The First Year Of Blogging – Writing

Welcome to the first post of this series about my first year of blogging as a business. Today will talk about writing, which is the cornerstone of your blogging. You couldn’t really have a blog without constantly creating quality content. This is why writing is one of the most time consuming blogging activities. But is also one of the most rewarding, if you do it right.

Posting Speed

The most important question, and also one of the most subtle factors in shaping your audience is: how often should I post? This is what I call posting speed.

When I started to blog in October last year, I set up a 15 posts / month posting speed. Seemed reasonable enough for my niche, which is personal development, and also comfortable for myself in terms of assigned time. That comes down to one post every other day. During the first few months, I was almost constantly over this speed, with around 18-20 posts per month.

But after the first 6 months something changed. I was comfortable with writing 15 posts per month so I thought it would be time to expand a little. To go for more. The increase my posting speed. And that took me by surprise. I decided to go for an experiment called massive guest posting. I will go into details about it a little later, but for now suffice to say it was implying writing an extra 7 posts in May. I was able to write those 7 posts, but I wasn’t able to keep up the speed in my own blog. So I ended May with only 8 posts in my blog and 7 guest posts at other blogs. Surprisingly enough, traffic wasn’t affected.

After May, I decided it’s time to slow down on my guest posts and get back to my regular routine. And so I did, until July, when I decided to write 2 more guest posts. This time everything went well, so I waited another month and in September I did another 2 guest posts. Those guest posts were smoothly inserted in my posting speed.

If I draw a line, my posting speed was constant during the first year. I wrote at least 15 posts each month. That makes more than 180 posts in a year, almost all of them over 1200 words each. Which is a lot. This adds up and creates a solid foundation. Something you can build upon.

If you’re going to have more visitors, at some point they’ll want to read more of you. And you don’t want to have just a dozen of beautiful posts and then nothing. Or at least I don’t want that. I do have something to say and I also created the discipline to say it.

First lesson: start slow when trying to increase posting speed. Don’t try to grow faster than you can. Expanding too much without careful planning will most likely break your current posting speed.

First benefit: keeping a stable posting speed is crucial. Although your traffic won’t be hurt if you screw it one month, it’s compulsory to get back on track as fast as you can. Posting speed is not about the traffic you get, but more about your commitment to your blog (or business). Outside symptoms won’t alert you immediately and it may take several weeks until your traffic will really go down, but you got to have internal mechanisms which will put you back on your best speed ASAP, before this will actually happen.

Guest Posting

Now, about the real guest posting. This first year I had 4 guest posts, as I already told you, grouped in July and September, respectively. Writing guest posts was fun but I have to admit it took longer than my usual posts. Here are some reasons:

1. I tried to fit into the host policy. Some hosts are suggesting that you write a maximum number of words and others are being strict on their topics. Sticking with this guidelines is sometimes cumbersome.
2. I was a little bit nervous, somehow like visiting somebody I didn’t know for the first time. I was very careful with my words, trying to make a good impression. Guest posts went out a little bit too serious because of that.
3. I was a little bit too much of a censor, meaning once I finished a blog post I waited a few days and then read it again. If it sounded ugly, I started to refactor.

Other than that writing guest posts was fun and inspiring and I will certainly do more of that in the next year.

Lesson: guest posts need a different approach then usual posts and requires more energy, focus and time than your own blog posts.

Benefits: I got a few new readers every time I landed my guest posts on a new blog. Met some interesting people and engaged in nice conversations. I also got quality links from quality blogs and that certainly helped my rankings.

Massive Guest Posting

During May I did an experiment. It was called Massive Guest Posting and as far as I know it was an Internet first. Basically, all I did was to publish a post about The 7 Ages Of A Business. But then I thought it would be nice to write a follow-up in which I will write in more details about each age. And then I thought it would be even nicer to have those follow-up posts as guest posts on other blogs. And then, of course, I thought it would be really awesome to have the follow-up posts published at the same time on all 7 hosts.

Easier said than done, of course, but a great idea. I had an immense fun doing it and I have to confess the whole thing was a huge success. You can see how this turned out once you click the link above. Several things emerged out of this:

1. Massive Guest Posting is a fantastic tool for networking. I connected to a lot of quality bloggers and created long lasting relationships.
2. On top of what I wrote about guest posts above, when you create a Massive Guest Post project you have to keep in mind a coherence between all the guest posts. Which can be pretty challenging, knowing that each blog has its own personality, preferred topics and established readers.
3. After a Massive Guest Post you’ll end up with the same benefits as for guest posting, only multiplied by 7 (or the number of blogs you will pitch).

