Today marks the 300th day I’ve published a daily blog post on here.
And today is also the day I’m quitting posting daily.
It was a hard decision because I originally thought I would publish daily for 10 years!
But I didn’t even make it ONE full year. I considered posting for 65 more days just so I could say I published daily for a year. But after a good talk with my wife on the way to the Oregon Coast two days ago I realized that was a dumb idea.
The truth is I don’t enjoy it and I don’t see it serving any good purpose.
I like writing. But if I’m just going to write about whatever is on my mind that day I may as well keep that in a journal. At least there I’m really free to speak my mind and process things without worrying about what anyone will think.
The other reason I don’t like posting daily is because I don’t have the time to produce good quality posts every day. Remember, some clients pay me over $400 to write a single post for them. And those posts are great if I do say so myself.
But they also require several hours to research, write and edit. And when I’m done I’m proud of it.
However, I’m not proud of these little daily rants that take 20 minutes to write. There’s little substance to them and I wouldn’t even read them!
So I realized the type of writing I enjoy – and excel at – is not the little 300-word posts about some random idea or opinion I had. That’s just not me. I’m not Seth Godin and I don’t want to be.
Seth is great at what he does. I need to be great at what I do.
Will I delete this blog? I thought about it. But I won’t. I still plan to maintain a personal blog because I like the idea of having a home base online so I can continue to document my journey.
The difference will be that now I will only publish on here when I feel like I have something worth saying.
And I’m not going to be writing less. I’ll probably be writing more. It’ll just be concentrated on my business blogs like joshuamonen.com and insfunnels.com.
Lastly, I want to share a list of things I learned after posting a daily blog for 300 days. So here we go:
3 Lessons from Publishing 300 Daily Blog Posts
1) Don’t do something because someone else tells you it’ll be a good idea: One of the reasons I decided to post daily was because popular bloggers like Seth Godin (who I still think is amazing and I enjoy his daily blog) said it was one of the best career decisions they ever made. And I’m sure it was… for them. Not for me. Remember to be true to yourself.
2) Know your audience:One of the biggest struggles I had with this whole thing was knowing who I’m writing for. I never got crystal clear on that so my writing was all over the place. This is why I’m excited to write for my other business blogs because I know exactly who I’m writing for!
3) Stick to the writing you excel at: Like I said, I’m not good with short pithy posts. I like to go deep on a topic and write rich posts that are pretty comprehensive. That’s the type of writing I enjoy and am good at.
…Well that’s enough lessons. It’s 10:30 p.m. and I’m tired of sitting out here in the dark at this campsite writing about why I’m quitting. It’s kind of depressing.
So time to go back in the motorhome and tell my wife I really did it! I quit! She’ll be so proud of me. 🙂