Massive Guest Posting

I never had a guest post before. Although I blog for more than 3 years, I just didn’t have any. This is why part of my intended promotion strategy was to include guest posting in my second half of the year as a full time blogger. But I wanted something different. Guest posting seemed like a very good promotion strategy, but I had to come up with something new. And several weeks ago I came up with this the idea of massive guest posting. Now, what is this thing and how it’s different from normal guest posting?

Massive Guest Posting

Regular guest posting means publishing one of your articles on another blog. Massive guest posting means

• publishing several of your related articles
• at the same time
• on several host blogs.

In my case, the related articles emerged naturally as a spin-off series from one of my most read articles: The 7 Ages Of A Business. That was an article with a good potential. And even while I wrote the article I knew I can add a lot to it. There was so much left to be said. So, I thought to write a separate post for each business age with more details.

But instead of publishing all the 7 posts in my blog I thought it could be interesting to publish each post on a different blog as a guest post. From here it was pretty simply, I contacted several good personal development bloggers and pitched them. After 2 weeks, I had a complete lineup of 7 host blogs and also a structured approach to it. I intend to write a bigger article about massive guest posting once this experiment will be done, in which I will analyze what went right and what can be improved. For now, I will just announce that the massive guest posting is live.

Beyond the benefits of normal, atomic guest posting – and by atomic I mean one guest post on one blog host – massive guest posting offers a very interesting potential: connections at the blog hosts level. Since the posts are related, if one reader would want to know more about the exhaustion stage after reading the enthusiasm age, can visit directly that specific blog host. The content is spread over 7 blog hosts which are creating not only a semantic web of links, but also expectation and value.

As far as I know, there wasn’t yet any experiment like this. Guest posting is almost as old as blogging, but I haven’t see any massive guest posting in the last 4-5 years, forgive me if I’m wrong. And by massive guest posting I understand spreading more than 4-5 related posts at the same time on more than 4-5 different blogs. There was a little bit of a leg work to make this work, but I’m thrilled to make it happen.

The 7 Ages Of A Business In Reality

Just a short disclaimer about the theme of this series: the described ages of a business are not always surgically identifiable in the real world. Most of the time there is a blend between two or more ages at the same time. For instance, if you’re just starting your first business, enthusiasm and naivety stage can coexist happily in the first few months. If you are more like an experienced entrepreneur, you’ll stay longer in stages like attention, maturity, expansion and leadership. Those ages are also mapping the entrepreneurship behavior, experienced by me and by the entrepreneurs I met and done business with during my 10 years as self-sustained business man.

Massive Guest Posting Hosts

Here are the blogs in which you’ll find the posts. Must say beforehand that all of these blogs are very dear to me. I constantly read them for many months now, and I also have a very good relationship with the authors.

AttractionMindMap.com

The post about the enthusiasm business age is published at AttractionMindMap.com, a blog created and maintained by Evelyn Lim (@evelynlim on Twitter). I always enjoy reading Evelyn’s posts, she has a way of writing about spirituality in a very earthy manner. I feel a deep connection with what she writes and I am also proud to be one of her Akashic Readings client. More about Akashic Readings in a future post. AttractionMindMap.com is an inspiring place.

SmallBizBee.com

The post about the naivety business age is published at SmallBizBee.com, a blog created and maintained by Matthew RInger (@SmallBizBee on Twitter). Writing about business in an understandable manner is not an easy task, but Matthew does it brilliantly. I like the fact that almost articles are quick and clear. And the ones that are longer are usually interviews in a project called Featured Entrepreneur. SmallBizBee.com is a fast growing and useful small business resource.

AdvancedLifeSkills.com

The post about the attention business age is published at AdvancedLifeSkills.com, a blog created and maintained by Jonathan Wells (@mrjWells on Twitter). We’re all students of life, as Jonathan says on his blog and we all need advanced life skills if we want to make the most out of it. I like the clear, crispy style of Jonathan and I’m also becoming a fan of his ebook “7 Simple Steps – Life Transformation Guide”, but more on that on separate blog post.

StevenAitchison.co.uk

The post about the maturity business age is published at StevenAitchison.co.uk, a blog created and maintained by Steven Aitchison (@StevenAitchison on Twitter). This is one of the most resourceful personal development blogs not only in terms of high quality articles but also special support materials. If I would be you I wouldn’t miss the excellent guides about lucid dreaming and making friends, those are really great resources.

RatRaceTrap.com

The post about the expansion business age is published at RatRaceTrap.com, a blog created and maintained by Stephen Mills (@ratracetrap on Twitter). If you’re after new, exciting and powerful ways to extract yourself from the rat race trap (a dull, boring, 9 to 5 day to day perspectiveless life, that is) and you’d like that served in an exhilarating yet compelling style, than Stephen’s blog is what you’re looking for. If you don’t have the courage to do that yet, start by Developing The Courage To Take Risks.

MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

The post about the leadership business age is published at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com a blog created and maintained by Steve and Jennifer (@mywifequit on Twitter). The blog documents the business journey of a young couple after Steve’s wife decides to quit her job in order to raise their beautiful daughter. One of the most constant and well written blogs about personal development and about having and running a small business. Read their full story about opening a successful online store.

