Chapter 7: Blogging with Purpose (Not Just Volume)
I started blogging for the wrong reasons.
Let me be more specific: I started blogging in 2013 because I wanted free software and marketing partnerships.
That's not the inspirational origin story most personal branding books would give you. Nobody wants to admit they started writing content because BigCommerce might give them a paid ambassadorship or Zendesk might comp their subscription. But that's the truth. I was running ecommerce operations at Stupid Cancer, testing every platform I could get my hands on, and I realized that if I wrote about those platforms publicly, the companies behind them would pay attention.
So I wrote.
"Here's how we set up Zendesk for nonprofit customer support."
"Here's why we migrated from Volusion to BigCommerce."
"Here's what worked and what didn't when we tried to scale our online store."
It was strategic content marketing dressed up as thought leadership. And it worked. BigCommerce offered me an ambassadorship. Practical Ecommerce gave me a regular column. Forbes Member Council came calling. The content opened doors because it was specific, practical, and grounded in real work I was actually doing.
But I wouldn't call it blogging with purpose. I'd call it blogging with an agenda.
There's a difference.
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The agenda era of my blogging lasted a few years. I wrote when there was something to gain --- a partnership, a platform, visibility in an industry I wanted to be known in. When the incentives dried up or the partnerships ended, the writing slowed down.
That's the problem with blogging for external rewards. When the rewards stop, so does the writing. And when the writing stops, so does the compounding.
I had stretches where I barely published anything. Months would go by. My website would sit there with a blog section that looked like it had been abandoned. And each time I came back to it, I'd feel like I was starting over.
The content I'd written for BigCommerce lived on their platform, not mine. The Practical Ecommerce columns were on their site, not mine. The Forbes articles were behind Forbes's paywall, not on my blog.
I'd spent years creating content that built other people's platforms while my own sat empty.
That's a mistake I see professionals make constantly. They'll write for Medium, or LinkedIn, or industry publications, and never bring that thinking back to their own site. The platforms benefit. The algorithms benefit. Your hub doesn't.
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The Shift: Do Something, Then Write About It
My blogging changed when I stopped thinking about what to write and started thinking about what I was doing.
The shift happened gradually. I was running Firmspace, leading the Testicular Cancer Foundation, working as CTO at Gryt Health. I was making decisions every day. Implementing systems. Testing tools. Solving problems that other people in similar roles were probably facing.
And I realized: that's the content.
Not thought leadership. Not opinion pieces about industry trends. Not "10 Tips for Better Nonprofit Management."
The actual work.
I rebuilt the Testicular Cancer Foundation website in 72 hours. That's a blog post --- not about web design theory, but about what it actually looks like to take a nonprofit's entire digital presence, tear it down, and rebuild it over a long weekend using AI tools and modern platforms.
I upgraded my Squarespace site with custom schema markup. That's a blog post --- not about SEO best practices in the abstract, but about the specific decisions I made and why.
I invested in structured data for the first time. That became the October 2025 blog post, "Why I'm Investing in Structured Data" --- the one that set the stage for everything in this book.
I built a Wikidata entry and a Knowledge Panel in a single day. That became the November 2025 blog post documenting the entire process.
Each post followed the same pattern: I did something real, then I wrote about what I did.
No hypotheticals. No theoretical frameworks pulled from someone else's book. Just honest documentation of actual work.
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The AI Conversation Workflow
Here's where it gets interesting. And where I need to be honest about how modern blogging actually works for someone who runs three organizations and doesn't have time to stare at a blank screen.
My workflow looks like this:
I do something. I build a website. I implement a new system. I make a strategic decision about my digital presence. I test a tool. I solve a problem.
Then I open a conversation with Claude, or ChatGPT, or Manus, and I talk through what I did.
Not "write me a blog post about website redesign." That's slop. That's the kind of AI-generated content that dilutes the internet and teaches nobody anything.
Instead, it's a conversation. "I just rebuilt the TCF website in 72 hours. Here's what I did and why. Here's what tools I used. Here's what worked and what didn't." And the AI asks me questions. Pulls out the details. Helps me structure the narrative. Identifies the parts that would be useful to someone else facing a similar project.
