It was late in the evening. Almost 10 o’clock. We had been busy shooting all day, came home to two super excited and loving kiddos, cooked dinner, and finished the bedtime routine. The kids were in bed at 8PM and I’d now been staring at the computer screen for two hours. Pages was open on my Mac, and the black cursor blinked steadily on the empty white page. It was my job to write the blog for the next day and it felt like I had nothing. to. say. at. all.
It felt miserable. Like an impossible task. But we had made a public commitment, and we had to stick to it. So I did my best to put together some thoughts and send out a meaningful post for the next day.
When we started our business, we heard from others who came before us that blogging was essential to our success. That it would be the literal heartbeat of our business. The medium that showed clients we were open for business. We took that advice to heart, but we ended up blogging whenever we had new material to show. If we weren’t shooting, we weren’t blogging, and since we were running our photography business on the side, that meant we weren’t blogging all too often.
Fast forward a year and a half and we found ourselves in Arizona doing this whole photography thing full time! The idea of jumping into blogging on a more regular basis was constantly in the back of our minds, but we just couldn’t make that kind of time commitment, could we?!
Then it happened, we made a knee jerk decision in the heat of the moment. We announced to the world that we would be blogging every week, Monday through Friday! It was surreal!
And then…it sank in…
We had to live up to that commitment.
In the beginning, it was hard – crazy hard! The late nights wondering what to write seemed to never end. We began to secretly regret making that commitment. But truthfully, we are so glad we did. The public accountability we opened ourselves up to forced us to stay disciplined and work harder. The most amazing thing was that over time the challenge of writing a daily blog posts became easier and easier. We began to get organized. We started planning ahead. It’s like anything, sometimes, just starting is the hardest part. Once we began to blog daily, the ideas started coming, the writing got easier, and we really began to see and feel our blog taking shape.
And the best part?? Not only does blogging daily have technical benefits like improving our SEO for internet searches, but it helps us personally in so many ways. It helps us to stay honest. It helps us be real about what we have and what we don’t have! And best of all, we began to accomplish our ‘why’ on a consistent basis. We began to see other people’s lives positively impacted though our time and engagement with them. We started to receive comments from people we didn’t even know about how something had encouraged them, or that a particular educational subject taught them something they’d been struggling to figure out on their own. And that, friends, makes it SO worth it.
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