LearnThis.ca

The post about the exhaustion business age is published at LearnThis.ca, a blog created and maintained by Mike King (@Mike_King on twitter). This was one of the first blogs about personal development I started to constantly follow and I often congratulate myself for that. Mike’s universe is filled with great ideas and articles about self learning, career, leadership and life improvement. One thing you could really do to get in touch fast with his work is to access his free resources page.

Now it’s time for you to read and enjoy. Once done, remember to come back here and share your thoughts about the massive guest posting idea. Feel free to leave your comments on each of those sites as I will monitor all of them and answer to you there.

Start Your Own Business

Ten years ago I started my own business. At that time I felt this was the best decision ever in my entire life. Ten years after I still feel the same with all my heart.

Having your own business is one of the most challenging situations in which you can put yourself. And I’m not talking only about the financial part of a business. Most of the crash-courses on how to start your own business have a strong focus on the profit and financial facts. They are all selling you methods to reach profit quickly. And, to some extent, those are good and proven methods, but they have nothing to do with the pre-conscious choice of having a business. Those profit making courses are assuming you already took the decision.

In fact, having a business is not at all about profit. If you are serious about it, and if it proves to be a good and mature choice, you will have to face the profit challenges sooner or later. It’s in a business nature to have profit in order to survive. But making profit the most important part in having a business is just wrong. It’s something that you deal with months or years after you started your business for real.

The choice of starting your own business is more like an adventure than a spreadsheet. It’s more about risk taking than financial security. It’s more about personal development and growth than bank statements and material wealth.

In today’s post I’ll share some thoughts about how I decided to start my own business, and how this decision still benefit me after ten years.

The Drive

I was 29 year old when I started my own business. Until that age I was mostly dragging around, living by talking out loud (really, I was working as an anchor man on FM radios, I have a pretty radiophonic voice) and never making plans for tomorrow. For several years in a row I was mostly drinking my evenings out with the same people, borrowing their misery and trying to find reasons to wake up the next day.

But around that age something started to change in me. Never knew how to define that. It was a drive for deep, fundamental and meaningful change. And that desire for change was spreading over all areas of my life: personal, as well as professional. To make a long story short, it was a mix of bad personal choices and amazingly risky professional decisions that lead to the final result: setting up my own company.

I won’t go into technical details about how and when exactly I did it. I want to focus more on the inner reasons that took me there. And those inner reasons are made of only three main qualities: courage, curiosity and enthusiasm. All three qualities mixed together created a powerful drive for change. (more…)

Understanding Emotions

Taking the plunge on such a complicated topic as emotions is something that I wanted to do long time ago. In fact, this post is staying as a draft in my MacJournal for more than 2 months now. I always wanted to start writing about it, but also felt a little uncomfortable with it. It was like something was not still clear. I had the overall idea but there was some inconsistency in my approach.

Today I’ll go for it because I simply feel like doing it. Noticed the reason? “I simply feel like doing it”. The trigger for starting to write this was an emotion. A feeling.

Being A Prisoner Of Your Own Emotions

I always was quite an emotional person. I am a Scorpio sign, which is a Water sign, and Water signs are well known to be extremely emotional. My rising sign is Capricorn, an Earth sign. Among all the Earth signs, Capricorn is known to be the most sensitive. Quite an emotional super mix here, right?

When I was younger I was always emotions driven. My emotions were so intense that I often mistaken them for thoughts. I often acted out of impulse instead of reason. I was so immersed in my own emotional field that I was convinced that I’m thinking when I was in fact only reacting to some stimulus, same way as the Pavlov’s dog.

Needless to say that when you act only and only by emotions you get hurt . Sometimes you get hurt big time. But your acting pattern is already set and even if you promise to yourself not to repeat the same mistake again, you’ll do it. You say you won’t do that thing that caused you pain, but you go straight to it. And get hurt again.

I’m sure many of you experienced the same pattern. You get emotional on some situation, act, do something wrong because you acted only as a result of that emotion, and then get hurt. And then do the exact situation again. You get hit by the same emotion, do the exact same thing and get hurt again.

Sooner or later you start to feel embarrassed by your own emotional system. You start to actually feel bad on a whole different level, by being able to predict how you will act on a certain circumstance. I won’t see this movie because it will make me cry. I won’t meet those people because I’m shy and I’ll do something stupid. I won’t talk to my parents because I always felt like they wanted to control me.

You don’t do a rational assessment of the situation, you just remember you acted in a hurting way, and start to avoid the whole situation, regardless of the potential. Each and every circumstance has a potential. Most of the time is about a learning potential. But if your actions are emotions driven, you won’t see that potential.

Acting only by emotion is the easiest way toward manipulation. The more emotional you get, and the less assessment you put into your life, the easier for you to be manipulated. You will attract people or situations in which you will be the puppet, and they will be the puppeteer. You won’t even realize that, of course, you will just notice how your life becomes more and more miserable. (more…)