Build Your Brand By Writing: Learnings from 100 Blog Posts

Photo by Toben Dilworth

This is my 100th blog post since I started writing about my career transition from a design leader to running my own business as a leadership coach, speaker, teacher, and writer. Writing weekly started with helping me process my own journey and my learnings in this transition. It’s become a pathway to a new identity, as a writer. It’s helped me hone my ideas and publish my first book. And most of all, it’s a way of developing my unique perspective and point of view on the world, AND getting feedback on it from readers.

From writing 100 blog posts, I’m sharing two of my biggest process learnings and four tips for what types of content has worked for me.

1. (Process) Writing is a muscle; You get better with practice

I’ve been writing regularly for 2.5 years, mostly publishing a blog post every week. For the first 6 months, here’s what worked really well for me to establish this rhythm:

• Topic. Each week I’d write about what I learned the most that week or a challenge I was grappling. Sometimes it was a problem that multiple clients were facing.
• Accountability. I posted on some leadership slack groups asking for an accountability partner who also wanted to write. When I found one, we would exchange our writing and provide feedback each week. It was valuable to have another pair of eyes on my writing and to know that I had a piece “due” to someone else.

Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the easier it gets. In the first 3-6 months, it would take me 2–3 days to write a post — perhaps a day to consider the topic, and maybe 4–6 hours to write it, broken up over several days.

Today, it might take me 5–10 minutes to find the topic. It’s a rhythm where I continually think about what I have to say this week and what would be relevant to others. I often still look at what’s topical this week, for me or my clients. The writing itself will take 1–1.5 hours. Then I step away from it, sometimes for half a day, sometimes overnight. When I come back, I give it a 10-minute read, make the edits, and post. It’s become part of my muscle memory from the years of practice.