Lesson: there is always room for innovation. This experiment was a first on the Internet and it was a success.

Benefits: a lot of traffic coming from the host blogs, great relationships with the blog owners and many inbound links. Not to mention the ninja writing skills I ended up with after the whole thing was done.

Blog Audit

This is a blogging tool, in the form of a wordpress plugin. I wrote it because I needed something to monitor my progress as a blogger. I still use it constantly and although it’s one of the simplest wordpress plugins out there it proves to be really helpful.

With blog audit you can set up blogging goals in the following areas: posting speed, comments density and pingback volume. Those are actually blog metrics, which will help you assess your current blogging performance. I set up my posting speed, for instance, in blog audit, and I was constantly monitoring it. If you’re meeting your goal, the numbers are colored in green, if you’re under your goal, the numbers are colored in red. I was so happy when my blog audit page started to be greener than a Greenpeace activist. Besides is statistic function, blog audit is also a little bit of a motivator. Don’t know if you’re going to find the “struggle for green” motivating, but for me it surely was. And still is.

Lesson: you need tools if you want performance. The same way you can’t really chop a tree with your bare hands, you can’t expect to become better and better without using tools.

Benefits: I started to have a much better understanding of what’s happening in my blog. I can see how comments density is changing or how the pingback volume is increasing or decreasing. I can adjust my strategy and move forward.

List Posts

I decided to write a special paragraph about list posts here, because there is quite a polarized attitude towards them. On one road, people who are nuts about list posts, thinking they are a by-product of the information age, and on the opposite road people who are hating the guts out of list posts, thinking they are here to make us even dumber than we are.

I won’t chose my road yet. I will just give you the information. I wrote 4 list posts in the last few weeks and all I say is that the traffic was sky-rocketing. And I mean it. All the posts got featured on almost every social media website, from reddit to delicious or hackernews. I ended up with a lot of recurring visitors and subscribers.

If you’re curious about the lists posts, take a look at them here:

100 Ways To Live A Better Life
100 Ways To Improve Your Blog
77 Tips For starting An Online Business
33 Ways To Get And Keep Yourself Motivated

There was a tremendous learning going on, from the early moments of getting on the home page of a major social website, up to several weeks after publishing the blog post. All I can say is that the posts are still retweeted at this moment, although some of them are older than a month.

Lesson: adjust your message to your audience. Keep in mind you’re writing for your readers first and find a way to get into their cone of interest.

Benefits: by far the most sudden traffic surge I ever experienced. Huge number of visitors, increasing subscribers with 50% and a lot of new relationships opportunities (especially on Twitter, where I can actually start a conversation with people who are retweeting my content).

My E-Book: 30 Sentences For A Millionaire Mindset

Writing an ebook was a fantastic experience. It was so fun writing my first one, that sooner than I realized I wake up with more than 4 books already cooking so hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have at least another one out. Writing the book took several weeks and it was a rather difficult process. Writing blog posts is one thing but keeping your focus on something that is 90+ pages long is a totally different deal.

The book is about a millionaire mindset and it’s based on a series of posts I wrote one year ago. It was interesting to see that one year ago I was struggling to write a list post with 30 items (the sentences, that is), broken down into 3 separate blog posts, and now I can write a 100 list post in less than 2 days.

Another huge surprise was that the book really sells and the whole process is actually working. I’m still not shamelessly rich out if it, but I sold copies to people I never heard about. Which is something that amazes me, to be honest. If you want to know more about the book, click on the link above, and keep in mind that you can also join as an affiliate and earn a decent commission out of every sale.

Lesson: you can monetize a blog in a much more direct and profitable way than by using contextual or display advertising. Now I have real proof that writing something valuable actually sells.

Benefits: I will not mention the experience I accumulated by writing an ebook, this is something obvious, I guess, but I will take into account the fact that I actually earn money out of this product. Not only I make money out of it, but I can also help others making money, through an affiliate program.

Writing Roadblock

No, it’s not about writer’s block. I don’t have something like this and never had. You can put me in front of a computer, with nothing around me and I can keep writing for hours. It’s about something related to my market choice. I write in English for an English speaking market. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Romanian and English is my second language. Or, to be honest, it’s my fourth language. I learned French in university and Russian in college. And I never had an English lesson in my life. That’s making English my fourth language.

