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Before I started blogging, I dabbled in a lot of different things. I spent thousands of dollars on courses, ebooks and coaching that I never applied. I could have saved a lot of money and time by just sticking with one program.

For the whole of 2009 I had this urge to start a blog and share my life experiences. My passion has always been self improvement and spiritual growth. I never thought I could write something that people would actually like, but my experience has been completely different since I’ve started my blog on self improvement.

At the end of 2009, in December I finally had a dream that left an imprint on me. The message I remember from this dream was “start now, don’t wait any longer”, which is when I started taking action and creating the Wake Up Cloud, which is my blog.

My Fear

I was confused and somewhat scared as I was taking steps and putting myself out there. I think most bloggers go through this and experience it for the rest of their lives to some extent. It’s tough putting your face and writing out there for everyone to judge.

But ultimately the more you can be yourself, the more people you will attract that are in harmony with you. If you’ve read my posts, you know I’m a big fan of learning how to find your passion and following it.

We’re all put on this planet for a reason. It is up to each and every one of us to discover what that is so we can start sharing it with those that need it. You don’t have to work a job you don’t enjoy; you can do what you love and make a living, if you work hard and persist.

One of the first things I did when I started my blog was to join a coaching course on blogging. There are many out there, but I decided to pick Authority Blogger with Chris Garrett. It spoke to me and it has helped me immensely in navigating past the pitfalls of blogging.

My Stats

If you really want to speed up your process I recommend you get a coach or join a program that can help you head in the right direction from the start. Many are surprised by the speed of my growth. To be honest, so am I. I have reached 400 subscribers (RSS and E-Mail) in around 8 weeks.

My subscribers have been growing steadily ever since I started. I attribute my growth to the amount I have been guest posting. I think I have written over 30 guest posts soon in my first 8 weeks of blogging. I’ve seen the best results from guest posting on bigger blogs, which have sometimes brought me over 100 new subscribers in a few days.

Most of my subscribers are via e-mail because I offer a course on how to discover your passion in 5 days. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on it. People seem to really like it. We all have trouble finding our passion, so it’s something that most people really need.

My unique visitors at the moment range from around 100 to sometimes 200. The first post on my blog went up just around 8 weeks ago, so I haven’t started getting good traffic from the search engines yet. When that starts to happen, I expect to see a mini explosion.

(My current visitor stats. Click to enlarge.)

My Methods

The methods I have used to do this are guest posting, commenting and being social. By being social I mean hanging out on twitter and e-mailing people I thought had cool blogs and starting a conversation. When you’re blogging about something that you’re passionate about it’s fun to make connections with like-minded people.

I never thought about what I could get out of my connections. I just had fun and talked to people. It has surprised me how powerful this is when used together with guest posting and commenting. I’ve realized that it takes hard work to start a blog, but it is a lot of fun, because I get to write articles about things that I truly enjoy.

Being Ruthless

Another thing I’ve discovered is that I have to be ruthless with my time. I can’t overextend and start several new projects. Writing and promoting one blog is enough, not to mention the time it takes to be on social media and hang out with people.

It has all worked out better than I could ever have hoped. If you’re on the brink and don’t know if you should start blogging, just try it and see what happens. When you’re ready for some awesome self improvement ideas, drop by my blog and we’ll chat.

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Blogging is a process.  One that does have a learning curve.  Most new bloggers start off by focusing on many of the wrong things and attempting every traffic generation and monetization strategy that one could find instead of focusing like a laser on building the identify of the blog and committing to a single strategy.  I know I made these mistakes during the early stages of my blog, 20smoney.com.

My Early Days

I focused on all the wrong areas during my first year of blogging.  I tried to find the coolest, most expensive theme (and I did).  I implemented every type of silly monetization strategy such as banner stripe ads and I even had a pop-up box designed to entice visitors to sign up for my email list.  The result?  A mediocre website at best with no real purpose.

Despite some level of growth, the blog did not grow nearly as much as I would have hoped.  The amount of work that i was putting in was not translating into sufficient growth.  I “hit the wall” like many new bloggers do.

