5 Questions You Got Answer Before Blogging Full Time

This is a guest post by Naveen Kulkarni. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

So , you have decided that you want to start a blog and build a successful online business. You have also decided that you will take up blogging as a full time career.

Let me congratulate you on your mindset of enterprenership. Considering the fact that hundreds of new blogs created every day, only few bloggers achieve incredibale success and rest of others fail leaving blogging midway or blog in a while. It’s because they dont see the expected results from thier blogging activities.

Let me tell you that I am not discouraging you, in fact I would encourage to take up blogging as a full time career. Before I do that ,I want to ask you few important questions which will help you to re-affirm your decesion and give you a first hand knowledge about what are the pillars for building a successful blog.

Believe me, I want you to create a online business, not a just a blog. An online business is much more than a content writing, it’s a complete business model involving content generation, marketing and a supported by a payment management system. Its a real business. It’s serious.

Are you ready for my questions? Take a deep breath and let’s begin.

1. Do you love to write?

Yes, this is where you start. Are you passionate about writing? Because, your passion for writing determines your success in blogging. Remember, you can always improvize your writing (by writing more) but core questions remains same. Are you a passionate writer?If you are passionate about writing, then blogging might be a great avenue for you. Go ahead my dear and if you dont love writing and want to start a blog just because someone else succeeded, believe me you are not gong to go too far. You might fail in midway because a quality content is the lifeblood of a blog and not being able to produce quality content is like running out of gas while driving on a beuatiful highway.

2. Are you dumping your current job to blog?

Let me discuss another important topic. What are doing currently? Are a full time employee or running a profitable business already or doing a freelancing job which is of course earning you bread and butter? And if you are starting blog by leaving your full time career then I suggest you to go slow. Message is go part time for blogging.

Why not? After all blogging is such a wonderful way to work. Many of the A-List bloggers were full time employees before becoming successful bloggers. Start small, test, experiment, expand and achieve. OVer the time,If your blog earns atleast 50% of your full time job, then its a sign that you can take it as a full time career.

3. Are you willing to learn?

Blogging is continuous learning experience. If you are brand new to blogging, then you might have to learn lot about how to set up a blog, adding plugins , publishing articles, content marketing , social media and so on.

Apart from these, you also need to wet your hands in technical platforms such as php, css and photoshop. I am not asking you to become an expert in any of these skills but you need to get a grip of these which can help you establish your own brand in blogging.

Are you willing to learn more about writing magnetic posts? Writing gets better with writing more. A quality content needs to touch people’s thoughts, solve thier problems, inspire them or motivate them to take some action. You may also need to learn about latest trends in social media and online world.

If you think, I am scaring you, then thats not my intention. Learning is beautiful and learning a life changing skills is a bliss.

I have just asked , are you ready for this wonderful challenge?

4. Are you ready to collaborate?

To succeed enormosuly in blogging, you need to collaborate and treat your blog like an enterprise. You may need to collaborate with other bloggers, sometime may need to outsource some work and so on. I am just making you aware of the steps in the journey, and about that fact that you won’t be able to achieve success alone.

5. Do you have patience?

Sorry for asking this one. Patience is virtue and even in blogging ,its true. Dont expect that your blog starts earning a crazy five figure income within six months of inception. Things will take time. You need to keep working and celebrate every small success as an online enterprenuer. You need to wait. You need to keep working. You will have your wow moment soon.

So do you have patience within you?

I am done with my questions. These questions may sound rude or discouraging at first reading but think again. Why I am asking these to you? I am arming with you with solid information about how to build an incredibel blog. If you get through most of these questions with a positive answer, then go ahead and create your first article. Be the next wave. Blogosphere needs you.

About the Author: Naveen Kulkarni blogs about personal development and life improvement on PlanetNaveen.com.

