, Tony D. Clark and Sonia Simone, we created and launched an e-learning program for creative entrepreneurs. And by the time we parted ways to pursue our different projects, I had served a valuable apprenticeship in what is now called content marketing.
Everything I’ve written and published since – hundreds of blog posts, four books for creatives and two podcasts – began with that first blog post.
Thank you Brian, Tony, Sonia, Seth, and Naomi Dunford. The skills I learned from you have shaped everything I’ve built since.
You helped me serve my readers and listeners – and attract the kind of inspiring and ambitious creatives I love to coach.
That blog means Mami and I can live where we want to (we chose Bristol) while running our business and being there for our children.
And it all began with a single, unremarkable blog post.
So if you’re reading this and thinking of starting something new, full of excitement but also hearing the voice of doubt in your head (and maybe in your social circle), then let me share with you what I’ve learned, twenty years on:
Firstly, I’m not linking to that blog post because I deleted it a while ago. And I deleted it because it was a bit rubbish – not terrible, just very bland.
But most things are a bit rubbish when you start out. (You can rest assured I burned most of my earliest poems years ago.)
That blog post didn’t matter because of what I wrote. It mattered because I wrote.
It was the start of a writing habit that has helped a lot of people over the past twenty years – and helped me grow my business and create the life I want.
Secondly, my blogging went from a bit rubbish to pretty good to powering my business because I made it my business to get better at writing – by seeking out the best teachers I could find, as soon as possible.
Thirdly, I remember feeling very anxious about the possibility of wasting my time. I wanted to know whether the blog would ‘work’ – by which I meant, ‘Will it help me sell my training workshops to agencies and studios in London?’
The good news is, the blog did help me sell some training. But the even better news is, it did a whole lot more.
If you had told me back on Valentine’s Day 2006 that writing that blog would not only attract readers and friends around the world, but also coaching clients on six continents, and gigs in Europe, the Middle East and the USA, I would have been open-mouthed.
Back then, I had never heard of podcasting or self-publishing, so those were adventures I couldn’t imagine – yet which my experience as a blogger equipped me for.
By the time I launched my first podcast, in 2017, I had learned one big thing from blogging. As I said to Mami:
‘The best thing about launching this podcast is I don’t know where it will take me’.
So if you’re thinking of starting something new, and wondering whether you’ll be any good, or feeling anxious about whether it will ‘work’ or turn out to be a colossal waste of time, remember these three things:
1. It might be a bit rubbish to begin with – and that’s OK.
2. Find the best teachers you can, as soon as you can.
3. Right now, you don’t know where it will take you – and that’s the best thing about it.
