dogging the blues

What can you do about it?

Question.  As you have been writing on your subject have you at the same time continued to increase your own knowledge base on it?  If not, this is a good time to do so.  Here are some good ways to broaden your scope on any given subject/topic:

1. Visit your colleague’s blogs.  Guaranteed you will find something that will get your attention.  A new slant, a new resource, a fresh approach, perhaps even the appearance of your colleague’s blog may give you some ideas.

You may want to visit blogs that have a commonality but not necessarily the same niche as yours.  For example while Blog Income is a blog on blogging I find visiting sights on personal development and personal finance to be both inspirational and broadening.   I apply some of what I learn at those blogs to some of the other areas of my internet marketing – and to my personal life.

2. Review a colleague’s blog – or a post – on your blog.  Why you like the blog.  What attracted you to it. What keeps you coming back.  Is there a suggestion you can make that would enhance that blogger’s results.This is a tactic I should follow myself.   Now that I have established a list of blogs that are on my  follow list, a review of each of them would introduce my readers to some really good (and sometimes irreverent) bloggers,  content and diversity of style.  A funny thing happens when you begin to review something – precious gems are unearthed, gems you can pocket and apply to your own efforts.


3.  Interview a blogger: This is a natural gimme.  It’s fun to come up with questions.  I like interviews where the blogger answers questions that are yes, helpful, but also that may be off topic and put the blogger in the hot seat.  It’s a way to break through the din of what is expected and perks your reader’s interest.

4. Invite a colleague to be a guest on your blog.  Pick a favorite blogger:  one whose sun is rising.  In the make money online grouping you are more likely to have such a blogger accept your invite than if you invited a big name guru.   Moreover I like the guts and nerve that the newbies display – they have to do something to rise above the noise and they have to differentiate themselves from the pioneers while basically still writing the same stuff as others who have gone before them.



6. Republish some of your earlier posts.  Some of your best writing may have been done when you first began.  Lets face it that was when you were pumped and bent on showing the blogosphere that you knew whereof you wrote, and you took time to polish the prose so that it came across as being professional.  The thing is that was early on in your blog income career when hardly anyone was aware of your blog let alone visiting it.  New traffic typically reads the current post yet some valuable stuff may be buried in your archives.

7. Last but not least – hit the internet for information on your subject, go to article directories and simply bone up.

These are simple steps which if followed will remind you why you decided to blog, why you chose the topic you did and guaranteed invigorate you to continue.

Blogging blues!   We all get them.

You know, you’ve been blogging for a while happy as lark, topic after topic tripping off the keyboard like there was no tomorrow.  Traffic is growing and even some comments are being left by your appreciative  readers when BAM!  Just like that when you should be feeling like you’re sitting on top of the world, the blogging blues take hold.

Suddenly:

-          You have nothing more to say

-          A commenter challenged your content and therefore (you think) your authority is being questioned.

-          Traffic has stalled

-          Alexa no longer loves you

-          You are not making any money

-          Doubt sets in – is this the right niche?

-          The topics on other blogs are always more enticing

-          You begin to flirt with the idea of a hmmmm… an online affair of a different kind

-          Your blog no longer appears attractive to you

-          Posting becomes a chore

-          Google has banished you to the sandbox

If you have ever experienced any of the above – or, all of them at once – you’re in good company.  There isn’t a top blogger around who at some point or another didn’t come up against the same challenges.   It’s as if you turn a corner and the road ahead is nothing but one speed bump after another.

You feel as if all your hard work is for naught, that the universe is set against you and you sink into a real funk – you get the blues and you get them bad.

If there is anything I can say to you at this point  it is that you do not give in – don’t succumb .  Simply add the experience as one of the rites of passage in your blog income career.  There are ways to deal with each of these speed bumps.   Check in tomorrow and the day after and then again … all of the above will be tackled one by one until once again you feel like you are standing on top of the world – a champion blogger!