One of my 2009 goals was to drastically improve my English skills. I’m making progress but not as fast as I want. One of the reasons I chose to have a constant posting speed, a part from keeping the blog afloat, was to practice my English skills more often. Other than writing constantly on my blog and reading other blogs I don’t do much to improve my English. Yet. There are a few months left from 2009, right?

Lesson: if you want to penetrate a new market, be sure to learn its language first.

That’s it for the writing part of my first year of blogging as a business. Would love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments.

The First Year Of Blogging – The Series

Last year on October 1st I made a commitment. To start blogging as a business. Half the distance, meaning 6 months ago, I checked out things in a series called The First 6 Months Of Blogging. Those first 6 months were really exciting. But time flies and a lot of stuff happened since then, so it’s time for another series. The last 6 months were full of new experiences and interesting things. This time, I will break the series down to only 4 areas: writing, promoting, money and personal benefits.

Be aware that this series will contain much shorter and descriptive posts than you’re used to, but I do this on purpose. I think every blogger who does it for a living needs accurate information. I do this series as a pure act of sharing in which I’ll describe my experience in the hope it will be useful. I suppose you already have the motivation, drive and self-discipline you need in order to blog for a living, so these posts won’t try o convince you about that. Your blogging goals may be a bit different and your approach could also be contrasting with mine, but what counts is that you will have a look at somebody else’s experience and hopefully learn something valuable from it.

Here’s a short description of what you will find in each post (you will find them here starting tomorrow).

The First Year Of Blogging – Writing

In this post I’ll analyze some of the writing activities every blogger performs on a daily basis. From posting routine up to guest posting or blog audit, this post will describe some of my breakthroughs as well as some of my biggest difficulties with the cornerstone of every blogging venture: content creation. One thing to notice is that I’ll include my ebook as part of blog writing. In fact, launching my ebook was one of the most interesting activities in the last 6 months.

The First Year Of Blogging – Promotion

As I already wrote in my 100 Ways To Improve Your Blog, one should carefully undertake the task of promoting his blog. Unless you pay an agency to do that for you, nobody will help you with that, so you’d better take it seriously. In the last 6 months I learned a lot about blog promotion and tested several techniques. I also changed my domain name, going from a “.ro” based domain to a “.com”. This had a huge impact on my traffic, although I still don’t have a page rank assigned. All in all, promotion wise, it has been an enlightening phase.

The First Year Of Blogging – Money

In this post I’ll describe what I did to earn some money out of this blog. As I already said it, I didn’t have any contextual advertising (AdSense, that is) nor display advertising. All I did was some affiliate networking and publishing my ebook, at the end of September. The last 6 months included a lot of summer, so to speak, and that usually shows in the cash-flow. Nevertheless, since this blog isn’t my main income source, (yet), I used this span just to observe and adjust some things.

The First Year Of Blogging – Personal Benefits

As always, the main focus will be on my personal development and how this first year of blogging about self improvement actually impacted it. There are a lot of things I will talk about, from self-discipline to motivation, from skills to experience, from interaction to goal setting and achievement. Blogging as a personal development tool is still one of my first options when it comes to self improvement.

So, stay tuned and be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss any of this.

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Writing

During my first 6 months of “serious” blogging I discovered a lot of things about blogging and about myself. In the first post of this series I’ll share what I learned about the blog writing process. This is a rather long post, more than 2500 words, so I suggest you set aside some time to read it comfortably. Keep in mind that this series is targeted towards people who embraced blogging more like a profession or a revenue oriented activity rather than people who blog for relaxation or fun. There’s quite a difference between journaling and blogging.

Posting Speed

During the first 6 months I wrote 106 articles on my blog. For the sake of statistics that accounts to 0,58 posts per day. Here’s the monthly breakdown:

October 2008 – 17 posts
November 2008 – 20 posts
December 2008 – 20 posts
January 2009 – 17 posts
February 2009 – 15 posts
March 2009 – 17 posts

The lowest month was February and the most productive months were November and December. During the first 3 months the enthusiasm level was pretty high and I found it easier to work. But after the first 100 days I had to rely more on self-discipline than on enthusiasm. The motivation was there all the time, but the drive to work is made of more than just enthusiasm. I had to really stick with it. I had to keep a constant flow of work, and here’s why.