A Renewed Focus

I contemplating a complete halt to my blogging activities just because I wasn’t seeing the return on my time.  Rather than quit, I decided to try out a drastic change.  The first thing to go was my theme.  I got rid of the magazine-like, fancy theme with moving featured posts and images, and went to a bare-bones theme.  The reason?  I wanted my readers to visit my site for the content; therefore, I needed to have the theme be about the content and nothing else.  The results were incredible.

As you can see from the below graphic, the immediate impact of the theme change was a huge drop in my bounce rate.  From averaging over 60% rate, I took the bounce rate down to the 4-5% range instantaneously.  This was step number 1 in taking my blog to the next level.  If people don’t last more than a single page view, it’s pretty tough to grow a website.

The next step was to understand my objective. Was I trying to create a real interactive community of readers who had a similar interest (in my case, finance)?  Or, was I simply trying to gain search traffic and get ad clicks?  If you haven’t answered this question yourself, you need to.  I decided that it was time to focus on quality and gaining a real readership versus short term search traffic and Adsense numbers.

I put an emphasis on quality content and became re-energized.  Why would someone want to visit my blog?  I ask myself this every day.  If I can’t come up with a good answer, then obviously, my blog will not go anywhere.  Similar to step one, the results have been excellent.  The traffic growth which I document each month with a monthly blogging update, has been encouraging.

The below graphic shows the steady increase in traffic i’ve been receiving mainly due to my renewed focus on quality content.

Please note that January’s traffic is through January 11, 2010. I’m on pace for my best month yet.

Conclusion

To sum up my advice, it would be to have a fantastic understanding of your objective as a blogger. What are you trying to accomplish? When you can answer that, you should be focused intensely on achieving that goal. Do not dabble in multiple strategies or try out a new approach every month. Determine your own approach for your blog and commit to it. If you do, you will see nice results.

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This is a blog story by Glen Allsopp who writes about viral marketing.

A few months ago, I received an email from Deelip Khanal of MaxBlogPress, asking if I would share my story with the readers here. At first, I was a little hesitant as I’ve shared most of my blogging advice in a lot of interviews recently, but then I had an idea.

Instead of me sharing my biggest tips about blogging, I just want to show you what is possible. After all, you can read tips on writing scannable content, creating killer-headlines and promoting your blog posts anywhere. However, at times all we really need is a little inspiration from somewhere who has been there and done that to get us going again.

If you’re losing a little bit of motivation for blogging or don’t really think you can achieve what you want to, then this post is for you. Allow me to start this story with a little of my background. In school, I absolutely hated writing. Despite being in the ‘high flyers’ class which meant that myself and 20 others took their English exams a year before anyone else in the country, I was definitely struggling. Computers were far more my thing and I would rather type out an essay than write it.

Being handed another assignment which involved 3,000 words, hand written, just drove me insane.

Over the next two years, I went through college and built up websites (some of which were blogs) on the side. In fact, three years ago, my first ever blog was the one I now write for full-time after giving it a recent resurrection: my site on viral marketing. For a year, I wrote on the site purely as a way to build up search engine traffic. I didn’t care about making my articles sticky or how viral they were; I simply cared about search engine rankings.

Of course, how search engines work and what I focus on has changed a lot, but even after a year of pushing myself to write and hoping that I would start to enjoy the process, nothing seemed to be helping.

Then something changed…

Getting Over Yourself

I slowly let my marketing blog die and wasn’t writing much online until I launched another site, PluginID. In just over a year, the site has gained over 6,000 subscribers and is viewed as a top 10 blog in the personal development industry.

If you’re wondering what changed between a guy that hated writing to one that makes enough money through blogging to support himself full-time, then let me tell you:

• I Started Writing What I Want To Read - I decided this would be the best way to judge whether I was writing excellent content that my audience would care about. Instead of writing things for search engines, or for teachers (like in school), I simply focused on writing what I wanted to write about. And, miraculously, I started loving it.
• I Realised the Importance of Content - Some people get so caught up in SEO, design and their analytics stats that they completely forget about the most important aspect of blogging: your readers. And, your readers are simply on your site for one thing: your content. Instead of writing for search engines, I started to realise that my blog would only grow if I provided massive value to my readers, so I started putting a lot more time and attention into my writing.
• I Stopped Caring About Things Out of My Control - After pumping out articles for a few months, it suddenly hit me that there is just no way I can ‘control’ whether people like my work. At school, I could study as much as possible and try to produce the best work that I can, but at the end of the day it’s up to the teacher to decide on my grade. Focus on what you can control (writing and promoting the best content you can) and then remain indifferent to how ‘well’ that article does. When you eliminate the number of things you focus on, you naturally start to enjoy the things you do.
• I Left Editing Until the End - Typically, with written content, I would edit as I go because I didn’t want to make a mistake on paper and have to start again. As you would expect, when I jumped into the online world, I kept this same method (as many people do). I now find that it’s much more enjoyable, and produces much better results, if you try to get down everything you want to say and then come back and edit the content later. This allows you to stay in the flow and enjoy two separate modes when writing your posts.

Each of these 4 things, individually, had a big impact on how I now operate online. Combining all of these changes meant that I went from literally dreading having to write posts, to living what I do and now enjoying writing as my favorite medium.

If you ever find yourself down about your writing ability or demotivated to write your next post, then keep these in mind. I went from someone who hated writing to making over $50,000 with my blogs in 2009. There’s no way you can’t do the same.

This is a blog story by Glen Allsopp who writes about viral marketing. If you liked this post, you may also enjoy his in-depth article on guest blogging.

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“Don’t you want to think twice about this?”

That was the question people threw at me when I handed in my resignation letter 6 months ago. Meet the small-town girl with big dreams - Wong Ching Ya, a social media enthusiast and freelancer of logo/header designs.

My experience in blogging isn’t too long but I have a major thrill utilizing social media as my networking and publicity tool. Now I am happily engaged in some writing offers and landed a couple of interviews as well. Let’s see how it all started:

1. Forum Participation – Quality Outbeats Quantity

I started blogging since August, 2008 owning 2 sites, both for entertainment purposes. I was active in joining forums that I had more than 10 memberships at one time. Later I noticed it’s best to focus and really participate in those I find helpful in my blogging career. No doubt, forum is a great place to build trust and friendship. BloggerTalk founder, Rose DesRochers was kind enough to promote me as the moderator due to my contribution in her forum. I met some nice people there and had fun helping out as much as I could. Authority Blogger Forum owned by Chris Garrett was the one that helped to initiate the idea in transforming my personal site into a niche one. After deliberate consideration for long term goals, I started fresh with a new blog name in February, 2009 – Social @ Blogging Tracker.

2. Start New Niche Post with A Bang!

I need a fresh new start! Something to capture people’s attention and to prove that I’m up for the challenge. It’s not easy to be unique so I tried to come up with a different way to present my post. I spent a lot of time adjusting the chart when finally it was ready to be published: Killer Twitter Apps to Expand Your Twitter Network.

Twitter was a hit topic then so with an immediate effect, this click-able chart received a lot of feedback, especially from my blogger friends. They are generous enough to share this post around and I was deeply encouraged by the results.

3. New Strategy - Authority Blogging with Quality Content

From that point on, I decided to go for quality posting instead of quantity. I keep a minimum posting of 1-2 times weekly, concentrating more on research and discovering ideas to solve social networking problems. At the same time, I was hoping to encourage comments from readers so I can either have a sequel or new ideas for coming posts. Here’s an example of how I responded to a reader’s request by 13 Facebook Applications to Promote Your Blog, which was surprisingly well received on Blogengage, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

4. Guest Posting on Popular Sites to Reach Wider Audiences

I must admit it was a little intimidating to think about guest posting at first. However, I knew I needed to overcome this barrier in order to move towards authority blogging. I’m blessed to have the opportunity to reach out to Mintblogger and Dailyblogtips, both are prestigious sites that are within the same niche as mine. Great experiences and I must say, to be able to post on the sites you respected is simply wonderful! It was the same period of time when I started to gain new readers and subscribers.

