Health warning: blogging can seriously change your career

It was just an experiment at first. I had no intention of becoming hooked. All I can tell you is that, after a while, something else took over.

My first introduction to blogging was by accident. I was doing some online research for a coaching skills course I was running and stumbled upon Mark McGuinness’s Wishful Thinking. Mark’s blog was not only really useful for what I was doing; it also captured my imagination. An online site that looked a bit like a broadsheet newspaper and was being developed by one guy. I’d lived a fairly traditional professional life till that point and could not have then identified what I was looking at as a blog. But it made me curious.

I can’t remember now how I found other blogs, but somehow I did. The big ones to start with. Copyblogger. ProBlogger. IttyBiz. Men with Pens. Remarkablogger.

Somewhere along the line I understood that these were not just cutting edge websites putting stuff out there for people’s reading pleasure. Part of their equation was a strong commercialism. People were selling all kinds of products and services, but there was no hard sell. How they seemed to be doing it was off the back of extreme generosity in giving away knowledge, and trusting that, as a result of educating and building relationships, people would buy. Clever, as well as creative, I thought. A whole new type of entrepreneurialism. One that has what the Positive Psychologists call an “abundance” mentality at its core.

That’s when I really began to get drawn in. Having worked for myself for over a decade, there’s a real business person in me. But I’d been a closet writer all of my life, with three half-written books to my name and endless story-boarded ones. I’d also had an interest in the role work plays in people’s lives and had worked in coaching and therapy to support people transform their experience of work. But I’d never promoted this as a passion of mine.

“I began to wonder whether blogging would give me the platform I hadn’t known I’d been searching for to bring together these three disparate strands of me.”

Someone told me about WordPress.Org, so I got a site and tried it out. It seemed remarkably easy to play around with the themes and pictures and colours. But I could tell from early on that the serious bloggers had their blogs on their own domains and that I was going to have to work out how to do that for myself.

My friend and former neighbour, Mandy Lehto, had found a really handy book called Does this blogsite make my wallet look fat?, which she lent me. It gave me enough know how to figure out how to get my own domain and load WordPress onto it. I confess there were times during this process when I wondered what the hell I was doing. Sure, I could have paid someone to do it for me, but at that stage I wasn’t at all sure that I’d stick with it. Besides which no-one might read me.

It was only when I was about four articles in and feeling, if anything, more determined than ever to really develop something, that I reached out for support. And I did so in the form of Michael Martine. He’s been a complete star in pointing me in the right direction.

I still have a long way to go. There’s still much to learn and a mountain or three to climb in terms of really making the thing earn its keep. But I’m amazed at how passionate I feel about it; how much I believe in it; and, indeed, how it has changed me to allow myself to experiment like this.

Blogging, and its associated activities of reading and commenting on other people’s blogs and being present on other online communities, like Twitter and Facebook, have taken my work and my life in a direction I simply could not have imagined in April when I started out. Then, I was a good coach, facilitator and therapist who’d been getting business through traditional networking and referral. But my creativity was under-exploited and I needed something new. Being so close up to things I didn’t see that at the time. All I knew was that I was vaguely bored with my life.

Blogging has allowed me to know that there’s a way of working as a coach and consultant that I’d never imagined. That there’s a world out there with opportunities that go beyond the confines of what’s possible if all you ever know and focus on is the City of London.

In recent years when I’ve been travelling to far flung destinations with my partner and playmate Steve, we’ve talked about how wonderful it would be to have the kind of work and business that wasn’t dependent on us being in any one place. After each trip, it has been a dream we’ve packed away as we’ve resigned ourselves to our self-employed, but location dependent lives.

Over the summer, inspired by what I was learning about online business, we decided to extricate ourselves from London in order to create the conditions that would make our dream come alive. Some people no doubt think I’m barking mad. But I really don’t care. I’ve got a concept of where I’m taking this blog that only now is starting to be made more concrete in terms of its business model and its commercial reality. And I have faith and determination.

As well as reading whatever else I write, come on this journey with me and see first hand how blogging seriously can change your career.

Are you up for it?

Related posts:

1. A Different Kind of Blog Review: March 2010