Welcome to the new look at Blog Income.

How do you like it?

It’s been a long time coming.   Back in February I had posted here that the site was to go under the knife.  The site had just undergone peer review at the time and the verdict was in loud and clear … Change the look!

I had just changed the theme about 6 months ago and was mindful that frequent appearance overhauls were not the best thing – visitors get used to a certain look and expect it.  But these were people from my Internet Mastermind group and there is some real deep expertise in that room.  I decided that a change should be made sooner rather than later but this time I was going to take my time before choosing a theme.  And take time I did!

Aaahhh – procrastination!  Actually I was dead scared.  Given some of the technical issues I had experienced in the last few months  I would was so afraid that I would  just screw it up and so  I kept putting it off.

Now I mentioned in my last post here that I am part of the Gather Success Super Blogger Reality Show. Wednesday was our first check-in.  Blog Income was reviewed.  One of the areas of suggested improvement was to move content to the left and keep the sidebars to the right.

OK.   No more procrastination.  Time to make the bold move.

I actually had been doing some homework already.  Perhaps my experience might be of some help to you at some time in the future if you too are looking for a new look to your blog.   Here is the process I went through:

BLOG THEME WINDOW  SHOPPING

Now when I went blog hopping in addition to reading the posts and commenting I was looking at the design of the blog itself.  What did I like about it?   What was the overall look?  I checked out the theme name and made note of it.

CUSTOMIZABLE

What I began to notice is that a handful of themes began to appeal to me.  Interestingly enough even though they were just a handful, each blogger made their version a little different with some customization.  Now I know that a skilled tech type can do wonders with just about any theme, but the main reason I want a theme is so that I don`t have to take a separate course on how to hard code my CSS, so easy customization options were important for me.

NO PREMIUM THEM

I read somewhere that premium themes – i.e., paid themes – were better because they were more reliable in keeping up to date with Wordpress advancements and they were extremely flexible when it came to customization.  I noticed however, that many of the bloggers I respected were not using premium themes.  I contacted them re their experiences and was really happy with the feedback I got, and blown away with the unconditional offer to help in any way they could.  You know who you are – THANK YOU.

ARCLITE

In the end I chose Arclite from the Elegant series of Wordpress Themes.

The main reason is that it has some customizable features but not so many that I would need to buy a manual to implement my choices.  I like it`s clean lines.  No clutter.  What you see here today is not the finished product.  There are still lots of tweaks here and there and I would be most grateful for any suggestions you might have.

I`m sure this is not the last time that Blog Income will undergo a reno.

Oh yeah … the thing I was most scared of?  Having to spend hours and hours and the real possibility of screwing everything up?  LESS THAN AN HOUR!  And no problems!

You know what they say.  Face the thing that you fear the most and do it first. Your fear may have nothing to do with the look of your blog, but I bet there is something that you cringe having to do every time you think about.  Whatever it is JUST DO IT.   It`s keeping you from moving forward.

That was just one of the nuggets I took away from last night’s call-in for Super Blogger Reality Show. Actually it was the first call-in and with just 16 of the 100 plus registered reporting in, it was like a private chat with Alvin of Gather Success in a cozy online living room.

The challenge was to post daily from May 01 – 04 inclusive.  That was an easy gimme for 10 points and all reporting got the full 10.  But things are heating up for the coming week and getting very interesting.  The curve just took a sharp uptick.  More on the details later – suffice it to say that we’ll be raising dollars for charity and I’m hoping that you’ll respond to the tap on the shoulder.  A few things need to ironed out first.

Alvin went over a few of the blogs.  Yup.  Blog Income was one of them.

Alvin is using UStream so it’s like a classroom tutorial – you get to see exactly what he is talking about.  Here are just a few of the gems I took away and want to share with you:

CONTENT LEFT THEMES

No contest here.  Look for themes that have content to the left, sidebars to the right.

Reason?

