Three days a week now, I’m usually in the gym by 5:00 am, and out by 5:30 am. That was the case this morning. There’s not much competition for the squat rack at that time, although there still is some!
I’ve settled on a program – “Stronglifts 5×5” – it involves squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, and rows. On my off days, usually 2-3 other days of the week, I’m in the gym doing what they call “HIIT” cardio (“high intensity interval training”). I’m working toward the goal of losing my belly. Only recently have I found a diet regimen that makes sense and is working.
So I’ve been going to the gym now for almost six months, on a fairly regular basis. I started in October, and now that it’s almost April, I’m still at it. I’m looking better and feeling better. The key to it is that I’ve been able to work it into my life as a routine.
With writing, that’s a little bit harder. You have to sit and think and focus for a longer period of time than is comfortable. You have to do research. You actually have to know what you’re writing about. But the results are significant.
I’ll put it into perspective for you – a kind of “Tale of Two Eloqua Partners”. When I was looking for a job in 2013, I had contacted a number of people – one of whom was Matt Heinz, founder of Heinz Marketing. He and I corresponded for a bit, and there seemed to be some interest there. One of his blog posts, from 2012, asked the question, “One thousand blog posts later, was it worth it?” Apparently the answer was a resounding “yes!”.
One is greeted on the Heinz Marketing blog by a pop-up that says “Join 60,000+ B2B professionals…” Here’s the theme:
This is my 1,000th blog post. For the first few years, I posted sporadically and when I had time. But for the past year, I’ve ramped up both publishing volume (posting something at least every business day) as well as how carefully we choose the topics I cover.
This weekend I reflected a bit on whether it’s all been worth it. Many bloggers struggle with this question, and many marketers (including some of our clients) wonder the same thing. But for me, based on the criteria below, there’s no question it’s not only been worth the time and effort, but also been one of the most important marketing investments I’ve made and continue to make.
The success here is quite the contrast to the results of the company that I actually joined. (I won’t mention names, but the company is listed in my LinkedIn profile).
There, the focus was “sales”, as in “a good salesperson can do everything that’s needed to generate enough business”. We used a CRM, and as a salesperson, I was tasked with calling a lot of different people. And I made the calls – I was the leading salesperson one year, and over a period of time, I made far more phone calls than the other two sales reps combined.
But the problem was, who was I calling? We were given a list of contacts, but they were stale, and there was no way of refreshing them. So I had to research my own list (in several different ways – I may go into this). And in the end, when we were setting up “call blitzes”, there were, after more than two years, still not more than several hundred contacts in my neck of the woods. In the end, I was dismissed for not being a good enough salesperson.
Today, both companies are still in the same line of business; both have upwards of 20 people. My former company, though, was struggling for business when I left. By contrast, in an article then about the milestone of reaching 2000 blog posts, Heinz writes of his blog, “It’s my top sales rep by far. It opens doors. Makes cold introductions easier. It keeps my prospects warm. Generates inbound inquiries. It literally helps me close deals, including with prospects I haven’t even spoken to yet.”
Two different sales philosophies, two different sets of results. I think the results speak for themselves.
