When I first started blogging on the site that would end up becoming the home page for my own business, I had a purpose for the site. I had just come back from an industry-based conference, and while I enjoyed the presentations of my peers, the cost was staggering. I was fortunate enough be a speaker, so the cost of the conference itself was covered. But the conference was in New York City, and between paying for hotel, cabs, food, and transportation, the budget I had been saving towards putting my own shingle out was significantly diminished.
A friend and I started talking about hosting a conference of our own, but one that was affordable for anyone who might attend. Instead of holding the conference in a large and expensive City, it would be in the resort town we both worked in, Havre de Grace, Maryland. Instead of going through a process where we would have potential speakers pitch ideas for sessions they would present, I wanted to have people attending be ready to give presentations of their own. The idea was similar to today’s barcamps or Wordcamps, where the people who were attending were also the people sharing their thoughts and ideas.
I decided that the conference should have a website, and paid for hosting and put up a WordPress site, where I started blogging about the conference. I blogged about local Bed and Breakfasts to stay at, attractions in the area, local history, and some topics that might be covered during the conference. I rented a local historic skipjack – a kind of boat that had been used on the Chesapeake Bay for over 100 years by waterman engaging in hunting for oysters, and wrote a blog post about it being one of the events happening at the conference.
Then I lost my Purpose…
The event came and went, and while I had a number of people show up, it didn’t attract the crowd that I had hoped it would. But, I was left with a web site that would end up becoming a platform that I grew my business and personal reputation upon, and used it to attract conversations about the industry I was working within. I had some thoughts in my head that I would write it as if it were 50
a personal workbook, like Davinci’s work
notes, or like Walden’s journal. I started
writing about search engine related
patents and whitepapers, and industry
news, and it led to opportunities to write
as a columnist for some of the biggest
web sites in my industry, invitations to
speak at other conferences, and brought
me clients whom I caught the attention
of with things that I had written.
Image from the Library of Congress, reference number LC-USZ62-76142, originally published in Harper’s Weekly, Mar. 1, 1884
I engaged in conversations on my blog
with people whom had written about one side of a topic, and I replied with my own thoughts about the other side. I wrote posts about the companies that Google and Yahoo and Amazon acquired that were little known at the time, and people picked up on those posts, and worked them into discussions at places like Digg and into Wikipedia entries. I kept at it, and a couple of years ago, wrote about Google acquiring over 1,000 patents from IBM, which ended up being reported upon in
the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and in a media roll that ended up going around the globe.
A blog helps you to be part of conversations about things going on in the world around you. It can help you start a number of conversations as well. A month or so ago, I received an invitation from someone at LinkedIn, and I added him, and sent him a message thanking him for connecting with me. He responded, and told me that he had been reading my blog since he was 12, and thanked me for helping him get excited about, and getting into the search industry. That was better news than having been mentioned in the Times and the Journal and Bloomberg News, and others. The conference that was my purpose for starting the blog didn’t pan out the way that I hoped it would, but the newer purpose of sharing ideas and information that I adopted had.