Google reads left to right (whod’uv thunk!) but only the first 50 words.  What that means to those of us who have sidebars to the left of content is that we are wasting a lot of precious real estate on items such as, for example on Blog Income, social media chicklets, archives, blogrolls, tags, and other minute type stuff.

The default to this is that when writing include your keyword(s) in the first 50 words if you can – this is something I struggle with.  First I don’t get keyword obsessed when writing, sometimes the keyword(s) don’t show up until several sentences later.  But now that I know the 50 word rule, I’ll try and play pretty with Google without sounding stilted.

OPT-IN BOX

You have to have a way to collect names to create a list.  I know it sounds trite.  We have heard it sooooo many times, yet it is an oft overlooked item. Most of the reviewed blogs fell down on this one.    Make a free offer.  Make it a call to action.

Something like

CLICK HERE FOR FREE WEEKLY BLOGGING NEWSLETTER
AND GET MY ABC’S OF BLOGGING FOR MONEY EBOOK (VALUE $47)

I did have an opt-in for my ABC’s of Blogging for Money up as a banner and yes, it did generate signups. Huh!  Wait till I get my new theme up!

AFFILIATE LINKS WITHIN YOUR ARTICLES

Unless you are blogging as a charity case with no intention of making money, you have to sell.  It doesn’t have to be salesy, but you should have affiliate links within the body of your article.  It doesn’t have to be every article and go light on the links, which should all be anchor text.

Just about all of us who had our blogs reviewed fell down on this one too.  We had banners up but any content linking was geared towards reference rather than product.

Here’s a sobering thought:  On average your product needs to get 100 click for one sale.   Track, track, track.  Use Google’s Analytics “Goals” to get metrics on impressions to conversions, for example how many eyeballs have to fall on your article/page for the affiliate to be clicked once?

Of course there was more.  You can still register and participate in the challenge.  Each week appears to be a standalone but the longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to catch up.

Stay tuned for the details of the Gather Success Charity Drive …

In three weeks and a day the first quarter of the year will have come and gone.  If you are serious about your blog income business this is the time to take a quick overview of where you’re going, where you are and where you’ve been so far this year.

Reviewing your progress in anything that you do is critical to success.  Goals drive success.  So you need to review the progress of your goal for the year.  I review by day, week, month and quarter.  I don’t spend a lot of time on all the details, but come the end of a quarter,my blog income business undergoes a microscopic review. Year to date results are tallied  and adjustments where necessary are made.

This is a good time to take a quick overview of the current situation vis a vis your blog income goal.  With three weeks to go there is still time to save the bacon.

Am I on track?

NO!

Do I know how far off track I am?

YES!

Here is a quick way to review your progress and maximize your internet marketing performance:

1.  Goal.
You can do this for any part of your life, but for the purpose of this blog and post let’s stay with your blog income business.  What was your goal for the year?  .

A common annual goal is to achieve a certain income.  Assume that your goal is $100K  for all your internet marketing streams.  A very simple plan might look like this

1Q = $10,000
2Q = $20,000
3Q = $30,000
4Q = $40,000

Total = $100,000

2.  Progress to date:
What is your year to date income?  With three weeks to go, if you do not make some quick adjustments will you achieve $10,000?  If not how far off the mark are you?  If the shortfall is just a projected thousand or two, what can you do to turn up the heat.

3.  High Gain Activities
A quick review will tell you what in your marketing mix has worked the best and brought you the money to date.  You will notice that every time you took action there was an upward  spike in the results.  Very quickly identify the action that brought you the most income.  Take that model and ramp it up for the rest of the month.  If it is affiliate marketing that is the major contributor, see which affiliate product contributed the most to your bottom line.

4. How Many Sales Needed?
If your current track projection shows that you will be $2000 short of your 1Q goal, what are the steps that will lead you to reaching $10K?  Ask yourself these questions:

a)  What is the commission for each sale?
b)  How many clicks to reach one conversion?
c)  How much traffic  per click?

