What I’ve Learned After 13 Years Of Business Blogging

Today marks the 13th year of blogging, but since it's this blog that I've reached 13 years, I'm calling it business blogging instead of regular blogging. First, I'll take a moment for myself; few people reach 5 years these days, let alone 13.

Enough of that. My original plan was to write a post like last year's post about being a nice person where I was going to write 13 points about business blogging. Then I decided that would take a lot more time and be less of a free flowing piece of art that I'm actually more in the mood to write.

The year I started writing this blog I had no real idea what I was doing. A lot of posts were one or two paragraphs and were about... something. lol Almost all were related to business in some way, but not necessarily my thoughts on it. This was in the days before Twitter and Facebook, so if I happened upon something I wanted to share, this was the only place I could share it from.

The first actually good post I wrote came on March 4rd, 2005, when I wrote about business networking and its relationship to leadership. There were no images because no one was doing it then, and the paragraphs were longer because no one was specifically writing for the web except marketers.

After just over a year I lost a bunch of posts because of a server crash, which I wrote about in the second paragraph on the anniversary of hitting my 500th post... which was one day before 4 years of writing here. To say it was crushing would be an understatement. It was the first time I contemplated giving up blogging; obviously I fought through it. I'm glad I did, even if few other people are happy about it.

I said that last line to lead into this one: business blogging can be frustrating. I've written over 1,370 blog posts over all these years, and I own up to many of the earliest posts being pretty lame. I've also put together some marvelous articles, if I say so myself, that have never been read or at least commented on.

The most comments I ever got on an article on this blog is 27, and that's on 3 articles with the last one being in 2012. I recognize that leadership isn't a sexy topic, along with the other things I write about here, but it's an important topic, especially in today's United States.

The most popular article I've ever written here was about leadership and Harry Potter; the next closest got about 37% of that number. It might look like I'm complaining but I'm not. Truth be told, this blog has ended up on a lot of top 100 lists in leadership over the years so it's hard to complain about any of it.

Joy and happiness

I've been asked often over the years what benefits do I get out of business blogging. I actually wrote a long post about how it helps businesses on my other blog, which I've linked to above. That's for everyone of course; what has it done for me or given me, other than pure joy and freedom?

One, it's given me a platform to express my thoughts and beliefs about leadership and other topics I address in my business. The diversity topics scare most people but the motivational posts do fairly well and the health care articles have an audience I'm able to reach on LinkedIn.

Two, it's helped me stay relevant in specific areas of my business in the search engines. Some of you know me as a hospital charge master consultant. The search engines also know that, to the extent that most of them, including Google, have my site listed in the top 10 most of the time. On many search engines I'm in the #1 position; that's never a bad thing. I've written 51 articles that mention this fact (not including this one) and, along with articles I have on my main site, it helps reinforce what I do. I haven't gotten tons of charge master work from it but I did secure one long contract because I was in the top 2 at the time; that's proof that doing proper SEO works well for businesses.

Three, it's not always the immediacy of one's writing that's an imperative, but what one can do with it later on. As I mentioned before, when I started writing there was no Facebook or Twitter, and LinkedIn came in a year later. In the years since, I've been able to take some of my articles and share them in these spaces. It's helped to increase traffic; not by leaps and bounds but an increase is an increase.

Four, I've also been able to go back to some of those older articles that had a nice start but seemed incomplete and update them to the new standards. Nothing says that every single article has to be totally new, and these days it's considered a smart tactic to help boost one's SEO (that's search engine optimization for the uninitiated) and help their websites rank better. I can also re-date them so that no one knows their older... as long as I do it to articles that don't have old comments on them; at least I care that much about it (even if I mistakenly did it once; oops! lol).

Five, I've been able to link back to many of those articles like I've done in this post. At the end of this one I'm going to link to my anniversary articles for years 10 and 11, which linked to other articles I was proud of. Interlinking is also a strong SEO tactic; maybe I should be writing more about SEO than business blogging. 🙂 In any case, linking back to relevant content might encourage a reader to check out more of your articles.

Six, even though I'm not sure I got a charge master assignment from this blog, I know I got 3 speaking engagements, which includes doing a keynote in Alexandria Virginia many years ago. I was so shocked and happy that I forgot to charge them for it; that's a major business lesson I've never forgotten again (if I travel that it; folks in the Syracuse area mostly get me for free).

Seven, I've been able to "pay it forward" by offering small business advice to other independent consultants and potential small business people. My article about self employment on the 15th anniversary of being in business didn't get a lot of comments but it did get a lot of views as well as shares on Twitter. When all is said and done, I write this blog to be helpful as much as for marketing purposes; who says one can't do both?

In closing, I want to say that I'm proud of being able to keep coming up with new things to say as it pertains to leadership, diversity, health care and other business issues. I might write fewer articles overall than I did back in the day, but I write regularly; that's the most important thing.

Here's the two links to previous anniversary posts: