Until this year, I could count the number of successful resolutions I’ve employed on one finger. That first success was building the habit of drinking 20oz of water the moment I wake up, and I’ve been doing so 365 days a year for roughly a decade now.

My second successful resolution was more of a promise to myself, and if I’m being entirely honest, I’m not sure I believed I’d pull it off when I decided to take a shot. It was right around this time last year that I resolved to write a blog and publish a newsletter during every week of 2019.

I did it. This blog marks 52 weeks of showing up as promised.

On top of the weekly blog posts, I managed to crank out 52 of my “Friday 4” newsletters, including weekly reminders that I’d published new material, and 208 articles that I found particularly useful in charting the course of my own business. I’m not feeling ambitious enough to bother counting the words, but I’d imagine this means that I churned out somewhere between 40-50,000 words of content..

Some of it was pretty solid, some of it was unremarkable, and all of it was worth the effort.

With 2020 now within my line of sight, I’d like to share the most important takeaways I’ve gleaned from making 2019 my year of consistent content creation. If you’re considering chasing a similar dream in the coming year, I’d encourage you to take these five lessons into consideration:

1. Under-promising and over-delivering will help you maintain sanity.

If you want to give yourself some real anxiety, go ahead and declare to the world that you’re going to hit a content output goal and make it an aggressive one.

Ideas come in waves for me. Sometimes the dry periods are especially discouraging, while others feature weeks where I feel like I have three blogs in the tank. I made a 2019 habit of putting my content surplus on hold for future weeks when times were good, and it eventually helped me to keep the streak alive during holiday weeks and especially busy times at Cressey Sports Performance.

This habit is especially important if you’re just launching a blog, podcast, or newsletter now. You’re going to come out of the gates in a full sprint thinking that idea generation is easy because the first five posts poured right out of you. This steady stream of wisdom is going to come to a screeching halt sooner rather than later if you don’t pace yourself, so hit the brakes and make a habit of establishing manageable expectations with your audience.

*52 weeks in the books of successfully rolling out the metaphorical typewriter*

2. You don’t HAVE to announce every new post.

There were a handful of weeks where I finished a blog that I wasn’t 100% thrilled with.

Sometimes I second-guessed the primary takeaway, while others I felt like I could have done a better job of firming up my argument. Those were the weeks where I thought to myself: No one is going to like this, and then they won’t trust me next week when I ask them to come back and trust my words.

And then I had a realization: Very few people were sitting at their computers refreshing their browser each week waiting to hear what I was going to say.

In fact, there may not be a single person out there who fit this description. With this in mind, there was no shame in publishing and choosing not to venture over to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to declare “NEW BLOG.” This happened twice this past year. Each week I hit the publish button, kept a promise I’d made to myself, and let the uncertainty slip away. On each occasion, to my surprise, the article in question made the weekly PTDC List of “best fitness articles,” so I’m obviously not a fantastic judge of content quality.

I’ll never tell you which weeks they were, but you’re more than welcome to take on the task of deciding which pieces qualified as numbers 51 and 52 in the content scrap heap of 2019. Hopefully you find some especially impactful good stuff along the way if you do accept the challenge.

3. Analytics off-set lack of engagement on social.

Some weeks I fired off a newsletter and didn’t receive a single response, while others would generate 15 or 20 unexpected emails in return. The same thing would periodically happen with blog posts I’d invested ample time and energy into creating. Thankfully, I could always take comfort in the analytics and see that I was still hitting my targeted 40% newsletter open rate just about every week of the year, and also confirm that traffic was in fact being driven to my website.

While Facebook likes, retweets, and social media comments are always nice indicator of content quality, the reality is that sometimes you’re going to feel like your best effort resulted in the sounds of crickets chirping. Those are the moments where your actual website and newsletter analytics will keep you moving forward and reminded you that there are still people out there clicking on links.

4. Chase small victories.

On January 1st of 2019 I put four boxes on the side of my Evernote to-do list. Each of them signified a Friday that would take place during that month. My objective was simple: Just have enough self-respect to finish what you started for the first month of the year, Pete.

Every Friday afternoon at 12:01pm after my newsletter officially went out, I’d check the box as complete, and enjoy a moment of success.

Showing up with four blogs and newsletters in four weeks really wasn’t that big of a deal, and I walked away with a small win. On February 1st I added the necessary boxes that would take me through the end of Q1. That felt a little ambitious, but nothing like adding 48 more empty boxes would have.

Q1 came and went with weekly successes, so I maintained my to-do list check-box habit through Q2. Once I hit 26 weeks of output, the finish line started to seem a little more reachable.

I then started telling the people around me that I was chasing a goal, and a handful of them stayed on my case when I was complaining about lacking time or the ideas necessary to churn out a blog each week. Public accountability mattered, but I chose not to use it as a tool until I’d knocked out the first 50% of my goal.

Here I am hitting publish for a 52nd blog of the year, realizing that chunking my overarching goal into manageable smaller wins made all the difference. I’d have quit quickly if I had decided to mark off one of fifty-two empty boxes on January 4th, 2019. Instead, I slapped a check mark on one of four, and felt like I’d made significant progress toward something I valued.

Whatever big-picture goals you choose to set for yourself, make sure there are measurable achievements you can document for yourself along the way.

5. If You show up consistently for your audience, they’ll show up for you.

Somewhere around the mid-point of this past year I began to see an up-tick in unsolicited reading suggestions.

Hey Pete - Just read this article and thought it might be a fit for your newsletter.
Hey Pete - This one has your weekly list written all over it.
Hey Pete - Not sure if you’re looking for suggestions, but this feels like a Friday-4 article.

There eventually came weeks where, if I wanted, I could have sourced 100% of my newsletter content from my own inbox thanks to engaged readers. This was NEVER the case back when I was knocking out inconsistent emails and failing to keep my promise to show up each week.

There were a few years there where I probably should have changed the title of the effort to my “Every Second or Third Friday 4.” Thankfully I changed this habit in 2019, and my consistency actually resulted in these readers making the content curation process consistently easier.

So, what’s in store for 2020?

I’ve got to be honest…banging out a blog each week this past year has been a challenge, and one that I’m not thinking I’ll replicate in 2020. The newsletter, on the other hand, is a refreshing habit that forces me to be continuously learning.

With this in mind, I intend to maintain my newsletter habit moving forward, scale back on my blogging frequency by as much as 75%, and thoroughly explore the idea of introducing a podcast in its place.

Regardless of the direction I take content creation in the year to come, I want to sincerely thank you for bothering to consume any of it to date. I hope that you have found something that has made your life in the fitness industry even the slightest bit easier along the way.

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