Two years ago I was a wannabe blogger. The kind who want a blog so desperately that it paralyzed me from picking out a theme and sitting down to do the hard work – writing. So with the help of my husband, I slapped a landing page on my domain with a gorgeous (and accurate) ticker. I set an arbitrary date for launch, and I watched the months, weeks, days, and hours disappear.

Then, hours before I was supposed to launch, I did what most people do when they’re faced with a deadline – I freaked out. Lucky for me, John was still there to hold my hand. He helped me decide on a theme that would work, add a little branding, and got it live. Then he went to bed, while I stayed up to write my first post.

The date was a Sunday, February 14th, 2010, and I didn’t crawl into bed until 6am the following morning.

But I wrote, edited, and published my first post. My blog went live, and I tweeted, and then caught up on my sleep.

When I woke up, my life changed.

There were tweets, comments, and mentions galore. I remember going over to a friend’s house for dinner on that evening and checking the most comments for the first time – there were fifteen.

Oh. My. God. People were actually reading my brand new blog.

And they liked what I had to say.

My legs went weak. I felt like I was going to throw up.

But I didn’t.

Instead I calmed down and replied to those tweets and those comments. I thanked my new readers – people who heard my excitement about launching a blog in the past and were thrilled that lamiki.com was finally live.

I became a blogger.

Over the course of the past two years, I have thought, I have written, and I have published. Through this blog I have met people, landed some amazing jobs, and built some deep relationships. Blogging, and this identity that is “lamiki” has helped me open doors that I never knew existed before.

lamiki is an acronym that stands for my full name, and out of that I have found an identity, a brand, that is 100% me. (more…)

In the spirit of all things Sunday, here’s a list of some of the best I read this past week. Enjoy!

The Bookstore’s Last Stand: Barnes & Noble, Taking on Amazon in the Fight of Its Life by Julie Bosman in The New York Times

Read this because: If you’re an indie lover like me, you never thought that you’d vote for the “big box” bookstore, ever. Except for the very brutal fact that these big box stores determine things like the very existence of printed books, as we know it. Indies rock, have way better service than the larger guys, but all the indies combined don’t have the buying power of Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the distant memory that was once Borders.

This is not the time or place to go into an endless saga about the world that could be if we only had one channel to receive our books from, but let’s imagine that, for a split second. What if one company was in charge of telling publishers which authors needed publishing and which didn’t? What if there was one retailer who said – um, yeah, I don’t think we’ll be selling that one?

9 Ways that You Can Build a Blog that Matters by Benny Hsu on Get Busy Living

Read this because: You’re a blogger, a blogger-in-training, or just curious. Benny does a wonderful job of sharing what he learned building Get Busy Living in a way that anyone can adapt to their own blogging venture.

Bonus reading material: Matt Cheuvront over at Life Without Pants wrote a response to Benny’s post on his blog (with additional tips, too!): The Friday Response: How to Build a Badass Blog.

Innovating the Library Way by Grant McCracken on Harvard Business Review Blog Network

Read this because: Libraries have been around since the fourth century BC, and therefore, librarians can teach us businesses people a thing or two about acquiring new customers because, let’s face it, they’ve lasted the test of time.

This article is a great case study about how one library looked beyond the usual promise of adventure within its products (books), and found a way to renew the value proposition of what is and what could be found within a library.

Read it. And let me know this library’s marketing campaign would have worked on you.

Why Some Startups Succeed And Others Fail: 10 Fascinating Harvard Findings by Alyson Sontell on Business Insider

Read this because: It has a damn good title, and you’re as curious as I am about finding out the scientific, secret sauce between success and failure.

Best Business Books of 2011: For every entrepreneur and intra-praneur by Sarah Peck on It Starts With

Read this because: You’re an entrepreneur-in-training like me. Or you’re not, and you’re just looking for the next book to add to your nightstand. The best part is Sarah breaks up her recommendations in categories like: Marketing & Advertising, Design, Business & Entrepreneurship, organization, and psychology. It’s like your own bookshelf, curated by Sarah.

What did you read this week?

Photo Credit: Hamad Saber

If you’re reading this, then that means you made it through the first week of 2012 – congratulations! Now, let’s get over setting goals, making plans, and get some real shit done. Who’s with me?

But before we go out and conquer the world, here are four blog posts that left the most impressions on me recently.

Day 100: The Top Ten Things I Learned In the Last 100 Days by Harmony Hasbrook on 100 Days or More

Read this because: In October, my friend Harmony quit her job to take a break of at least 100 days from the work force. And the best part is she blogged during her entire journey and this weekend she reached day 100 and shared the top ten things she learned along the way. And it’s good.

20 Bloggers to Watch in 2012 by Jade Craven on ProBlogger

Read this because: Even though we all know that I’m the best blogger in the world (wait a minute…), here’s a list of 20 bloggers who are going somewhere and the best place to keep track is on their blogs.

My top picks:

1. Stratejoy
2. Life After College
3. It Starts With

The Five Must-Dos for CEOs in Social Media by Chris Perry on Forbes

Read this because: Whether you’re a CEO or not, you’re the CEO of your own life. Whether or not you tweet from a profile that discloses that your tweets are your own, everything you say on social media is an extension of your life, your personal brand, your professional brand, and even the company who employs you. Be smart about what you say.

The Worst New Year’s Resolution: Network More by Dana Hughens on Clairemont Communications blog

Read this because: You want to know the real cost of that casual coffee date, lunch meeting, or that time when someone asked to ‘pick’ your brain.

