Keith Goodrum

Looked at the dashboard today and saw this was the 100th post. It’s a cool milestone, and a chance to look back at the short life of this blog. Here are a few of the numbers:

• In 117 days there has been 100 posts.
• The last 2 weeks of January there were 694 unique visitors, and through the 1st 8 days in May there has been 1072. (Knock on wood that the numbers keep growing)
• Unranked in Alexa in January, and today 148,868.
• Zero page rank in Google, and PR3 today.

These numbers are fun to watch because they are fast improving. This is a new blog, and the numbers will make big jumps. And that’s always fun to track. Eventually the numbers will level off, and at best will see incremental moves. This is just the normal course of action as a blog matures.

The big question is what’s the reason behind this growth?

The easiest answer is… action.

Pretty simple, and not overly complicated. I’ve worked hard to get up 100 posts in 117 days. I remember reading once that a new blog should get up a lot of good content fast. And I figured blogging 5-6 days a week should be a way to get that much content.

Publishing this many blog posts a week was not easy. There were many days I got up with no idea what to write about. But I wouldn’t let myself off the hook. I made myself sit down in front of the keyboard and write. I would write 2 maybe 3 paragraphs not like what I wrote, and start over again. Many of those early drafts I deleted.

Sometimes I would write a complete post, and decide not to publish it. I was not happy with the way it turned out. It either got way off point, didn’t read good or the timing didn’t feel right.

So, I would start all over again. I was not going to miss my personal commitment.

Another curious thing happened because of this hard work…

It put me in position to receive a little luck. A couple of big name bloggers linked to my blog… I was lucky to have them do that. But if I wasn’t adding content on a regular basis would they have linked to this blog? I don’t know, but probably not. I got to interview copywriter Stephen Dean. That interview has generate traffic, and back links. If I wasn’t actively involved in the blogsphere I would have missed this opportunity. I got asked to participate in a Marcus Hochstadt blog contest. Would I have been asked to participate if I wasn’t blogging on a regular basis? Probably not.

I guess it boils down to this… Luck and hard work go hand in hand.

Here’s how I’ve always felt about this. It seems like when you are working hard you tend to be in the right place at the right time. You find luck out on the playing field. You have to be in the game. When you are out there working hard, making the plays, you will find yourself standing in the right place at the right time. If you are standing on the sidelines when luck happens by, you will miss out, because luck will pass you by.

I think that Will Wheaton, and Sam Adams make great points about luck & hard work. They both write that you need to be working hard to be in position to have good things happen.

Will Wheaton sums up about hard work and luck in his post yet another post about writing… and stuff

Finally, an important note to all artists: nobody in the world will work as hard as you will to promote your work, nobody will care about promoting it as much as you do, and your work will be as successful as you work to make it. Hopefully, you’ll get lucky like I did and get some good word of mouth and connect with a passionate group of people who will tell their friends about you, but that’s never going to happen if you don’t work hard — really, really hard — to make it happen.

Here is what Sam Adams says in his post titled Luck and hard work go hand in hand:

Luck is about being there. Luck is about showing up. I tease my kids all the time that it might be true that it is better to be lucky than be good; but I also tell them that you can’t get lucky if you are not prepared to accept it.

Every champion, in sports or industry, can look back over the course of competition and see places where they were fortunate, opportunistic and sometimes just downright lucky.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, gets lucky. What we all want in life is a shot. What we do with that shot, that’s the story we want to tell.

What do you do with the luck that falls your way?

So, what are you going to do to make sure you are standing in the way when luck comes along?

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