Sixteen years ago, with some trepidation, I hit the Publish button for the first time on Column 2, posting a review of the BPTrends 2005 BPM Suites Report. This was early in the social media days, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in anything that I had to write about. Since then, I’ve written 2,236 posts and 1,026,740 words. My readers from all over the world have contributed 2,095 comments. The readership stats are not completely accurate, since I’ve transferred platforms twice and they would have been reset at those points, although the last change was quite a number of years ago. Based on the current site stats, aside from the Home and About Me pages, the most popular post of all time is Policies, procedures, processes and rules from 2007. More readers are from the US than any other country, although India and Germany have respectable second and third place showings.
Social publishing platforms come and go, and I occasionally dabble in other places such as LinkedIn and Medium, but I believe that maintaining control over my content is important. I choose to make this open platform (self-hosted WordPress) my main platform, rather than a proprietary walled garden that may limit who sees what I write, or go out of business and take my content with them.
When I started writing this blog, I was doing similar technical strategy and architecture consulting work to what I do now. The exposure that I have from writing here has leveraged me into a different and complementary business, and I now spend half my time as an indepedent industry analyst. That started with me asking for free press passes to vendor and industry conferences, since I was writing about the conferences; eventually, the value of what I was writing was recognized, and vendors started to invite me to attend (covering my travel expenses) and include me in analyst sessions and product briefings. Now, they hire me to help with internal strategy, as well as to write and present on thought-leadership and educational topics regarding our industry.
Writing this blog has expanded my business social circle enormously, and I count as friends (or at least friendly business colleagues) many people who I have met because I hit that Publish button. Without a doubt, it has been transformational for me, both in business and in life.
Congratulations on all of your success Sandy. It is well earned.
Well done Sandy! I have always learned a lot from your posts both on topic and off topic.
Sandy –
Congrats! It’s a great milestone! I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again: reading your blog was one of the things that inspired me to write. And I learned a lot from your work – both as a blogger and about the space we operate in.
Feedly has helped keep me on top of every post ever since Google Reader shut down 🙂
Thanks, Scott. I’ve heard from others over the years that I’ve inspired them to start writing, and that is probably my biggest contribution to the community. So many great opinions, even when I don’t agree with them.
And just when you’d think a space would get a little long in the tooth, it gets very lively again 🙂 Just different things to debate this time ’round !