This Is My 1,000th Blog Post
Writing blogs is like playing video games: You play and play, hoping someone is paying attention to your score. 
You increase the tally, and you can see your place in the game analytics. Then you realize there are thousands of people ahead of you — people with thousands more blogs or enormous audiences.
Like a game, once you’ve posted your blog, you move onto the next blank white page (or screen). Content creation is a hungry beast that devours ideas at an incredible pace. Unfortunately, many organizations are still thinking of content like a brochure — one and done. Then revisit the content in a year or two or five.
With that said, this is an incredible time to be in marketing and branding. If I had written this blog 20 years ago, I probably would have stopped at 10 blogs. To write 1,000 blogs means there are myriad marketing ideas to explore.
So what’s next? Video blog, podcasting, live content creation, neuromarketing … it’s all coming, and I’ll be here. There’s another game waiting to be played.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle. After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant. He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.” Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.” One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College. Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board. Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.