Posting speed is one of the key metrics of blogging. Here are some of my thoughts about blog metrics, among other things, if you want to know more about this topic. Based on the posting speed you can actually predict some of your other blog metrics, like traffic and comments and pingbacks. In fact, posting speed was the main metric I wanted to control during the first 6 months.

When I decided to go full time blogging, this was my first and most important commitment: to write at least 15 posts per month, one post every other day, at least 1200 words for every post. That was my number one goal.

And I did this for a number of reasons: (more…)

How To Write An Ebook Using MacJournal

Writing an ebook could be a lot of fun. Not to mention the fact that by writing something you’re spreading value directly and you can receive a lot of direct compensation. If you chose to sell your ebook chances are that you will make some money. Sometimes a lot of money. And if you chose to give it away for free, it’s a sure bet that you’ll make a lot of new friends. Either way, it’s a win.

But writing an ebook can be sometimes overwhelming. I’m not talking about the actual writing process, choosing the topics, putting the chapters together or the main ebook subject. I’m talking about the invisible scaffold, the physical setup for managing, maintaining and organizing your work. Sometimes you don’t remember what you wrote yesterday, or your ideas are coming too fast and you don’t have the time or the habit to write them down, or you don’t have a place with the last version of ebook and have to compile it every time you distribute it.

In today’s post I’ll share with you my setup for writing an ebook. It’s a system based on my favorite journaling application, and that would be MacJournal, of course. I’ve already wrote some articles about enhancing MacJournal, like power blogging with MacJournal, GTD style, or how to create a habit in 15 days, feel free to check them out before starting to read this one.

Writing An Ebook

I’m not going to talk about how you can chose you ebook subjects, because the options here are endless. You can write an ebook about gardening, an ebook about dating, an ebook about cooking, about programming, about business, about self-improvement (that would be my case, by the way) the sky really is the limit. I am going to talk about what your physical steps are in creating an ebook, what exactly are you going to do, step by step.

For start, your ebook will contain sections, or chapters. The main creation process involve writing those chapters which are forming the main product. Yeap, I know you know that, just saying. You usually have a plan for that, either in form of a list, either as a mind map. You also establish a writing speed and a certain volume of writing each day. This is the main work.

But if you’re writing an ebook, you must already have a blog in which you can talk about that. If you’re writing an ebook and don’t have a blog yet, I highly encourage you to create one ASAP. It’s not very difficult, and it’s good for your writing habits. So, besides from writing your actual ebook, you’ll have also to write some blog posts about it. To announce your ebook to your potential audience, to share progress or to call for opinions.

Apart from that, you will promote your ebook and you’ll do that by writing various pieces of text, most often landing pages for all your promotion channels.

And in the process, you may have some ideas about the ebook, about the blog, about promoting or about anything else. I often found out that committing myself to a medium term project like an ebook opened the door to a bunch of new ideas.

And of course you will do a lot of research also, usually grouped into notes.

So, to keep a long story short, your ebook will consist on:

• chapters
• blog posts (including landing pages)
• ideas
• notes

Introducing MacJournal

MacJournal is a great application for journaling and blogging. With a little bit of hacking it can be a killer application for blogging, as I already wrote. But in its default setup is a little bit too simple for writing an ebook.

When I decided to write some ebooks (and that would be several weeks ago) I turned to another fantastic piece of software from Mariner, StoryMill . StoryMill is a tool for writing fiction material, very close to writing movies scripts, including characters and scenes. It’s not a surprise that Mariner launched something so close to script writing since they are also owning Contour, one of the best tools for writing actual movie scripts. But it was too complicated for an ebook. Great for a novel, but an ebook is usually less than a novel.

So, I decided to make some tweaks to my MacJournal setup and come up with something a little bit more complex than a MacJournal vanilla setup but less complicated than a full blown StoryMill installation. I made use of MacJournal tagging capabilities, entry attributes like status and label, and of course, smart journals. At the end of the post you’ll also be able to download a template containing all the modifications described here.

Writing An Ebook The Smart Way

Well, enough with talking, let’s do some work. Here’s how you can create a setup for writing an ebook similar to the one I use right now.