The blog post emerges from that conversation. My voice. My experience. My decisions. AI just helped me extract it faster than I could have done sitting alone with a Google Doc.
This is the same process I described in Chapter 6 for writing books. Claude didn't write my books --- it asked me questions until the books emerged from what I already knew. The blog works the same way. The knowledge is mine. The experience is mine. The AI is the writing partner that helps me capture it efficiently.
And here's the part I always include: I share how I used these tools to accomplish the work. Not just "I rebuilt a website." But "I rebuilt a website using AI to generate the initial design concepts, refine the copy, and implement custom code." The blog documents both the work and the methodology.
That transparency matters. It's learning in public at every level --- not just what I did, but how I did it.
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Why Quality Beats Volume Every Time
There's a content marketing myth that says you need to publish constantly. Daily LinkedIn posts. Weekly blog articles. Monthly newsletters. The algorithm rewards consistency, they say. The more you publish, the more you're seen.
That might be true for influencers and content creators who've made audience-building their primary job.
It's terrible advice for professionals who have actual work to do.
I publish when I have something worth publishing. Sometimes that's twice a month. Sometimes it's once. Sometimes I'll go a few weeks without posting because nothing happened that warranted documentation.
And I'm fine with that.
Because I learned something important about blog quality: every post you publish becomes part of your permanent digital identity. Search engines index it. AI systems train on it. People who find your site read your most recent posts to gauge whether you're credible.
If your blog is full of low-effort posts --- generic industry commentary, rehashed advice from other people's articles, AI-generated content that could have been written by anyone about anything --- it doesn't just fail to help you. It actively hurts you. It signals to both human readers and machines that your content isn't worth citing.
I'd rather have thirty blog posts that each document something real than three hundred posts that exist because someone told me I needed to publish weekly.
The quality filter is simple: would I be embarrassed if a potential client or partner read this post? If yes, don't publish it. If I'm proud of what it says about my work and thinking, publish it.
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What Makes a Blog Post Worth Writing
Not every project becomes a blog post. Not every opinion needs documenting. Here's how I decide what's worth the effort.
It documents real work.
The best blog posts on my site are the ones where I did something and then explained what I did. The structured data post. The Knowledge Panel post. The TCF website rebuild. These aren't content --- they're case studies written in first person.
If I didn't actually do the thing, I don't write about it.
It would help the next version of me.
This goes back to the philosophy from Chapter 6 --- educating the next me. When I write a blog post, I'm writing for the person who's facing the same problem I just solved. The nonprofit CEO who needs to rebuild their website on a budget. The professional who wants to understand structured data but doesn't know where to start.
If the post wouldn't help someone in my shoes from three years ago, it's probably not worth writing.
It captures a strong opinion backed by experience.
Sometimes I have something to say about how an industry is evolving, or how a tool is being misused, or how a common approach is fundamentally flawed. Those opinions are worth documenting --- but only if they're grounded in experience, not just reaction.
I try not to write hot takes. I try to write informed perspectives. The difference is whether you've done the work behind the opinion.
It's specific enough to be useful.
"AI is changing nonprofits" is a thesis statement, not a blog post. "How I used Claude to rebuild a nonprofit website in 72 hours" is a blog post. The specificity is what makes it citable, searchable, and useful.
Vague content gets lost. Specific content gets found.
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Your Blog as a Discovery Engine
Here's what most people don't realize about blogging in 2026: your blog isn't just a place for humans to read your thoughts. It's a discovery engine that feeds search engines and AI systems.
Every blog post you publish gets indexed by Google. It becomes part of the corpus that AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude use to understand who you are and what you know. When someone asks an AI about nonprofit technology or structured data or digital disambiguation, the AI draws on the most authoritative, specific, recent content it can find.
Your blog is how you become that content.
But only if the content is worth citing.
This is where the volume trap becomes dangerous. If you're publishing three posts a week of generic, surface-level content, you're training AI systems to see you as a generalist who doesn't go deep. If you're publishing one post a month that documents real work with real specificity, you're training AI systems to see you as an authority in your domain.
