The Skool of Life in 2009: Lessons from a Blogger’s Journey

I decided to follow suit as many bloggers everywhere have and take a look back at the past year. At the end of this month The Skool of Life will have been in existence for close 9 months.  As I said to Andrew Swsenson from Wordpost when I interviewed him “it’s been around long enough to get pregnant and  get ready to deliver it’s first child.”

In that 9 months I’ve learned a great deal about myself and about what has worked and what hasn’t. So I wanted to share some that with all of you and hopefully you’ll find it useful.  So in no particular order here are some of my thoughts on everything

1. Write every single day. You don’t have to post every day, but when I talked about how to be an extremely prolific blogger, this was one of the most important tips that I think I offered. Writing every day gets you polished for fast content production. If you do anything every day you are going to get better at it and it becomes much easier. I don’t spend more than about 15-20 minutes writing a blog post anymore. I think that’s because I make a point to write every day, even if I don’t plan on publishing.
2. Don’t waste time with your analytics until month 4: I honestly think that until you’ve hit over 100+ visitors a day your Google analytics data doesn’t provide much value and looking at it is just a pointless exercise that gives you something to do. In my interview with Sid Savara he talked about the fact that after a year he had enough valuable data to leverage it strategically.
3. Nathan Hangen recently said you should focus on the actions that matter. That is one of the most useful things you can do. I think the highest value action you can focus on in your early stages of blogging is producing content. Adding plugins, working on design, and that kind of stuff should be about 20% of your time, while producing content should be about 80% of your time.
4. Learn to manage your time. One thing I here many bloggers complain about is not being able to manage their time or getting distracted. Need to know how to manage your time? Fortunately there a few dozen posts written by some great bloggers.
5. Keep a list of topics handy. At anytime I have between 20-40 topics for blog posts in a list. If I really have no idea what to write about I’ll actually look at the list. What’s interesting is that I almost never have to use it. But knowing that it’s there gives me a sense of security. The other thing is that inspiration strikes at unusual times and you may not be able to write the post right then.
6. Guest post as often as possible: I think in all honesty some of my best content was wasted on my own blog. I know that sounds strange, but at first I was afraid to give away my best content. I have posts on my own blog that definitely would have been accepted as guest posts if I had actually just submitted them and not worried about how I would come up with a new idea.
7. Build Relationships: This could be an entire article in and of itself. Fortunately I have already written one  on How multimedia content increases the authenticity of your relationships. The thing about relationships is that you are planting the seeds for many future opportunities. The relationships I have built through my podcast series have been tremendously valuable and will be really the key to what I think will be exponential growth in the long term . Collaboration is going to be a bigger and bigger part of how blogs succeed when people realize that a team can move much faster than a one man show. In fact I even have started to believe that blogging is a team sport.
8. Run it like a business.  This is seriously one thing I didn’t do at all in the beginning and I’m still working on moving in that direction. But you will probably start making money much sooner if you do.
9. Plan: This is one area where I could be much more detailed. If planned out every month in advance I think that things would be really interesting in terms of growth. You would never run a business without a plan, so why would you run your blog without one.
10. Seek out Mentors: This kind of ties into the idea of developing relationships. One thing that you will find is everybody will help you. I encourage you to try and find one or two mentors to guide you through the journey. These should be people you talk to on a regular basis who are willing to give you advice and help you get there, and potentially even partner with you along the way.
11. Be authentic. If there’s any one thing that will take your blog to the next level really quickly it’s authenticity. Let’s face it, my early work to some degree was regurgitation of personal development ideas from all over the place. I didn’t tell you anything me or who I really am. It was only when you started to realize I am “highly educated unemployed surfer” who offers personal development advice that I became authentic.
12. Write about what interests you: Passion is contagious. People for some reason are drawn to it.  If you write about things you are passionate about, you will find that your writing will be a thousand times better.  Most of my articles that I tie in surfing analogies to seem to be really well received.
13. Break all the damn rules: At this point I came up with that bullet point because  don’t have 15 tips, or 25 tips, or 20 tips, which all would probably be much better Linkbait. But, I don’t give a shi#$#. I guess the only lesson from that is to write whatever comes to you when you get stuck, or just write about being stuck.

As I look back at this experience,  I realize it’s been a very formative period of my life, learning how to surf and finding this whole other side of my personality, fighting the woes of unemployment and uncertainty. It’s just the beginning of an experience that will build a great deal of character and I truly believe that periods adversity are the precursor to massive success.