So I have two options – adapt and change my approach to make it fun again or throw in the towel. Considering I have made a tremendous amount of progress in the three months that I have been doing this, I would hate to give up and lose the momentum that I’ve gained. But what is it that I’m actually shooting for here? I’ve spent the last few days re-evaluating why I am blogging in the first place…

Monetization – I’m certainly not blogging as a direct tool to generate income. Don’t get me wrong – there are some bloggers who make a lot of money blogging. It has become quite apparent, though, that the people who are able to successfully monetize their blogs (as in, income generation being their primary focus) live and breath their blog or have been at it so long that they have a bit of a head-start if you know what I mean.

They develop insane amounts of high-quality content on a consistent basis over a very long period of time and then spend the rest of their time immersed in a cycle of tweaking, testing, studying, learning, applying, promotion, etc. To be honest, I am not a point in my life where I have the time, discipline, or desire to do the things that are necessary to develop a highly monetized blog. I’m not saying I will not ever get there or that it wouldn’t be nice, but monetization is certainly not the top priority for me at this point.

Connection – Blogging was really fun for me in the beginning. A lot of it had to do with the novelty of having the first website that was entirely mine (I’ve had other sites that I’ve developed but were tied into past employment positions). But while that was fun, what was exciting was the CONNECTION aspect of it all. I started writing about some things that were on my mind and people started digging it. That was pretty cool. But what was even more exciting was getting introduced to other like-minded people and reading THEIR blogs. There were other individuals that not only took their own leaps of faith to go after what they wanted in life…but they also were giving me ideas on how I could take my “experiment” to an all new level. New opportunities and ideas seemed to open up to me and, more than anything, it was THAT aspect of blogging that completely appealed to me.

But somehow, I began to get caught up in becoming a “blogger.” I started to analyze stats incessantly and became a traffic whore. I began leaving comments on every blog that I could just to get traffic back. I stopped reading blogs that I actually liked and instead focused on blogs that could “help” me drive traffic. My content shifted from what was on my mind to trying to develop content that I thought would read or “spread” well. I started losing my own authenticity. I stopped getting involved with the conversations that I enjoyed and instead started promoting other blogs in the hopes that they would, in turn, promote me. Twitter stopped becoming a way to connect with others and became strictly a promotional tool.

And then I started stressing over post schedules, lengths of posts, keyword optimization, design, and all the other crap that goes into blogging. These things are obviously important if you want to get your name and your words out there…but I was becoming a slave to them and this is what was taking the fun out of it all. Plus, all of those efforts seemed to add very little to actually improving my readership and traffic. Most of my readers and traffic come from efforts and posts that I actually feel inspired to write. Go figure…

Listen, I know all of you who are reading this are probably saying, “dude, you’ve only been at this for three months. How can you possibly be burned out already?” Or maybe it’s, “suck it up, bro – if you want to blog, this is the shit you have to do.”

All I can say is that if “blogging” is always going to be like this than I will walk away now and not look back. It’s not worth it to me. I would rather spend my time actually living my life and making real connections with real people than being handcuffed to my computer fretting over stats, traffic, and reader counts. I would rather spend my energy developing new income streams than stressing over whether or not I can get two posts up by Thursday just because I somehow began to believe it was “necessary.”

So with that said, I am going to conduct a little experiment for the rest of this month. I am going to make this blogging thing fun again or scrap it all together. I am going to refocus on connecting rather than stressing over stats and traffic. To do this, I am going to break a few self-imposed “blogging” rules. Namely:

• No Post Schedule: I’ll post something when I have something to say. It may be once every two weeks or it may even be every day. I’m not going to stress about it. When I write or post a video, I want to be excited about it. Some of my posts may be short…some of them may be 3000 words. Who knows? I’m just not going to force content. We all have feed readers anyway so if you don’t want to read my stuff because I have a weird posting schedule, cool. No worries. But if you don’t mind sporadic posting times, than I’d love for you to stick with me.