The Main Journal

First and foremost, I created a new journal in MacJournal and named it after my future ebook. In this post, I’ll use a MacJournal template for an ebook called “7 Things”. It’s an example ebook which contains all that I’ve learned from my daughter, each year. She’s 3 now, so I will have 3 chapters. This journal will hold all the necessary information for my ebook, acting like a main repository.

After that, I established a little routine for writing stuff in this journal. Nothing complicated: each time I add an entry in this journal I tag it using the Inspector window. And this is where the power of this setup actually is, in the tagging area. If the entry is a chapter of my ebook I add a tag “book chapter”. If the entry is an idea, I add to that entry the tag “ideas”. If the entry is just a research note, I tag it “notes”. I think you got the idea. Exactly, when I write some blog post, I tag it “blog”. Tagging your posts is a great habit anyway, regardless of the fact that you’re writing an ebook or not.

Another important habit is to keep a close reference of your entry status. Using the Inspector make sure you assess each time after you finished writing something the status of it. Mac Journal offers 5 statuses for your entries: Unknown, Not Started, Underway, Needs Review and Completed. Most of the time I’m in the “Needs Review” status. When I finished a chapter I assign it the status: “Completed”. You’ll see later why this is important. (more…)

Therapeutical Talking And Writing

Every time I talk about something that was on my mind for a lot of time, I have the tendency to forget about it shortly after. Just talking about things that really were on my head seems to make them disappear afterwards. I had this impression a lot of times. Lately, I experienced this almost on any topic I am thinking about. Expressing my thoughts in words, written or talked, made the topic vanish. It’s like giving the thought some shape pushes it out of my brain, into another realm.

I had this going on for many years. I ruminated about something for months, making it bigger and bigger in my head, and then, all of a sudden, expressed it violently. Either in form of a journal entry, a blog entry, or sometimes in a fight or controversy with somebody else. After the eruption, the inside volcano magically disappeared. I even forgot that there was a volcano in that place. Shifted my attention to something else, and of course, started another ruminating session on a different topic, soon to be ended with another eruption, in several days, weeks, or months.

This chain of reactions lead me to the concept of therapeutically talking or writing. In today’s blog post I’ll try to understand what are the reasons for this therapeutical dimension of talking. Why is this happening, what are the triggers and what are the limits of this behavior. Is this a good thing, a bad thing or just a thing that I have? We’ll see about that together.

Healing Talking

During the last 5-6 years I started to pay more attention to this phenomenon. I monitored those “eruptions” and the subtle mechanism behind them. Gradually isolated similar events and tried to build on a pattern. It seemed that every confusion, fear, worry or lack of trust was in fact a root for a ruminating session. Not being able to express in the very moment my feelings about that confusion or fear pushed it back into my mental backyard, converting them in seeds of some huge wild-growing plants. 

Without paying attention to those plants, they grew until they started to shade my normal thinking patterns. They grew so big that they took some of the whole garden light. So big that I was forced to confront them. And the only immediate action I could take was to cut them out. Talking them out loud, writing about them, bringing them into conversations or fights. I just cannot leave in the dark, so I had to eliminate the obstruction, most of the time by violently expressing it.

After I eliminated those huge ugly wild-growing plants, the backyard was clean again. No need for another confrontation, my mental clarity was not obstructed anymore. Those wild-growing plants were out for good, so the very topic that generated them was forgotten.

This pattern was so powerful that it become my way of life. Almost everything that wasn’t managed was staying somewhere back, waiting to reach an “explosion” point. After expressing my feelings out loud, the problem disappeared. I went on this rollercoaster for years, until I started to feel annoyed about something.

I didn’t realize in the beginning what was my annoyance. But things around me started to lose consistency. I was forgetting stuff, more and more stuff and more and more often. If there was something that I was already “erupted” on, I even avoided direct confrontation. I knew from the beginning that this will lead to a huge wild-growing plant that will need to be cut in a painful storm of words, so I was keeping the distance. I didn’t engage in a lot of activities, started to work less, to keep honest relationships away, to avoid social interaction. All of that was before a source of pain expressed by words, so it had to be avoided.

But that was even worse. My way of dealing with negative emotions or situations was keeping me from experiencing a true and sincere life. Everything was thrown back and vomited weeks after in order to keep me clean. And between those periods I was almost invisible. I wasn’t doing much on my own. It was this chain of non-confrontation and therapeutical talking that took command of me. It was an auto pilot. (more…)