30 day reflection 😀

Today is my 30th daily blog post in a row.

Even typing that feels a bit strange, but as I come to the end of #ship30for30 I’ve been reflecting a lot on the last few weeks.

Firstly, I’m very surprised that I didn’t miss a single day.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not a quitter, but when I started I assumed that with everything I have going on at the moment, life would get in the way occasionally and just make it difficult.

I think my biggest takeaway from the whole experience was around managing expectations.

Before it began I had a few preconceived ideas in my head, that in hindsight, were well out of sync.

With so many people taking part, I thought I was going to get a lot more likes and engagement on Twitter. The truth is I didn’t engage the community enough.

And there is an irony in this, I work in marketing and tell people every day that engagement is key to growth.

My Twitter numbers aren’t bad as you can see from the image below. I’ve never really tweeted much but I know I didn’t do enough to really maximise this opportunity to grow my following a bit more.

Looking at my analytics and email sign-ups, they were a little underwhelming.

They are not bad but quite why I thought I was going to turn in to a cross between Elon and a Kardashian, I’m not quite sure.

If you want maximum reach, content distribution is just as important, if not more so than the actual writing, and it is hard work. To do it right takes a lot of time, perseverance and skill.

But numbers aren’t everything. In fact, numbers had nothing to do with why I started down this path in the first place.

I wanted to prove something to myself.

I know I’m not the best writer, I know I need to write more to grow my personal brand and I want to get better. I knew I had to start somewhere.

Have I improved? I guess you’ll be the judge of that but I certainly think so.

I’ve definitely improved in my approach and execution.

I think the key thing to help improve your writing is to have a process of noting down your ideas. I actually wrote an atomic essay on it here.

Having a solid bank of ideas means you’ve cleared the first and biggest hurdle, having something to talk about.

The biggest step change in my writing occurred when I stumbled upon the game-changing hack of reading your content out loud before publishing. I wrote about that too (click here) if you are interested. 😉

While I’m at it, I owe a big thanks to my friend Nicholas who proofread pretty much everything I wrote. If you want an editor, give him a shout on LinkedIn.

I also had support from my wife which was invaluable, allowing me to focus on my writing every day, especially when the kids were playing up. This point in particular is incredibly important.

The feedback I’ve received in general has been pretty positive, mostly from friends and family so taking it with a small pinch of salt, but it has made me think about the future of my writing.

I am trying to grow my personal brand to support my new business, and I know for a fact that producing regular content is a major step forward in doing this. Along with engagement! 😀

I’m a bit torn though. I want to be knocking out content that is interesting and adding value.

What I really don’t want to be doing is producing content for the sake of it and ending up sounding like every other personal brand builder out there.

It’s a very fine line.

Will I continue writing every day?

Yes, I think so (assuming I have something interesting to talk about), I have actually enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.

I expected it to be a bit of a chore and while it was far from easy, once I got into the swing of it, it became a part of my day. The process certainly became a lot easier over the course of the 30 days.

The biggest outcome of this exercise is that I want to do more 30 day challenges.

30 days is a great time period to give something a proper crack and form a bit of a habit if you want to continue it.

Stay posted for the next challenge!

If you are reading this and debating whether to give #ship30for30 a go, my advice would be 100% go for it!

This post was originally published on chrishutchings.online