• No Stats: I am not going to check my Google Analytics or Feedburner stats. I am also turning off my Alexa Sparky toolbar option. Obviously, forward progress requires some evaluation and tweaking of strategy but checking my stats every day isn’t going to change whether or not you read my stuff this month. Instead, I’m going to gauge my “success” for the month via my overall interaction and conversations with people. Worthwhile connections and exciting opportunities and ideas were what drew me to blogging in the first place so that’s where I am going to put my energy.

• Promotion: I am really thankful for everyone who supports and shares my material. Knowing that something I post resonates with people is a pretty cool feeling. And I love promoting your stuff if it strikes a chord with me. But there are just way too many GREAT blog posts for me to get around to all of them in a given week. We all lead busy lives – I’m trying to balance the development of multiple streams of income while at the same time still leading an active social life so I don’t want to feel obligated to read and promote EVERYTHING that comes across my reader and I certainly don’t expect you to do the same. Trust me, if I read something that I like, I will be the first one to promote the hell out of it. I just may not get to it and I hope everyone understands that.

Okay, enough of the rant. That’s it for now. I don’t mean to come off like this is such a big deal. Worst case scenario, I scrap the blog and keep on trucking without specifically documenting my progress. No biggie.

But I needed to get this off my chest for my own good. Like I said, I want blogging to be fun and exciting. I don’t want it to feel like a chore or a J.O.B. I want it to be exciting and I want it to continue to open doors to opportunities and other like-minded people…but I just can’t abide becoming a slave to it.

Paul

P.S.  If you liked this post please subscribe to the RSS feed using the button below. I would also love to hear from you – drop a comment if this post moved you in any way (or even if it bored you to tears). As always, thanks for following me on this journey…

I am 29 years old and I have a bogeyman. When I was younger, he would chase me through my neighborhood at night. I never saw him but I always knew when he was close. The hair on the back of my neck would stand straight up and I could feel him breathing over my shoulder. When I sensed he was near I wouldn’t stop to turn around, I would just tuck tail and run like the wind.

I was fast so it wasn’t too difficult to outrun him. He never caught me and he faded away as I got older. I just assumed he got bored and gave up trying to catch me. But he is a hell of a lot smarter, and much more insidious, than I gave him credit for – I say this because my bogeyman is back and he’s been whispering in my ear this whole time…

I have just recently become aware of what my bogeyman has been doing all these years. He did, in fact, give up trying to outrun me (I’m still fast). But he never went away; he just changed his method of attack. You see, my bogeyman is responsible for that little voice that pops into my head from time to time telling me I may not quite be good enough or I may not quite have what it takes. He doesn’t care as to what his comments are referring to, he just waits until I am vulnerable and drops a few snide comments to sew those seeds of doubt. He likes to whisper to me using my own voice – not only to make me doubt myself, but also to make me anxious about all the things that could go wrong if I make a particular decision or step down a certain path. I have to give my bogeyman credit, he’s been pretty effective all these years. But now I know his game…and I am not going to let him beat me.

We all have self-doubts from time to time. All of us, at some point in our lives, give up on a goal or a dream because the end seems so far away and so unattainable that it’s not really worth the effort. But this can lead to a vicious cycle that affects not just one goal or dream, but ALL facets of our lives. Anxiety about what the future MIGHT hold leads to little mushrooms of self-doubt. Self-doubt, in turn, tends to make us more anxious about an uncertain future. When we have reached a sufficient level of anxiety and self-doubt, we become paralyzed by fear and become stagnant. When we become stagnant, we kill any momentum or forward progress that we had previously made. It’s like trying to ride a bike up a hill with the brakes on.

It pains me to say, but I have been caught in this negative cycle more times than I would like to admit. But rather than dwell on all the times I wasted momentum, all the times I gave in and believed the little nagging voice, I decided that enough was enough and that I would take a stand. And it’s working. Here are a few weapons I have been using in my battle:

Focus on the Present -

Everything is better when you stop worrying about a future that may or may not come to pass and instead focus on the task at hand. Develop a plan, but focus on what is right NOW and what is RIGHT now. And ENJOY yourself. Enjoy the process of putting yourself out there, of laying it all on the line. If you can focus all of your energy and enthusiasm on the small steps that are immediately in front of you and get yourself to take action, you will find that the paralysis by analysis is largely alleviated and you will build positive momentum.