For ease of calculation:
commission per sale:  $100
clicks to make one sale: 10
traffic to generate 1 click: 10

Armed with this information you come up with this formula
2000 visits = 200 clicks
200 clicks = 20 sales
20 sales @ $100 commission = $2000

5. Which Piston Is Firing  The Traffic Engine?
Look through your statistics to identify which marketing action drives the most traffic.  Isolate it and increase that marketing action in direct proportion to meet and deliver the additional numbers.

This is also a good time to look at your second quarter.  Based on your 1Q results what are the action steps for the coming quarter.  What adjustments do you need to make?

Look at your business as sailing.  When you sail you know what your destination is.  You have a mapped out route.  Depending on how the wind is blowing, how the currents are running and daily weather changes, you need to continuously tack your sailboat to reach your destination.  A review of your  results is just tacking your internet marketing business to success.

In short:  review, correct, continue.

I buy your products and visit your blog often but a recent post of yours  got my hackles up.  In your post of Feb 09 “Where 99% of Bloggers Go Wrong” you pulled no punches and pretty much told those of us who are blogging about blogging to pack it up.  The topic has been done to death and extremely well by uber bloggers who cut their chops on this subject and have entrenched themselves as experts for life.  They hold top positions and rankings with all the major search engines for just about every keyword associated with earning an online income and its not likely that any new blogger can add value or anything new to that which has already been written about in every which way except Sunday.

The “A” Listers have got it in spades and who are we to think that our humble efforts would ever see the light of day or  receive the blessings of Google and rub shoulder with the likes of Darren Rowse , Yaro Starak or John Chow – just to name a few.

Whew!  Nathan, you might be right.

That’s a lot of humble pie to eat.

But not so fast my boy.  At the risk of offending someone I admire – yes, you Nathan  here are my two cents worth, a retort if you will:

I am a “Z”Lister – no, you know what, make that a “Y” Lister (recently promoted myself).  I am a shameless hussy climbing the ladder to success and I notice that there are other aspiring bloggers blogging on blogging who are riders on the up escalator ahead of me.  I notice that they have good rankings of PR3 & PR4, and even PR5 with Alexa’s below the 100K mark.  That escalator is pretty crowded but my faves are:

Glen Alsopp of Viper Chill

Dave Doolin of Website in a Weekend

Gabe Young of Free Blog Help

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income

Caroline Middlebrook of Caroline Middlebrook

There are plenty more and they all provide some valuable info.  Granted some of the above are not exactly wet behind the ears when it comes to internet marketing, and they brandish some sharp cyber smarts, but for all intents and purposes their blogs on blogging are.

I have learned a lot from these potential usurpers to the number one spot which is not to say that I have not learned from the current reigning kings.  But here are the reasons I like to visit the “new” blogs:

1. Inspiring.
   I can relate to these dudes.  Yes, they are ahead of me but not so far that I need to genuflect at the altar of their blog.  If they can be where they are in less than 2 years, and in Gabe’s case less than half a year, glory be.
2. Timely Information.
   Yes.  I can visit the uber bloggers blogs and go through their archives for content that is relevant to where I currently am in my blogging career.  But quite honestly, that content is somewhat wilted by now.   I realize and recognize that the basic info hasn’t changed, but I like the fresh approach that the new lot is bringing to the make money online market.  They are not so far ahead that I have to dig into back issues to understand what they are talking about.
3. Fresh Perspective
   Did I mention fresh approach?  No matter how grand the symphony a young conductor can infuse it with a new richness, a new energy, show a side that the audience may not have heard in quite that way before.  I also think of the new covers being recorded by no-name artists of the Beattles classics – and you know what?  Great as the originals are, the covers are smokin’
4. Community
   No offence here but what are the chances that a fledgling like myself would ever be noticed by oh say the likes of Darren Rowse (hey I like the guy and have opted in for the membership).  Those lower down the food chain still have the luxury of being able to mingle with us babes in swaddling clothes and actually helping us – they reciprocate with visits to our sites and leave valuable comments, they private message us with helpful suggestions, they give of their time in a way that the A Listers cannot if for no other reason than that logistics just get in the way.
5. Potential Alliances
   Just like the A Listers, this new lot is active and aggressive – they have products in the pipeline, we mere PR oners do too.  Can we ride on their coattails?  You betcha!  Can we form strong strategic alliances?  Ditto.  Can we eventually look to joint venture partnerships?  You bet your sweet bippy we can!