You will benefit from reading this article because: You are a service provider or are job hunting and want to contact some people for ‘informational’ interviews.

Additional reading material: No You Can’t Pick My Brain. It Costs Too Much by Adrienne Graham on Forbes

What did you read this week?

Photo Credit: Brendan Lynch

Last week marked my 5-week anniversary since joining the Scrappy Face team and a few exciting things happened: We officially launched!

What does that mean?

Well, Scrappy Face had been “stealth” until they quietly started telling people about it via Twitter in the fall and then I joined in November, but meanwhile we hadn’t really “opened our doors.” But launching a service-based company is a little tricky. There’s no big, red ribbon to cut like a brick-and-mortar store or a landing page to drop from your website if you’re a tech startup launching a product, you just do business. And that’s what we’ve been doing.

So we shouted-it-outloud via Twitter, Facebook, and our blog last week and speciflcally through the first blog post I wrote for Scrappy Face: The Unofficial Official Launch of Scrappy Face.

I’m really proud of that post; you should read it.

Have a happy weekend!

Today is the last day of November which means that all of the men who grew ‘staches for Movember can finally shave, we all flip our calendars and freak out about the goals we have left to meet in 2011, and it is the end of National Blog Posting Month. This is my second year at posting one blog post every day for the month of November and – woah – what a month it’s been!

Goals and Milestones

On November 1st I made six goals for myself to keep this month. Here’s how I did:

1. Post at least one blog every single day

By the time I publish my recap, I’ll have published 27 blog posts in a month with 30 days. I skipped three days; one was because I was out with friends and forgot and two were because it was the first week of my new job and I was tired.

This weekend I read Om Malik’s list of lessons he learned from ten years of blogging and he shared something Doc Searls said: “Blog if you have something to say and respect your reader’s time. If you respect their time, they are going to give you some time of their day.” And while there are a few blog posts I wrote this month that I categorize as “throw away” posts (meaning that I could have gone without writing them because I was too exhausted from life, uninspired, was unwilling to write, or had plain and simple writer’s block), every single post that I wrote and published went live before midnight and that’s an awesome accomplishment.

2. Stick to the content calendar

Who was I kidding when I wrote this? My blog is the place where I can write about “life according to Laura,” and this life says that content calendars are great, but mostly irrelevant for whatever I’m feeling right here and right now.

Screw that.

Okay, okay, so I probably stuck with the content calendar 30% of the time, like today and this recap. I’ve had this recap blog post planned for an entire month

3. Be fearless

Yep, did that, but not without hesitation.

4. Increase traffic

I totally nailed this goal and my traffic for the month of November 2011 was up 56% from November 2010. I’m proud of achieving this goal.

5. No epic blog posts

I made sure not to write or publish any “epic” blog posts this year. Epic blog posts are essays or articles that could honestly be a senior-level college thesis. They include a very strong point of view and research to back that up. And they take a lot of thought to write and a lot of time to edit. Epic blog posts should not be cranked out in 2-4 hours, but days or weeks.

While I technically didn’t write any epic blog posts this year, there were three blog posts that were about timely subjects and I wrote them a day or two in advance. The problem, you see, is that NaBloPoMo isn’t about writing everyday, it’s about posting every day. So there were a few nights where I cranked out that day’s post, published it, and went straight to writing the next one. That was a little hard, but it sure was fun to relax and not write the next night.

Small victories

Oh, and the best part about not writing epic blog posts is I’ve been listening – to what you’re responding to in my posts, to what other bloggers are writing and asking about – and I’ve put all of those ideas in a queue and I’m very excited to dive deeply into those topics. So get ready.

6. Read one new blog every single day

I’ve been reading a lot this month, but I haven’t been commenting as much as I wanted to. Why? I quit my job and started another one. Oh, and I’ve been blogging. A lot. So suck it. It happens.

Milestones and big announcements

• I came out as a writer, a real writer (and my first writing professor responded to it)
• I quit my job
• I started a new job
• I started a new weekly-roundup series
• My husband became an artist
• My friend launched his daily art project
• I started a Facebook page for my blog (Toss a girl a like?)
• Yesterday, I published my 100th blog post on lamiki.com

Bragging rights

• 500 Words or Less – I wrote a blog post about something that a writer said at an event and he wrote a response back. That was pretty awesome.
• Hipster Generation of Entrepreneurs – I I wrote a response to the New York Times article about the Entrepreneurial Generation and I was quoted in an article on GeekWire in response to the same NYT article – big win in my world.

Blogs I had the most fun writing

• Happy Thanksgiving Eve – I had the most fun writing this post and telling you not to listen to every other blogger and Tweet during Thanksgiving (Okay, ‘fess up, who stayed online all weekend?)
• Picturing My True Identity – Because who doesn’t love sharing photos of themselves from high school?
• That Blog Post About my Cats – Even though cats may rule the Internet, being a cat lady is still does not. This was one of the most creative posts I wrote and, let’s be honest here, I have cats, two of them, and they’re pretty awesome.

So long, NaBloPoMo, we’ll meet again!

I had fun this month. And while I really think that the 2010 NaBloPoMo experiment was my breakout year, I kicked ass this year and I’m emerging from the 2011 NaBloPoMo season as a better writer who is pretty damn good at blogging. And as a result, I know you and myself a lot better. Thank you for being with me on this journey.

What’s next? Not a new blog post on Thursday, December 1st, but you will see a new post this weekend.

Stay tuned boys and girls. And thank you for being here with me.

Photo Credit: Lorena Cupcake