Blog birthday!
Another year has passed us by and its the anniversary of this blog. But it is not just any anniversary - the blog is 20 years old today. This time has passed in a flash. During that time we have learned a lot and we want to share some of that with you who may be considering this particular form of engagement with your clients, colleagues, and friends.
First, writing helps me be a better analyst of the sector. Personally, I have always liked to write. I started to do this as a way of organising my thoughts, as a way of providing rigour to argument, get those reviewed by other people, and to help understand both the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own analysis. These are vital for one to see through 'common beliefs’ and ‘stories that we tell’ and come closer to understanding the truth about our subjects. A good explanation of why writing works is at this link: https://paulgraham.com/words.html I encourage you to write more.
Second, this has been a great mechanism for finding other people who care about our industry, are prepared to engage with me, and therefore, this has been possibly the single best form of marketing for us. It may be more suited to our kind of business than yours. But if you are an adviser working on more technical areas or trying to engage with clients that will be demanding in terms of details and overall quality of fulfillment, then you too, may find that a blog could be a valuable component in your marketing planning. I encourage you to engage in some ‘long-form’ marketing. It’s a great way to get found.
Thirdly, our clients have found the resource so useful that it drove further innovations: we now run a news database, which includes all the blog content here, and this fulfills a lot of other content requirements - helping us to keep an eye on events for company reports, and to spot changes that feed in to quarterly life and health reports, and adviser business remuneration reviews. I encourage you to think ‘create once, use in many platforms’ connections between one thing and another are so useful. Fran jokes ‘not another database’ and yet - spotting relationships between events and data, and other data, has been so central to our success both at Quality Product Research and in consulting that it could also be a guide. So I encourage you to build databases.
I always write this, too, on our anniversaries: if you are thinking you would like to write about the sector, and you don’t want to set up your own blog because of the commitment, you could become a guest commentator here. Please send me a draft article and I will look at it and give you a call to discuss if we can use it. I would be delighted to help you experiment with this process.
Lastly, I could not do this without other contributors. Fortunately in my team I have several people who help a lot with this process. Kelly O is the content creator for the regular news pieces these days, as I must work on other things. She also helps to proof many of my pieces. Ed Foster, our data scientist writes many great pieces - but usually for quarterly life and health reports. Along with Fran and Doreen who also provide content from time to time here. In addition I am grateful for proofers these days: Kelly P and Aneel Ravji who are very good at checking and challenging me on what we publish. Friends in the industry who help are too numerous to mention them all but Jeremy Bernstein has an eagle eye and a real passion for the sector, and so is one of our best at giving feedback. There are many others and I am deeply in your debt if you have written me an email to give a point of view or perspective - or to tell me I’m wrong - these are really valuable to have when writing.