I don’t know why the current upwardly mobile bloggers blogging about blogging  got into that saturated niche.  My guess is that they felt it isn’t so saturated after all, that they had something of value to say.  Maybe they’re just an ornery lot who look at the face of impossibility, stare it down and grapple it to the ground.  I dunno know but I thank them.

I do know why I got this market.  Actually I was visiting Caroline Middlebrook one day and noticed that she was just blogging about her experience in blogging, talking about her success and failures and things to fix and so on.  I thought that was rather brave of her – moreover I liked her online voice, felt the sincerity and thought, hey, I can do that too.  Yup!  I quickly appropriated the idea and wrote and told her so.

By blogging about blogging, or at least my trials and tribulations and ultimate small granules of success I have learned things I probably never would have otherwise.  You see, I had been trying to get into the internet marketing arena for some time (well at least two years prior) and took course upon course.  In retrospect some of those courses were damn good, but honestly, I wasn’t fully up to them.  Almost without exception the early chapters were easy (they seemed to get easier with each course) but within a short period of time the eyes would glaze over and the brain would go on strike.

I thought about that and about Caroline and came to the conclusion that blogging would be the best way to put into practice that which I know – and I felt I knew plenty after all the credit card statements supported that feeling.  So I began my blog about blogging.

By applying things I knew I found holes.  Moreover, now that I was writing something, I had to do some checking to make sure that what I was saying was indeed so.  My atrophied internet marketing muscles began to gather strength.  I have laid a foundation, one that I can now build on.  I have launched other “niche” blogs which blush, yes, do bring in some shekels, but it is this blog that I look to as my flagship.  It is this blog that makes the others possible.

From this blog I learn.  It is my practicum.  Along the way I hope that my experiences are relevant to bloggers newer than I, that my content is helpful to them.  Because of my newbie status I still speak in a language that is devoid of blogspeak although I have caught myself drifting that way occasionally.  I am still at that place of my blog career that fledglings can look at me and say “I have a chance.”  And that is all I want.  It is a right of passage – maybe we will never sit side by side with the Darrens and Yaros and John’s, but we’ll have learned a hell of a lot by trying.

Nathan, forever your admirer …………..

Valentina

I was speaking with a retired gentleman a few days ago.  He took early retirement because he could.  His income was almost entirely based on his stock portfolio.  With last year’s debacle he finds that he now has to look for a job, not exactly a promising prospect.  He knows I blog and asked if this might be a good direction for him.

It might be.  He brings a wealth of knowledge from the corporate world.  He could launch a business to business blog, start a paid subscription newsletter, build up traffic and subscribers and sell ad space on his blog and newsletter.  He’s a quick study and I have no doubt that with laser like focus, consistent effort and bulldog tenacity he would succeed.  But it wouldn’t be overnight.

When speaking with would be bloggers who want to earn an online income, my advice to them is to keep the big picture in the background, and work towards small achievements that are part of the picture.  Yesterday’s post was on 5 milestones that are easy to achieve and a good starting point for any blogging career.  One of those milestones was to eliminate one bill.

