Building a blog and subscribers is just like training – Sean Bowes
Tonight I was jogging with my friend and Bondi personal trainer Sean Bowes – which is rare, since he’s a 2:26 marathoner and I’m slower by a good hour and then some. Fortunately, he’d already done a cycling session and a 20km run before our leisurely 8km jog.
He said something that buzzed around my head for the rest of the run.
Building a blog or email subscribers is just like my training. I don’t have a huge audience yet, but I know if I write every day and commit to practicing, I’ll get better and better at it, and in a few years time I should have built something worthwhile and see some great results.
Hearing Sean announce this was a breath of fresh air. I find too many people looking for fast and easy results, and too many companies promising the world and delivering an atlas. And happy to run off with people’s money in the process.
Sean Bowes
I’ve admired Sean’s work ethic for a while and to hear him commit to the same level of intensity for his online activity was cool. I’ve never been more sure of someone’s long term success on the web.
In my keynote presentations, I always include a story about Sean’s motto, “Train hard, win easy.”
He puts in the work, every week, year after year, and he gets the results – on this occasion 1st place in Canberra!
If you turn up at the starting line without having done the work, you’ll be one the runners in the back of the pack trying to catch Sean. Impossible.
Same on the web. If you’re building your web strategy system, you need to do the work. Every week, year on year. Treat it like a marathon. Just decide you want to do it and commit. Don’t worry about how you’re going to do it yet… there’s plenty of time to work that out along the way.
Then start! Start small. Get out of bed and jog. Get out of bed and write an article. Then do it again and again and again. And you’ll get better and better and better. It’s painful at the start, but after a while you see results and start to enjoy it!
This was reiterated by Gary Vaynerhuck on a YouTube video I saw after training this morning. He tells the interviewer,
This isn’t a sprint for me, you know me well to know I’m in this game like it’s a marathon.
It is a long term game, and it’s one you can win because too many people give up and chase the ‘short cut‘ or go down the ‘let’s just buy followers‘ path and wonder why they see no business results.
There’s plenty of room for us all to succeed on the web. You just gotta want it enough to do the work!
A free tool to help you get started is the Web Strategy Planning Template.
Do you agree?
