# 4 years By [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly), 2017-08-29 4-year-anniversary, anniversary, blog-anniversary, blogging, influencer, influencers, instagram, medium, personal-blog, personal-blogging, social-media, uncategorized, youtube --- Today is the 4 year anniversary of this daily blog. Sure, I’ve missed a few days over the years (my estimate is 4-5 days), but for the most part I have shown up here every day and written something.  Sometimes that something is very short and/or bad. I’ve had a few people say to me: “I can tell when you’re super busy. Your posts are shorter.” I’m okay with that. Part of this exercise for me is simply about the discipline. 80% of success is showing up, [right](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/10/showing-up/)? In some ways, what I do here is an anachronism. [Here is a good vintage article](https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/11/how-to-build-an-audience-on-the-internet-the-kevin-rose-school-vs-the-fred-wilson-school/) (2011) that talks about two different schools of thought when it comes to blogging. The reality is that it’s painfully slow and difficult to build an online audience via a personal blog using your own domain. It takes years, unless you’re a celebrity, which I am most certainly not. That’s why many people give up. Instead, many people/influencers choose to build their audience on top of an existing network, such as YouTube, [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/donnelly_b/), or [Medium](https://medium.com/@donnelly_b). Medium is pretty tempting and I’ve seen lots of bloggers port over their personal blogs. The idea here is that you simply bring your content to where your/an audience already lives, instead of trying to get them to come to you.  Of course, one of the risks of this approach is that you don’t own/control the platform. What if people one day decided to stop using MySpace? I like the idea of owning (at least part of) my online presence. So here’s to another year on the blog. Thanks for reading! I really do appreciate it. Regular scheduled programming will resume tomorrow. --- *Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly/4-years)*