My 1 Year Blogging Anniversary: What I’ve Learned

I’ve been involved in the online world since 1996 – Remember back when people needed this thing called a website as soon as humanly possible, had no idea what it was, were willing to pay whatever it cost and often had no business plan at all?  Despite nearly 15 years in the field, it’s only last year that I started to regularly blog.  In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago today that I wrote my first post on Marketing Trenches: A Winning Bracket Resembles a Winning Marketing Strategy.

It’s interesting for me to go back and read that post now and look at how things have changed in a year.  Sure, some things haven’t changed at all – I’m still writing almost exclusively about marketing, I’m still getting ready to enjoy the start of March Madness this week with more enthusiasm than just about anyone I know, and my posts are still almost without exception not as long as Mike’s.  But one thing jumps out to me very quickly when I read that first post and go back and read some others in the archives – I’ve gotten better at this.

I bring this up because it jumped out to me after a recent meeting.  Prior to that meeting I took a look at the company’s website, and noticed that some of it was just terribly out of date, including their blog.  The blog section of their site had 3-4 posts, all in about a month’s time in 2008, and nothing since.  In our meeting, I asked about this, the answer was after posting a few times they didn’t see any results, got busy, and never had the time to get back to it.  Now I’m sure most of you are nodding your heads here because you have seen similar situations.

It seems so obvious but some people miss it completely.  We’ve said a few times that “Getting a blog is easy, but blogging takes time.”  And I think that’s relevant in a few ways:

• Time to build your audience – You probably won’t see dramatic visitor numbers right away, it takes time to build this up
• Time to build your style – Reading my first post and now, I’m confident that I got better
• Time to create quality content – Again, we all know this one, but it’s critically important to carve that time out to write

So, a year into Marketing Trenches, that time and consistency has more than paid off for me.  And the consistency and growth over that year has been great for me…with many more years to come.  I could make an argument that for us, our blog is even more important than our website.  In fact, we’ve gotten good enough at this that we’re working on a blog redesign, bringing on guest authors, considering new formats, and a bunch of other exciting things to stay tuned for very soon…but more on that later.

About Right Source:

The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.