Intuitively the mind jumps to the biggest bill – the mortgage, or car payment.  But what if instead of the big bill, you decide to tackle the smallest one first?  Here is what you do:

1. Make a list of all your standing order bills along with the monthly amount
2. Pick the smallest bill and make that your first target
3. When you eliminate that bill, take the next smallest one and add it to your blog income goal.
4. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I’d like to take credit for this process but I believe I first heard it from Kevin Wilke of Nitro Marketing Its brilliant and here is why I think it is so:

1. It’s doable.  You are not starting out to conquer Mt. Everest, just a local hill.  You can relate to it.
2. It’s friendly:  you don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to scale this little incline in your neighborhood – just the will to step out and walk it.  Maybe you haven’t done any exercise for a long time and the top of the hill is a ways off.  Never mind, daily effort eventually brings you to the top of the hill.
3. Success:  When you look at your standing order of services/payments, I bet you’ll find something that is less than $10.  Mine is $1.96 for a membership to Problogger’s Forum (I got in at the first offer – even at $5.95 it’s a good value).  Well, that was easy.  I have several recurring monthly fees that are in the $9.95 bracket – bet you do to.  Decide which one you want to topple first.
4. Success builds on success.  A funny thing happens when you first experience success – your personal energy changes and that changes you forever.  It may be just $1.96, but that is one bill that your blog income is paying for and suddenly your backbone strengthens, suddenly there is a new will and resolve that keeps you moving to the next post and then the next.

Soon the process becomes a new habit – it’s now deeply embedded in your DNA, trust me.  The car payment and the mortgage?  They too will topple.  The debt?   That too will be erased as your blog income grows.

To An Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

What does a blogging career look like?

If you are not currently employed, at some point or another in your life you have been.  When you got your first job you needed to present some credentials:  a diploma, a degree, or some experience at the very least, preferably a combination of the lot. Indeed, acquiring each credential was in itself a major milestone in your professional career.  The same applies to blogging.

While it is easy to start a blog, developing a blog income is an entirely different matter.  For serious newbies who want to become professional bloggers it is important to learn the most essential of the basics involved, just like you had to learn your alphabet, so too do you need to learn the ABC’s of  Blogging for Money.  After getting through the basics you need to keep your eye on the next step, or milestone.  It is a way of monitoring your success and keeping yourself on target.

Your success path will have many, many milestones but you have to get started somewhere.  Here are five easy ones to begin with:

1.  First 30 posts:
This is your entry into the world of blogging.  It tells the internet that you are serious.  Do you know that up to 90% of all blogs ever started have been abandoned after only a few posts?

Thirty posts also sets the tone for your blog, a culture of your own begins to emerge.  Now it will have an appeal to a certain audience. You begin to develop a style.  Blogging will always be a work in progress but this is your beginning, one to build on.

Hint:  post the30 as quickly as possible – one a day if you can, three a week at the very least.

next step:  100 posts.

2.  First 50 visitors

When you first begin to blog you will feel like the Lone Ranger.  No one knows who you are, no one drops by, even the spiders and bots are ignoring your efforts.  But lo!  One day the stats show that your site had a visitor, and the next day there are two.  For some the cumulative 50 visitors will be quick, for others it may take a month or even more.  Nevertheless, it is an important notch in your belt.

Next step:  first 50 visitors day

3.  First comment

This can happen before the 50 visitors, especially if you have promoted your blog amongst family and friends.  More than likely if you, like most bloggers, have decided to keep your newly embraced blogging career as your best kept secret from friends and family, the first comment will take a little bit longer (or a lot longer).

Getting comments on your posts is important.  It is a vote of confidence by your readers and a signal to the search engines that your readers like what you write and are willing to take the time to interact with you.  This is big in the eyes of the bots and spiders that come crawling through your posts.

There are strategies that you can employ to help this along.  Gabe Young over at Free Blog Help has posted an impressive lists of things to do to encourage comments on your blog.  I certainly found it helpful and rather than writing the list here, I encourage you to hop on over directly to his post for the whole meal deal.   “How I Get More Comments Than Blogs That Have 10 Times More Traffic”

Next Step:  Implement Gabe’s list, rinse and repeat.

