Social Media: What 10 years of blogging has taught me

I've been blogging for …

well, 10 years exactly.

I found myself saying this phrase during a client meeting and was taken a back. It's true. I have been blogging for 10 years. Almost to the day.

I published my first post on Oct. 20, 2005. While my content has ebbed and flowed through the years it's certainly snowballed. Not only in quantity but in quality.

It's also helped grow our business, build our brand and open new doors. So what have I learned about blogging over the past 728 posts? And, more important, what about the future of blogging?

Lessons Learned

Take my total posts and divide them evenly by years and weeks and it could look like I've been churning out a post or more every week. That would be a mistaken assumption.

I went in bursts early on (a few posts a week, a few weeks off, one here, one there, etc.). Sometimes months went by without a post.

When I met Mack Collier at a MarketingProfs event in Chicago, it was a turning point for my blog. I asked him a simple question: 'How do I blog consistently?”

Mack offered a simple answer. Set a deadline you can reach and hit it. Maybe it's weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly - whatever works best for you. This helps you build blogging muscles and helps set audience expectations.

This advice led me to a New Year's resolution to get into a weekly routine. This resolution became two posts a week the next year.

Today we publish a blog post each week along with two podcasts. I also learned that I couldn't do it alone, which is why other members of the Brand Driven community and team contribute posts regularly.

The Future of Blogging

My blogging has changed but so has the medium itself. When social media first emerged, shortly after I began blogging, many rushed to these new platforms thinking that blogging was passe. However, many like Brogan stressed that while these new networks were critical for engagement and growing your audience, you still needed a digital content hub - your home base - to drive the traffic from all these outposts back to.

While this remains true, leading experts such as Mark W. Schaefer stress that we are entering a period of 'content shock” - in which marketers are creating more content than there are readers to consume it.

Do we quit blogging? Do we focus on off-site blogging platforms such as Medium or LinkedIn's popular publishing tool? Or do we simply blog less?

I'm inclined to think the latter. Or, if not less, we need to blog better. Content shock exists because of the proliferation of 'me, too” content.

When, as reported by Google, we create as much information online every two days as we did from the beginning of time up to 2003, we have to consider that most basic topics have been covered already. But in a basic way.

What's missing? Your unique perspective. Your voice. That's your brand and that should be your content.

Ask yourself what holes you can fill in your industry. What questions can you - and you alone - answer? And how can you do this in a way that no one else is?

If that means you sacrifice quantity for quality, I'd say that's a good trade-off. More isn't always better. Sometimes more is just more.

Ten years later, blogging still is the juicy center of my own personal and professional content strategy, but it may continue to evolve as I hone my focus further.

Who knows what blogging will look like 10 years from now.

' Nick Westergaard is founder of Brand Driven Digital; nick@westergaard.com; @nickwestergaard