Recently I had a beer with Josh Porter, and he mentioned to me how something I said had resonated with him. Apparently, I had advised him to keep a blog on a single topic, posting regularly and well, and that would allow him to "own the space" or at least build reputation in it. My own blog had let me establish authority in IA when I had only been doing it a few months... .

Well, we all know it's easier to give advice than take it. I've been blogging for seven years, and while my first few years reflect a focus, there have been plenty of divergence, and my audience has fluctuated with my attention span. I remember bitterly when a reader commented "I like it better when you blogged about design."

This caused me to wonder, now in these days of blog proliferation, is Josh's success the norm, or an anomaly (and I should clean up my act, even though all I really want to post about is the amazing stuffed pork chop I cooked last night.) This led to an unscientific LinkedIn Answers query:

Has blogging affected your professional life, and how?

Has blogging brought you notoriety, gotten you clients, respectability, a job? Love to hear if all this writing is helping (or hurting) folks. Less the "I was fired for begin indiscrete" and more an overall effect ..though anecdotes are fun.

Clarification added 7 days ago:

I'm also interested if *reading* blogs has helped you professionally...

posted 7 days ago in Career Development

Admittedly the last bit was an afterthought, and most respondents did treat it as such.

From the results, I determined Josh (and my younger self) were dead right. Post regularly, and well and it can only do you good. Some folks built a big audience, some built a small one, and some just found themselves with an audience of their potential employers. If I were to list the priorities in order, I would say

You need to

1. post well
   
2. post on topic
   
3. post regularly

Which might be a relief to those who can't face posting every day, but painful for those of the "half-baked" school of thought.

Some particularly useful insights:

from Michael Angeles

Excluding my first job out of grad school, every job that I've taken, including my current full time job, has been because of blogging. I can't say enough about how writing a blog is one of the best things you can do for your career. I get way more in return than I put into blogging. For testing out new ideas, nothing has been better for me than blogging--even better than posting to mailing lists because the audience can be more diverse.

Reading blogs is also an essential part of my professional development. The evolution of my craft as an IA really grew much greater when I started reading blogs of peers who like to share ideas (like your EH) and having conversations with people on their blogs. Same is true of mailing lists, however. These days, I do more lurking or freeloading of other peoples blogs than I do commenting because of the lack of time to write, and because Google Reader makes it easy to take things in without engaging. But when I bother to engage in conversations I really get more out of the experience.

Brian Ghidinelli says

Blogging casually, in my opinion, is relatively worthless for your career. I believe if you blog "professionally", meaning it's a core component of your professional strategy, then you will likely develop a following large enough or content of a certain caliber to have some impact on your career.

37 Signals' SVN is a great example of "professional blogging" even if the blog isn't what makes them money (directly). They sold thousands of their Design E-Book thanks to the legions of fans they've developed via their blog. In the sense that your readers can become your sales force (or are your sales targets), then blogging is a communications channel like PR, advertising and direct sales. It takes work and vigilance to develop and execute on.

Personally, I blog for myself. I tend to post HOWTO or research-driven pieces where I've invested time in sorting something out and wish to contribute back in exchange for the help I find out there. I don't receive many comments but that's not the goal of my efforts so it's OK. Wordpress has become the easiest way for me to track what's going on in my (mostly professional) life and the fact that it's public, if carefully edited, is a bonus to my "reputation". ...

Gagan Diesh says

... Yes blogging has been helpful as it keeps me honest as a designer by forcing me to research. It IS read my clients before they hire us (part of their due diligence) and we use it in client meetings as reference material when trying to sell the power of design! I have had some good debates on blog entries with programmers who take exception at my design-focused project management approach.

Scott Abel says

Blogging has helped me reinvent myself and create an entire new career...one that I never imagined. My blog, TheContentWrangler.com, has allowed me to share what I know, what I discover, and what I am doing with others. And, it's helped me create a valuable audience of 17,000 newsletter subscribers, and several hundred (or thousand) folks a day visiting my site and/or reading my RSS feeds.

It's also attracted advertisers anxious to gain access to my audience. Paid advertising campaigns allow me to continue looking for the next great topics to blog about.

And, blogging has helped me increase my notoriety. Conference organizers have spotted my blog and invited me to speak at their events. Journalists have found my writings online and interviewed me as an expert. Magazine and newsletter editors have asked me to author articles. And, venture capitalists have contacted me for advice before investing in new technology initiatives.

So, yes, blogging is worth it.

However, blogging involves discipline, commitment, and a drive to do better, learn more, and help others. It creates lots of extra work (email, instant messages, and telephone calls). And, it involves thinking outside the box.

Reading blogs is an excellent way to identify new technologies, techniques, and strategies worth writing about. Reading blogs in disciplines outside your own area of specialty helps you to relate the concepts familiar to you with those of others to create "ah ha" moments that may not have ever materialized without such information.

Blogging also have some nice dividends, from collecting your bookmarks and insights in one place, to improving your writing chops.