Take Action and Fail Forward -

Whether it’s the saying, “get knocked down seven times, get up eight,” or the story of Thomas Edison finally producing the incandescent light bulb after a reported 10,000 attempts because he “simply ran out of ways that wouldn’t work,” the notion that one must first learn to fail in order to achieve great heights is ever-present in business lore. But the part that is misunderstood by most people is that the “failing” that facilitates growth actually requires action. Failure induced by action, if viewed from the right perspective and learned from, is actually a GOOD thing as it moves you closer to where you want to be. But too often we are afraid that all of our energy and our hard work will be for naught so we don’t even attempt to get moving. The only real failure in life is NOT taking action, NOT taking the chance for fear of falling short. If you want to gain further perspective on “failing forward,” read “Triple Your Rate of Failure and You Might Succeed” over at Illuminated Mind.

Condition Yourself -

Let’s be honest – even though we know negative self-talk is bad, we don’t do much to change it. In fact, we are our own worst enablers – we think it’s “normal” to let the mind chatter take control. But like any habit you try to break, it takes time, patience, and a certain amount of vigilance to monitor your negative thought tendencies throughout the day, especially in the beginning. But, over time, it becomes second nature. Don’t expect to “quiet the beast” overnight. Remember, it has been living and thriving unchallenged for quite a long time.

I can’t say my bogeyman is gone. I can’t say I have destroyed him completely. I know he is probably just biding his time waiting for me to slip up before he rears his ugly head. But I intend to stay vigilant and to never give him that chance again. For now, I am beating my bogeyman at his own game.

Paul

P.S.  If you liked this post please subscribe to the RSS feed or “tweet this” to your friends using the buttons below. I would also love to hear from you – drop a comment if this post moved you in any way (or even if it bored you to tears). As always, thank you for following along on my journey to “break the chains.”

The Moronic Graduate

Okay, quick story about this picture. This is me on graduation day from the University of Texas (Master’s Sport Management) in 2006. After let’s just say a bit of a rough night (finally stumbled home as the sun was coming up), I shot out of bed at 8:35am realizing that I was supposed to be graduating…in 25 MINUTES! I grabbed my graduation gown which was still in the bag and I was just coherent enough to get it out of said bag when I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to put my arms through the sleeves. Seriously. I slipped my arms through the sleeves only to find them sewn shut at the ends.

So, like any enterprising individual who is so hung over it doesn’t yet hurt, I grabbed the scissors and began to cut open some hand holes. It wasn’t until after I caused a mini-uproar on stage in front of my closest 3,000 friends and their families that I realized the arm slots were already cut…in the SIDES of the gown. Everybody else had nice, flowing sleeves and I looked like I was wearing Larry the Cable Guy’s graduation gown. To this day, my family likes to call me the “dumbest grad school graduate of all-time” (all in good fun, of course). Okay, now back to the review.

It has been a little over a month since my first ever blog post, “I Have Yet to Make a Single Dollar Online and I Just Quit My Job.” Over the course of this last month, I have…moved to a different city (again), moved in with a girl for the first time (it’s okay, she has a ring. It’s not my ring but…just kidding), left a job most people would kill for, and started my own online business with absolutely no past experience or realistic expectations of success. I have also been planning a destination wedding in Jamaica, a co-bachelor party in Vegas, and have been enrolled in two separate mentor / coaching programs. To say the last month has been a whirlwind is a bit of an understatement…

Sometimes, especially in the midst of turbulent change, we get lost in the minutiae of the day-to-day grind without acknowledging our successes and just how far we have really come. Taking a step back to reflect on and gauge my progression has always been a helpful tool for me to (1) acknowledge I am further along than I had given myself credit for (usually) and (2) to re-evaluate, recharge, and re-focus from a different perspective. With that in mind, I wanted to share my first month’s experiences as a full-time blogger with all of you. So, without further ado…here’s the progression of PaulNorwine.com over the last month:

Posts / Videos:
Not including this post today, I have written six articles and have even posted one cheesy 30-second video in the “About Paul” section. My posts have ranged from 122 words (I included a movie clip) to 1775 words (average of 1100) and I have touched on topics ranging from simplifying goal-setting methods and online business strategies to football, heat-seeking missiles, and even guys puking on my garage floor. I used to hate writing…but now it’s almost cathartic and I have come to realize I DO have a voice that I want to share (though you may wish I’d go back to being silent ).

Visitors:
Since my first post on August 10th, I have had 481 visits, 275 unique visitors, and 1282 page views of my blog. Considering I haven’t truly dedicated myself to driving traffic yet, I am relatively excited by these numbers. Last week alone I had 162 visitors (109 of which were unique) with over 371 page views. I have just recently begun to play around with twitter, StumbleUpon, and other traffic driving techniques so I am definitely looking to continue the upward swing.

Comments:
With 80+ comments spread over my first six posts I am definitely feeling the love. I know a ton of people struggle with getting comments in the beginning so I feel pretty blessed that people seem to be resonating with my articles (my first post alone has 30+). I have even started to get a few pingbacks with each of my posts (I didn’t even know what these were a couple of weeks ago). But I also know a lot of this has to do with the comments I have been leaving on others’ blogs. I always strive to provide relevant comments that add value when I write on others’ posts. I will never become “THAT GUY” who just copies and pastes generic comments on every blog he comes across in order to get backlinks to his site…those guys suck – the copy and paste comment method is not only shady, but it’s also easily identifiable and these people will not get very far in the long-run. But I digress, back to the review.

Subscribers:
I currently have 11 people on my mailing list and about 5-8 feedburner subscribers depending on what day it is. Not as high as I would like but it is still early, after all. And, I didn’t even have feedburner set up until last week so I can’t be too disappointed (but if  you would like to help out then by all means click here to receive my updated posts via email – yes, it’s a shameless plug but what the hell, we’re all friends). I have a few ideas that will hopefully increase my numbers in this regard and they all involve offering the best free stuff I can find so keep an eye out!

SEO / Google Rankings / Alexa Rankings:
It took me a while to figure out (aka, last Wednesday) that I not only needed to learn HOW to use the All-in-One SEO Pack on Wordpress but that I also needed to ACTIVATE the damn plugin. In fact, my pages have yet to be indexed correctly but they ARE starting to return organic results – I’m even getting a little bit of traffic from Google which is surprising considering (1) I only have 6 posts and (2) none of my pages have made it to page one yet (at least not that I am aware of).

But, despite not ranking too high yet, I have seen a dramatic jump in my Alexa ranking. After previously being unranked, last week I made it to the 2.43 millionth “most important” website only to LEAPFROG ALL THE WAY TO…1,896,583. Talk about ballin’! Okay, okay – this is nothing to get excited over but it’s still fun to think I increased my ranking by 500,000+ spots in one week. I have a ways to go to make it into the coveted top 100,000 but my Alexa ranking is something tangible that will always help me to track and evaluate my progression over time.

Alright, I have turned an 800-word post into a post of 1,300+ (what’s new?) so I am going to stop right NOW…or after this:

This exercise of looking back and evaluating my progress has shown that even though it has been crazy month, I have come further along than I had given myself credit for and it motivates me to push ahead even further this next month. I hope you will continue to follow me on my journey and I sincerely appreciate all the support and advice you have showered me with from day one. As always, I would love to hear your feedback – either on this post or my blog in general – so please leave a comment below or hit me up on twitter (paulnorwine). I also urge you (seriously, this time) to subscribe to receive post updates via email. I know that I will only reach my goals if I help enough people reach their own…and that’s exactly what I intend to do. Until next time…

Paul