The Day Martha Stewart Emailed

I began writing my wedding blog in 2006 (which came years after I began a personal blog in 1999).  In the Spring of 2007, I received an email from one of the editors at Martha Stewart. She confided that she had spent far too much time at her desk reading through my blog’s archives and encouraged me to keep writing it.  The email included a couple of other paragraphs, but the gist of it was "what you are doing is great, keep at it."  Needless to say, her email made my day, if not my year.

Here I was, a young entrepreneur, hammering away at a keyboard every day and those random thoughts that made their way to the blog not only managed to catch the attention of an editor at a magazine that I had read and loved for what seems like forever, but had impressed her enough to prompt her to email me.

I learned quite a bit from that exchange, but one of the things that most stuck with me is that taking three minutes to send an unsolicited email of genuine encouragement can go a long way in helping someone’s trajectory in business.

Around the time she sent that email, I was ready to throw in the towel when it came to the blog. I knew from my analytics that it was reaching a large audience, but those numbers were faceless to me at the time. The truth is that blogging takes quite a bit of commitment (and if you've had a blog for longer than twenty minutes you are well aware of that fact) and I just wasn't sure that it was worth the energy I was investing.  Her email encouraged me to keep it going, and as an indirect result, I now have a book on how to market your business through blogging coming out in November.

So my challenge to you is this: take three minutes each Friday to send an email to someone you admire professionally letting them know.  It may be just what they need to hear at the time.