Pop the bubbly–I finally made it! This is the 90th blog post that I’ve written in the past 91 days. At the beginning of September I embarked on a journey to focus my efforts on doing just one thing in my business each day. The thing I chose was writing 90 blog posts over the course of 3 months.

You’re probably wondering what would compel me to take on writing 90 blog posts in such a short period of time. Well, I wanted to improve my discipline, increase traffic to my site, grow my email list and position myself as an expert in the area of personal branding.

It’s been a journey that has survived a 10 day hurricane evacuation, multiple family visits, late nights and mild illnesses. It has taken some serious discipline, boundary setting and a whole lot of iced coffee.

But through it all I’ve learned some valuable lessons.

Here’s what I learned from writing 90 blog posts in 91 days.

Inspiration is a result of intentional self-care and personal development. read. you’ll never run out of ideas if you look after yourself.

The most common question that people have asked over the past 3 months is “haven’t you run out of ideas yet?” And I have to be honest, at first I questioned my own ability to come up with things to write.

But I soon realized that inspiration is all around us. If you take the time to go for walks, to spend time with friends, to feed yourself good food, to pray, to slow down, to read, to listen and to have fun then you’ll never be short of ideas to talk about.

There have been times over the past 91 days when it’s been 9pm and I’ve been so consumed throughout the day that I still haven’t received inspiration. At those times I prompted myself to slow down and take a nice long shower, and the idea came to me before I pulled back the curtain.

Everything takes 10 times longer when your phone is next to you.

People have told me that their reason for not blogging is that the process of writing one post takes so much time. But I dare say, that the process of writing a blog post takes so much time when you have multiple tabs open on your laptop, a phone full of social media apps sitting next to you, and the TV running in the background.

On the days when I chose not to exercise self-control, posts would literally take 30-60 minutes longer than the days when I left my phone in another room.

After less than 45 days of writing I had gotten my writing time down to 30-45 minutes per blog post (which is pretty impressive if I say so myself).

You don’t have to talk about a million things to retain people’s attention.

You can talk about basically the same thing but from many different angles. In fact, if you talk about less things but from various angles then it increases the legitimacy of your work and is more likely to catch people’s attention.

Building a strong brand means that people know what you’re about and what they can come to you for. If no-one can identify what it is that you really do or talk about then you are too much all over the place.

After writing 90 blog posts in 91 days I started to feel like I was talking in circles. But the reality is that becoming known for your work is about sticking to one area and talking about it over and over again.

Just how Beyonce or Bruno sing the same songs over and over and over.

Clarity (and confidence) is bred through action.

A sure fire way to figure out what the hell your passionate about and what you are good at is to just do it. Just start talking about it.

Although I knew my area of passion before embarking on this journey, I am now better able to articulate my passion in helping people to build a solid foundation from which they can become known in their field.

Just like a journal helps you to bring awareness to your thoughts and feelings, blogging has helped me to bring more awareness to the needs to my audience and clients.

Few people are prepared to do the work, so if you do (the work) then you’re already ahead of the game.

This point basically speaks for itself. I had a conversation today with someone that upon hearing of my journey insinuated that I’d sacrificed valuable time with my community and with my clients in order to achieve my goal.

Apart from the fact that I’ve been incredibly present with both clients and community, it spoke to something bigger…Few people see themselves as capable of doing all the work and doing it well.

When you focus on one thing you start to gain traction.

Building an online business can feel like an incredibly daunting task sometimes. You have products to create, client relationships to nurture, outreach to do and marketing to focus on.

There are so many moving parts and sometimes it can be overwhelming knowing what to focus on.

Picking a goal and focusing on the one major thing you need to do in order to accomplish that goal is an awesome way to bring simplicity to your life and business, and to start gaining traction.

People are always impressed when I say I wrote 90 blog posts in 91 days but the truth is, I’ve felt more relaxed and focused than I did in the 4 months prior to embarking on this journey. Plus I’ve seen a steady increase in traffic and email subscribers since committing to this task.

Growing an audience is a marathon, not a sprint.

I wish I had some insane growth statistics to share with you right now but the reality is that I’ve experienced a steady climb in traffic but nothing crazy.

None of my posts have gone viral and to this date my page views haven’t increased by thousands upon thousands. I am incredibly happy with the increase in traffic to my site and even more stoked to have strangers joining my email list.  I see hundreds of new users per month find their way to my site and my bounce rate is considered ‘excellent.’

But I’ve just got to say–overnight success stories are all the rage on social media but the reality for most of us is that this stuff takes times.

It takes time to build an audience and it takes time to build credibility as an expert in your field. When you understand and embrace this as your reality then you are one step closer to building a business and a life you love.