4.  First Dollar Earned

Earning your first dollar on the internet is a validation that you can earn more.  It is so important that Ed Dale who hosts the annual 30 Day Challenge makes that the foremost goal of that free course.  If you have not participated in the 30 Day Challenge I encourage you to do so.  Every year in August Ed Dale puts up his 30-Day Challenge. The good thing is you don’t have to wait till August, he leaves it up for the entire year and you can go through it in your own sweet time, take months if you want to.

Next Step:  Eliminate one monthly bill with your blog income

5.  PR1 – Google Page Rank 1

While there may be  life without Google it is a difficult one.  Google is the world’s largest search engine and confers page ranks on blogs and sites from 0 to 10 -  the higher the better.  Yes, you can be below 0, it just shows up as “-“ when you look at your stats.  Page Rank, PR of 1 is a good starting point.  Google only updates a few times a year, so if you have been blogging for months and still nothing from Google, don’t despair.  Your tenacity will eventually be rewarded.

Next step:  PR2 and upwards.

There are other milestones that you will aspire to, but these are  good building blocks and should be included in the goals section when developing your blog income business plan.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

In my post on Reflections of 2009 and Things Yet To Be of December 15 I cited one of my goals as being:

-          Launch a project blog that is centered around a newly planned trip to China in June … it is both a human interest blog and based on a significant but not well known historical event.

Shot down may not be the right term, deferred would be more like it.  Identify, correct and proceed.  A little background:

The planned trip was (is) to Harbin and centers around the Russian connection that is unique to this city in Northeastern China. The connection dates back to 1898 when Harbin became the terminus for the Chinese Eastern Railway – an extension of the Trans Siberian Railway – and figures prominently until 1946 when Russia turned the city over to the Chinese Government of the day.  Actually, it was under Russia’s protection only during WWII, but the relationship between this city and Russia is long and even today there are many Chinese citizens who are of Russian decent.

My family history happens to run a short pace alongside this historical dateline.  The city was once known as the St. Petersburg of Asia not just because of its strong Russian presence but also because it’s buildings are built in the classic style of architecture that St. Petersburg is known for.  Today Harbin is famous for its Snow and Ice Festival which is held in February and is considered to be a strong contender for the 2022 Winter Olympics.

When a friend of mine mentioned that there are now societies being formed to mine and record this historical association and that a small conference was being planned for June 2010 I took up the invite and thought that it would make for a good blog project for 2010.

A “conference” may have been premature, or perhaps not enough thought given to it.  Perhaps it was meant to be a casual gathering of like minded souls, or not.  The fact is that China has a strict ruling re gatherings of 50 or more and it likely takes a bit of bureaucratic filing and stamping and time before approval is given.  Repeated requests for more info have gone unheeded.

I have therefore changed my bend on this.  I still want to visit Harbin and write about it, but perhaps it will be without any conference and therefore need not be in June 2010.  I now have a different process in mind. The blog I planned as a project will now make way for something else.  So an early in the year correction points to a stronger presence on Blog Income Life with a major thrust into Affiliate Marketing.  The bar has just been raised.

To An Awesome Blog Income Life in 2010!

Valentina

I thought this would be an appropriate time to share my reflection on the passing year, lessons learned and a bird’s eye view of 2010.

Birth of a Blog:
This blog began as a “buddy” system for some friends and myself who bought a program that promised to be a money machine without any heavy lifting..  We found that not only was there lots of heavy lifting but that we did not understand most of it.  We hoped to attract other customers of that program and share experiences here.  Frustration set in. Very quickly my colleagues decided that it was not for them and moved on to other, greener pastures.

There is a stubborn streak that runs down my back.  I don’t easily give up or maybe its just plain pride that does not want to own up to failure … or it could be my downright orneriness.   Right about that time I came across several blogs on blogging, Caroline Middlebrook’s was one.  I thought I could do something like that, chronicle my journey on blogging.   The idea being that I had taken several internet marketing courses and could apply what I learned here, and learn more as I blogged.  Got myself a new domain name, redirected it to the  Blogger one, changed the title in my header.