I didn't plan for this when I started blogging. The realization that AI systems were consuming my blog content and using it to inform their responses came after the fact. I noticed my web traffic trending up and to the right. I saw tools like Semrush introducing AI-accessibility scores that measured how well AI systems could consume and cite your content.
The awareness that blogs had become training data for AI changed how I thought about every post. Not in a manipulative way --- I'm not writing for algorithms. But in an intentional way. I make sure every post has clear structure. I use specific, verifiable claims. I identify myself as the author with consistent credentials. I connect posts to my broader body of work.
That's not SEO gaming. That's good writing that happens to be machine-readable.
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The Blog as Part of the System
In Chapter 2, I talked about treating your website as a system rather than a publishing project. Your blog is the engine of that system.
Here's how it connects to everything else we've discussed:
Blog → Structured Data.
Every blog post on your site should have Article or BlogPosting schema markup that identifies you as the author. This builds a pattern in search engines: Kenny Kane writes about nonprofit technology, structured data, digital disambiguation, AI adoption. Over time, Google associates your name with those topics.
Blog → Wikidata.
Blog posts that document significant work become citable sources. When I updated my Wikidata entry, some of my blog posts served as references for claims about my expertise and projects. Your blog isn't just content --- it's evidence.
Blog → AI Citation.
The more specific, authoritative content you publish on your own domain, the more likely AI systems are to cite you when answering related questions. This is the new SEO --- being the answer, not just ranking for the query.
Blog → Books and Other Content.
My second book, Mission-Driven Ecommerce, was essentially assembled from years of published columns and blog posts. The content already existed. It just needed a through line. Your blog is your raw material for larger projects.
Blog → Professional Opportunities.
When I became CEO of the Testicular Cancer Foundation, I'd known the founder for five years. The relationship got me in the door. But when I showed up, my blog posts had been printed out and shared among the team. The writing validated the hire. That story from Chapter 2 isn't ancient history --- it's the ongoing reality of how opportunities find you when you document your work in public.
Each blog post feeds the larger system. Each one creates a signal that search engines, AI systems, and human readers can find. The system compounds over time in ways that individual posts don't.
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The Practical Playbook
If you're ready to start blogging with purpose, here's what the practice actually looks like.
Start with what you're already doing. You don't need to create new projects to blog about. You're already doing work worth documenting. The next time you implement a system, solve a problem, or make a strategic decision --- write about it. That's your first post.
Use AI as a writing partner, not a ghostwriter. Have a conversation about what you did. Let the AI ask you questions. The post should be your voice, your experience, your insights --- extracted efficiently rather than generated from nothing.
Publish on your own domain first. Before you post on LinkedIn or Medium, put it on your blog. Your domain is your hub. Everything else is distribution.
Add proper schema markup. Make sure every post has Article schema with you identified as the author. This takes five minutes per post and pays dividends forever.
Don't chase a publishing calendar. Publish when you have something worth publishing. A blog with twelve great posts per year beats a blog with fifty mediocre ones.
Be specific. "How I did X using Y in Z amount of time" will always outperform "Thoughts on the Future of X." Specificity is what makes content citable.
Share the tools and methodology. If you used AI to help build something, say so. If you used a specific platform or approach, name it. Transparency builds trust and makes your content more useful.
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The Evolution Continues
My blogging journey has gone through three distinct phases:
Phase 1: Blogging for incentives. Content marketing partnerships. Software discounts. Platform visibility. The writing was good, but the motivation was external, and the content lived on other people's platforms.
Phase 2: Blogging as documentation. Writing about real work. Building a body of evidence. Content living on my own site. The TCF job offer proved this approach worked.
Phase 3: Blogging as system infrastructure. Every post feeds structured data, AI citation, professional opportunities, and the knowledge graph. The blog isn't just content --- it's the engine of the entire digital ecosystem.
Each phase built on the one before it. I wouldn't have reached Phase 3 without the skills I developed in Phase 1 or the body of work I created in Phase 2.
You don't need to start at Phase 3. You just need to start.
Write about what you're doing. Publish it on your site. Make it specific, honest, and useful.
The system will take care of the rest.
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