Rob Tannen says

When I started blogging about designing for humans three years ago it was as much to organize and store information of interest to me, as it was share information with people of similar interests. So in a very tangible way it helps me do my job by providing quick access to reference sources (helps that I had to summarize them too).

Joshua Porter

Short answer:
Yes to notoriety, clients, job offers.

Also made me a better writer (I hope). And being a better writer is how you not only participate in conversations, but help lead them as well. Being an independent who has a blog to help start and keep conversations, it's incredibly important to be able to write. The more I can make ideas clear, the more clients I'll get.

There were so many awesome answers, and so many good points, I want to encourage you to read all of them... Has blogging affected your professional life, and how?

Okay, more asking questions on LinkedIn time. This time it's

"Has blogging affected your professional life, and how?

Has blogging brought you notoriety, gotten you clients, respectability, a job? Love to hear if all this writing is helping (or hurting) folks. "

I only posted it two hours ago, and I'm already getting terrific answers. For example, Michael Angeles said

Excluding my first job out of grad school, every job that I've taken, including my current full time job, has been because of blogging. I can't say enough about how writing a blog is one of the best things you can do for your career. I get way more in return than I put into blogging.

I'll be writing up a summary once it's closed...

Read the entire report from the A List Apart Web Survey for more amazing factoids.

I asked on LinkedIn How has writing a book changed your (professional) life? because it's an oft-asked question "Should I write a book?" I received -- as ever-- a ton of great answers.

Everyone agrees that you lose money doing so-- advances are dreadful, and percentages are not good so you never really make money from sales, but publishing does give you authority that translates into career advancement, and that does lead to more money.

One surprise was that many people said it forced them to deeply understand their subject, and after they had a new perspective and a great deal of confidence. I agree completely, but I had rather forgotten about this precious side-affect.

From Harvard Business Online's Marshall Goldsmith

1. List the names of the key groups of people that impact your life -- both at work and at home (customers, co-workers, friends, family members, etc.).
2. Write down the names of the people in each group.
3. Post your list in a place you can't miss seeing regularly.
4. Twice a week -- once on Wednesday, once on Friday -- review the list and ask yourself, “Did anyone on this list do something that I should recognize?”
5. If someone did, stop by to say "thank you," make a quick phone call, leave a voice mail, send an email, or jot down a note.
6. Don’t do anything that takes up too much time. This process needs to be time-efficient or you won’t stick with it.
7. If no one on the list did anything that you believe should be recognized, don’t say anything. You don’t want to be a hypocrite or a phony. No recognition is better than recognition that you don’t really mean.
8. Stick with the process. You won’t see much impact in a week - but you will see a huge difference in a year.

Nothing will improve every aspect of your life than regularly saying thank you to the people in it.

Focus on the Big Rocks

Plateauing: Redefining Success at Work - Knowledge@Wharton

What may be happening, suggest McGrath and others, is that people are setting career paths based on their own values and definitions of success. They are not burned out or dropping out; they are not going back to school and changing careers; they are not having a mid-life crisis. Instead, they are redefining how they can keep contributing to their organizations, but on their own terms. Rather than subscribe to the 'onward and upward' motto, they are more interested in 'plateauing,' unhooking from the pressure to follow an upward path that someone else has set.

Designers of all sorts, be they information architects or interaction designers, have a excessive amount of personal identity embedded in their profession. This makes it very hard for them to grow. I've talked about it before... I'm hoping this diagram might shed some light.

Career paths in design seem to fall into a pretty stable path for all the "makers of stuff" professions. You are a n00b, a raw bit of talent, and some company picks you up cheap and gets to teaching you. What they teach you isn't usually to revolutionary, but it provides a good foundation.

Now you get to be a Journeyman. Many young designers call me up asking what they should do next, because they are leaving their company. The answer is typically "go inhouse" to consultants and "go outhouse... er, join a consulting firm" if they are in house. There are things you can only learn by being one place or the other; even somewhere as diverse as Yahoo can't teach you consulting tricks, and no matter how many companies you think you've seen into you don't know them until you've walked a mile in their excel sheets.

So after awhile you get pretty high up the org, and you think, now what? Do I have to become a ... gasp... manager? If you are lucky the company might offer you two choices, manager or senior practitioner (master, in this chart). And now the cycle is complete, right? You can stay in your spot, or twitch back and forth between the two for the rest of your life, right?

Don't be afraid, little sufferer of ADD.... there is hope. Get the f*ck out of the boxes!

Designers get stuck because they are scared of losing their identity, and IA's are certainly among them. How many folks stood up at five minute madness and declared, "I am a IA, and these are my people!" Giving it up means loss of who you are, and who you love, right?

Well, the good news is it ain't so. Lou Rosenfeld, the publisher. Frank Ramirez, the children's book creator. Christina Wodtke, entrepreneur (hey, all of us are in publishing. Well, ya can take the girl out of IA, but...) all will be at the next summit, with our "peeps."

And that's the point. You are you. You know what you know. If I chucked it all tomorrow and became a food writer, well I would certainly organize my articles intelligently.

Don't fear growth. A sapling is a tree, as are old-growth redwoods, and they know it at their core.