3500

As this post goes live I've hit another milestone that I want to share. This makes the 3,500th blog post that I've written since February 2005. Actually that's not totally true, but it's evidentially true; that's a real word believe it or not; anyway, let me explain.

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When I first started blogging

For this blog, this is either post #1,136 or post #1150. The reason for that is I started the blog with a different hosting company and in April 2006 their servers crashed and everything was lost; gone, just like that. There was no recovery... or so it seemed.

I think I was on a site called Ryze at the time and I poured my lament out in one of the groups there. Someone then came along and suggested that I take a look on Google to see if I could find my posts there. Turns out that because of their caching feature, all my posts, including my most recent at the time, were there; yay! So I retrieved them all, but there were 14 that I didn't think were worthy so I left them to disappear forever (or so I assume) because they wouldn't be attached to anything and there wasn't any relevance to them anymore.

So, I could say that made 3,514 posts, but on this blog there's only the 1,136 now, although I've made many of them private over the years because they're not pertinent anymore either. Short sales articles, advertising articles, or things that eventually didn't exist anymore... no sense keeping those in the public eye. But they're still on the blog, so they count towards the total.

It also seemed appropriate that #3,500 should be on this blog, since it started everything, although I just passed #1,500 on one of my other blogs, which I felt was a pretty big deal, even though I started it 19 months after that one; go figure. 🙂

My early blog posts weren't all that special most of the time. My first post introduced who I was, and my second post was a paragraph long, linking to one of my newsletters that I'd created as a pdf. Then I wrote about what happened to the blog as the third post, but it was the first post on the new hosting server so it shows for everyone as the first post on this blog, which it wasn't. Is that confusing? lol

Many of those early posts were pretty short and, in comparing them to what I write now, pretty lame. Still, I did have one early nice post on the topic of mentoring that wasn't bad. However, I took some years before I feel I hit my stride as a blogger on the topics I cover here, and the first article that I thought was pretty good and reminiscent of my present style was on the topic of customer service. A little bit of personal leading to a morality lesson; now that's storytelling!

I'm not about to go through 9 years of blog posts to find some that I feel stand out for two reasons. One, not all of those posts were written here, since I now have 5 blogs. And two, that would drive me nuts! lol What I am going to do is give what I hope is kind of an inspirational lesson about the power of persistence, if not consistency.

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Me now

I started this blog with the intention of highlighting my business proficiencies, with the intention of driving clients my way. It was all about me at the time, and I think most people who start blogs think that way. I did give out a lot of information, but early on, with the short posts, I don't think I was delivering any value.

When the chips were down and I'd lost all those posts, I almost folded up the venture and moved on with life. It's easy to quit when things get tough, or when it seems like the world is telling you to do something else. I'm not religious by any means but I do believe in karma in a way; if the signs are telling you to do or not do something, take them seriously.

In my case, other than losing all those posts, the signs weren't telling me to stop. They were telling me that it was just a minor setback and to prove it that I should retrieve my posts and push on. They were telling me that some success with the blog was just around the corner, that I had things to share and offer, and that if I quit that I should quit everything, go back to working for "the man", and be satisfied with whatever came my way.

I went and got those posts, put them on this blog, spaced some of them out so that 155 posts didn't suddenly show up on one day, and plunged back into the blogging world, this time with a renewed focus and knowledge that I really hadn't given it my best. Even now, with the traveling, I think I've slid back some, but at least when I do write something I know it's better than it used to be, and that I still have lots to contribute.

The lesson here is to not give up just because you've encountered some difficulties along the way. If I hadn't gone back to get those 155 posts, I wouldn't be at 3,500 today, and that's just on my blogs, since I presently write for 2 other blogs and have written for many other blogs over the past 5 years.

If I can take a moment to be proud of myself for continuing to blog, I just want to say that it's not all about me anymore, and that I've benefited both monetarily and mentally from the journey, and every once in a while I touch someone else. That's made it all worth it; I hope you feel the same about your ventures every day as well.