Success Manifesto

I started blogging in late June of 2003 and updated it fairly continuously until January of 2004, making over 200 total posts in all. Some of my general musings on it are:

1. Word-of-Mouth: In the back of my mind, I pictured the blog quickly growing via word-of-mouth and having lots of regular readers. While it did garner regular readers, the number was fairly low. This probably has to do a lot with my writing style, how long I've been writing, the interestingess of what I write about, and so on.
   
2. Managing the Network: Overall, I thought the tool was very effective in keeping in touch with people of varying relations to me. With a growing network of contacts, I'm quickly realizing that actually effectively managing my network is going to be a larger obstacle than growing it.
   
3. Accelerating the Network: I thought the blog was a very powerful tool to accelerate initial growth of contacts. For example, let's say I just met somebody at an event. By reading my blog, they can rapidly learn more not only about certain things I've done, but who I am and how I think.
   
4. Inspirational/Useful: I did get comments from regular readers of the blog that they found it inspirational read.
   
5. TIME!: In the end, the largest challenge to blogging was the time spent creating a quality entry, which is about 1.5 hours for me.

   In the end, did the benefits outweight the costs? In other words, was it worth it? To that question, I must give the answer that nobody likes to hear, which is 'maybe'. I think I learned a fair amount, which I can apply to making a blog that is better moving forward. Here are the preliminary changes, I plan to make:

   1. Make less frequent, but higher quality posts.
      
   2. Measure what works and what doesn't.
      
   3. Integrate Sheena and I's blog more. If you haven't noticed, we are dual-blogging now.
      
   4. Generate word-of-mouth. I plan to spend more time thinking about what I'm going to write about and making the writing more interesting.
      
   5. Leverage Notifications. Movable Type has a feature where whenever new blog entries are made, you can notify people of the entry and send them an excerpt. I would like to advertise this feature to people when they sign up for the quarterlyEE Newsletter so that Extreme Entrepreneurship is on their mind more often.