Plan to Succeed
The danger of knowing a little bit is that you don’t know what you don’t know.  I had the basic text book knowledge down pat – or so I thought and wrote about it.   Anemic results did not phase me, at least not at the beginning. Contrary to my training which I apply to all my businesses, I did not develop a business plan for this blog so did not even have benchmarks to reach.  In retrospect, even though I “launched” my blogging career at the start of this year my approach to it was less than businesslike.  To succeed in anything you need a plan.

Anemic monthly results continued to dog me and began to take a toll … should I just give up?  Was this a bad idea?  What do I know about blogging anyway?  What hope did I have of ever getting Google’s blessing and traffic let alone make money? The temptation to throw in the towel was strong.  Numbers tumbled – ok, slipped – tumble would suggest that there was a long way down to tumble to.

Defining Moment
Attending Frank Kern’s Mass Control was a major turning point for me.  I went not for the blogging, but to learn more on internet marketing.  Suddenly the penny dropped.  Here I was yet again taking another internet marketing course.  Just how many of these do I need? Don’t get me wrong – the event was stupendous but I asked myself, how much of what I learn am I going to implement?  Knowledge is good, but for it to be effective you have to use it, to apply it.

One of the speakers was Ed Dale.  He got a standing ovation.  The man impressed me enormously.  He mentioned his Thirty Day Challenge which he runs every year in August.  One of the uber gurus present, Jason Moffat, apparently was the first winner of the challenge some five years ago.  Thinking about this blog I decided it deserved another chance, or more to the point, I deserved another chance to make something of it.    I would take the 30-Day Challenge.  That was the best decision I made.  I learned a lot.  As a result of that “challenge” I made the following changes:

1.  New Domain Name
Using my newfound knowledge and a nifty tool called Market Samurai I changed the domain name   from Blog Along With Me to Blog Income Life.  I wrote about the reason for the change in this post

2.  Switched from Blogger to Wordpress Direct.  This version of Wordpress is a little bit more user friendly for us non-techie types while still offering flexibility and entry to those who are to be able to work behind the scenes in the html/c-panel/ftp world.

3.  Started to find other blogs of similar content – yes the biggies to start with, but my Google Alert and Google Reader (two services I was not aware of before) introduced me to others who were not yet well known, indeed newer at the game than myself and with better results.

4.  Became a commenter on some of them.

5.  Changed my template when a successful blogger whom I admire observed that my theme was blah … he also suggested that I should write about something I knew, but by then I realized that I actually enjoy writing on this blog, and that what I “knew” is that I have a long way to go before I can actually hang out the professional blogger shingle.  So I continue as a willing apprentice.

6.  The shingle I have hung out is “Open for Business.”  In my 2010 business plan, Blog Income Life figures prominently with stated goals and objectives.  One good thing about having kept track of my journey thus far is that I have data which I am using as my starting point.

I can honestly say that in the last two months I have learned more and done more here than in the previous nine.

My blog related goals for 2010 are:

1 -     Google PR3 for Blog Income Life by year end

2 -     Launch a project blog that is centered around a newly planned trip to China in June … it is both a human interest blog and based on a significant but not well known historical event.  My intention is twofold:

One:  for the interest, learning and my roots.

Two: to draw attention and gain interest from print media to publish my experience/story/visit to China, carriers for contra air in exchange for an article or two for their in flight magazine and ad sponsors on the blog.  In short, I am looking to fund the trip.  I am very late getting into this game, but only recently learned of the pivotal event that is drawing me to China.  The goal is scary, the journey sure to be enjoyable, time will be my biggest challenge.  I also anticipate enormous growth … and some hair tearing along with it!

Thank you for allowing me to share my musings of the past, the current and the future.  Please share yours with me.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

I think the cheese will have to be shelved for 2010