Hush, hush – it’s already Wednesday and I haven’t published a blog post this week. Almost a year ago I might have expected this thought to visit me much more regularly, but my blogging life changed in 2013 thanks to the Ironblogger. This is a voluntary unit, where bloggers unite and blog once a week. If they slack, they pay 5€ and if their debts hit 30€ they are kicked out. Once in a while, the blogger bunch meets and donates half of the slacking money, the other half is invested in drinks and good moods for the evening. 
The beginning
When I joined Ironblogger Hamburg in early January, I was quite sure that I would be able to publish a post at least once a week. When I started in 2010, I used to blog every day, but the decline kicked in when I became a freelancer, got married and started to use my writing skills for various clients. Looking back, blogging helped me to become self-employed. One of my first blog posts asked, if someone was interested in joining my Social Media Club night on Sports. This resulted in meeting one of my first clients and urged me to go freelance as digital consultant, lecturer and journalist under my brand “Der Medienlotse”.
The year as an Ironblogger
I really like the rhythm of Ironblogging. Sometimes, after having finished a post for the current week, another idea came to my mind, which I could then use for the next seven days. This very much describes my way of working as a freelancer: getting things done as soon as you like doing them 🙂 I kept my usual topics and continued to write on sport, marketing and other knowledge topics. But what changed dramatically was the number of blog posts in English. I’d done that before, but this time it felt much better and I even got some attention by the rest of the world. Some of my posts were re-published on other platforms, which was also a good motivation. And since my WordPress monitoring started working again and 9 out of 10 of the most read articles on my blog are in English… you get the picture what’s coming in 2014.
The future
I’m up and ready for another exciting year of Ironblogging. 2014 will see the Winter Olympics and the World Cup and working as a freelancer in the sport business I need my blog to draw attention for my expertise. Who knows, the one or other journalist might stumble upon my blog and ask me for interviews like in 2012? I might even consider in asking other sport business professionals to share their views on my blog. Aaron Syed Jaffery from the digital sport consultancy NineteenEightyFour had written the first ever guest post on my blog.
The Ironblogger network also helps me to broaden my horizon on what’s motivating fellow bloggers from my city. I enjoy it every week, when the new results are published and I instantly start browsing the newest articles I’m interested in. It might be a good 2014 challenge to raise the traffic on all Ironblogger sites and maybe a Flipboard magazine or other curation on the website might help to find the blogs and bloggers for the topic one’s interested in.