5. New Ventures via Quality Comments & Blog Visits

I take commenting very seriously. Visiting to 3-5 new blogs daily earned me a connection with founder of Rotorblog, Maris. He was kind enough to offer me an opportunity to guest post on his informative site and I was more than happy to do it. Later I decided to be a regular poster for him that my second post had a massive support from his readers, especially on Twitter. All these wouldn’t happen if I didn’t comment on his site in the first place.

6. Transforming Your Passion Into Career

Apart from writing, I’m a huge graphic fanatic! I had my first job of logo/header design in August for Miscbytes. The client is kind enough to share it with others in her post and social network, which caused me to think about making this passion of mine a career as well. Recently I offered a header tweaking to a friend that eventually he bought me coffee for it! It feels fantastic when I can earn by doing what I love. For the same passionate reason, I customized 90% of the graphics used on my posts. Some said I’m crazy for spending hours on them! I have to admit I am - it’s my way to personalize my posts while evoke creativity at the same time.

7. To Receive and Give Back on Social Media Sites

I owed what I have today to social media sites. Now I reward my readers with acknowledgements to their sites in my Facebook Fan Page. Twitter and StumbleUpon are my most favorite sharing tools as I had fantastic traffic influx experience from them. To give back doesn’t make you any smaller but in fact, generate good network with your readers. They worth my appreciation for their constant support and I seriously believe generosity is here to stay for all bloggers.

There you have it…

Currently I’m on the process of writing 4 more guest posts, 2 awaiting interviews and a request from a company to review their current social media strategy. I blog and living the proof on how social media catapulted my blogging career to the next level. The power it possesses is way beyond imaginable. I can’t wait to see where I’ll be heading next.

Otherwise, how do you think I made it to Maxblogpress in the first place?

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One of my passions is eating out with friends, particularly new restaurants that have a good reputation and whose reputation is spread by word of mouth.

Here, Southern Spain on the Costa del Sol, there is a plethora of restaurants from the ´Greasy Spoon´variety to the more upmarket establishment and everything in between.  For me a good restaurant is where my friends and I can enjoy ourselves with good food, good house wine and excellent coffee in an atmosphere of attentive but unobtrusive service and which does not empty the bank account to enjoy.

An interesting menu that manages to cater for the wide variety of choices that my friends might wish to make always helps to make the evening or lunchtime that much better.

It was with this passion that I decided to develop www.gourmetinternational.org with my very techie friend Miryam Stenger.  One of our tasks was to master wordpress and to have a host that could manage effectively the various plugins that we wanted to use.  This was easier said than done because not all hosting companies are the same and after numerous emails about permissions etc. we finally found one that suited our needs and which has worked famously for us.

One of the obstacles that has yet to be overcome is that of getting reviews from around the world and it is here that I have created a business opportunity for people who enjoy doing what I enjoy so much, viz. eating out.  Video interviews are not yet much in evidence in the restaurant sector and yet, are such a powerful marketing tool.  For anyone interested in setting up a business in this field with ongoing residual income please feel free to contact me.

That this works and works well is evidenced by our viewing figures and the frequent requests we receive for reviews on different aspects of this sector such as wine reviews, kitchen gadgets etc.  I am a kitchen gadget addict that finds it very difficult to resist a new gadget that makes cooking more interesting.

One of my favorites is corkscrews and particularly antique corkscrews and this particular article attracted considerable interest from the readership, some examples of which have placed here for your perusal.

A regular inquiry I make of restaurant owners is, “What are the facilities for the physically challenged?”, Some of my friends love eating out with both their friends and family and the facilities and entrances can range from excellent to dismal if not insulting.  I am usually shown the facilities but when I criticize the inadequate toilet room space the owners feel quite upset.  It is only when I show them with a wheelchair, how limited the space really is that the truth dawns.  By this time it is usually too late to make any alterations.

As more and more reviews are completed I intend to charge a monthly fee for inclusion as well as the adwords that have been added with the aim of getting several thousand reviews from differing parts of the world.  Most iportantly, I am looking for peaple who share the same interest as myself in good wining and dining and who can regularly contribute to the reviews.  This not a money over night task but one of building up a network of restaurants throughout the world who pay a regular fee for a full review of their best practice.  Hopefully, more people will want to share in bringing these wonderful restaurants to the attention of others who might also enjoy social eating and drinking.

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