Blogging

I started my first blog in 2006.

This is the very first post: Inspirational Speakers

The most popular platform back then was Blogger which was launched in 1999.

It was one of the first dedicated blog-publishing tools and one of its founders was Evan Williams who later went on to found a micro-blogging platform called Twitter, which may explain why I like it so much!

At that time I had been running events for business owners for about a year, featuring inspirational business speakers and had an email list of about 500 people.

I can’t remember how I met Lloyd Davies — this was before I joined LinkedIn (2008) or Twitter (2009) but Iwas using Ning so maybe it was through that. Lloyd was making lots of interesting noises about blogging for business so I invited him to a meeting in Cambridge to explain to a room full of mostly mystified guests what blogging was all about. I’d be very surprised if any of them did anything with the information they got that night but I was already hooked.

The blog was a way of creating conversations and building a community between the people who attended my events and the speakers and I wrote 70 posts between 2006 and 2008 when I switched from Blogger to Wordpress, which I’ve been using ever since.

One of the last posts on my Blogger blog was “Dealing with the Downturn” dated October 2008 which just proves that there is nothing new in business.

I’m eternally grateful that I started blogging when I did. It’s enabled me to build a fantastic list of over 3,000 people, many of whom have been on my list since 2006. Quite a few have become clients and even more have become friends.

I always write evergreen content and keep my posts circulating on LinkedIn and Twitter so people are still coming across very old posts for the first time and enjoying them and commenting on them and finding them useful.

I started writing here on Medium to accomodate posts that weren’t strictly about my business and let me take some flights of fancy but I completely lost my writing mojo during the Covid lockdown and have just started to get it back.

Between my business blog, this blog and LinkedIn posts I’ve probably written several books — but of course that all helped when I was asked to help write New Business: Next Steps for Pearson plc in 2015 as most of the content was already done!

Blogging is great for business and if you haven’t tried it, I really recommend it!