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6 Reasons Blogging is a Good First Business

This is a guest post by Jacqueline Boss. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The dream of becoming self-employed is the fuel that takes so many bloggers from the first few months of scraping for followers to the successful later years of making a comfortable income. But what is it about blogging in particular that makes it such a great option for first-time entrepreneurs?

1. There is a wealth of information about blogging

What entrepreneurs of big businesses do is search for an unfulfilled need in the market, and fill it, often with a fancy new product. This is a great money making strategy, but an extremely risky one because there is so little data for them to base their businesses on. Even if they are entering a market that is saturated with competition, it is unlikely that their competitors will want to share any insider information. And market research is expensive and time consuming.

Not so with blogging. You can find free, online, step-by step guides for almost any blog-related topic under the sun, from SEO and drawing traffic to which WordPress plugin to use to run contests and how to leverage your blog to get free products and services. Blogs are in the business of giving away free information. Unlike Coca-Cola which feverishly guards its secret formula, bloggers happily give theirs away for free.

2. Everything can be measured

Bloggers love their stats. Every blogger knows how many unique visitors he gets each month, his AdSense revenue, his bounce rate- you name it. These are all great things to know if you want grow your blog. But what I really love about the numbers is that it gives me constant validation and shows my progression toward my goals. 10% more subscribers. 50% more revenue. 1000 new visitors. Entering into many other types of businesses can be extremely discouraging for first-time entrepreneurs. Unless you are able to sell quickly, the only number you will know for a while is zero. Zero sales, zero profit, zero clients.

With blogging, you can see your numbers grow immediately after you take action. They may grow very slowly, but the increase is measurable and therefore encouraging. When my blog was getting twenty visitors a day, I was excited because it was more than zero. When I got my first AdSense click, I was excited to see a dollar in revenue.

3. You can start a blog while you transition out of your 9-5 job

One of the main reasons so many people aspire to be entrepreneurs but so few people actually become entrepreneurs is the fear and the risk associated with quitting a job. And sure, that can be very scary. But you can maintain and build a blog, as so many of the big guns have, while you are still employed full-time. You can ease your way into entrepreneurship, slowly building your income from blogging until you feel safe and confident enough to quit your job and blog full-time. Being a blogger doesn’t mean you suddenly have to fend for yourself and your family in the unfamiliar world of making money online- you have all the time in the world to make it work, but do yourself a favor and start right now.

4. There are almost no start-up costs

This pretty much speaks for itself, but compared to almost every other business you could ever dream of starting, blogging will probably cost you the least in up-front cash. You can get by, as I have, by paying for nothing but a domain name and hosting. Sure there are little “upgrades” like a premium site theme and cool WordPress plugins, but you certainly don’t need these. Blogging doesn’t break the bank.

5. You can write about what you are interested in

At the job you have now, or in another business you might start, you’ll probably have to focus all of your attention on one topic. Ideally you’ll love that topic, but that isn’t always the case. If you start a blog, it is your blog. You have the power. You can pick any topic under the sun to write about (of course it certainly helps if you know a lot about it and other people want to know). When you write about what you are interested in, it shows. You posts will naturally be more engaging and your readers will appreciate that.

6. You get tons of feedback

Feedback comes in two ways- from numbers and from people.

What is great about blog statistics is that you can access them instantaneously and use them to continuously tweak and improve your blog. For example, if you run a contest on Twitter, you know how many new subscribers you get almost as quickly as they can subscribe. You will quickly find out how many of those subscribers stick around to become loyal readers once your contest ends. You can use this information to help you create a more successful contest in the future. Can you think of many other businesses that get such instantaneous and thorough feedback?

As for the feedback from your readers and others- that could be a post in itself. It is incredibly rewarding to read positive comments left by people who were truly moved by a post you wrote or who were able to solve a problem because of the information you provided.

So if you’ve been on the fence about blogging, I’d say go for it. It could pay your bills one day, and if nothing else you’ll learn a lot and have a fun new hobby.

What do you think the benefits of blogging are for a first-time entrepreneur?

About the Author: Jacqueline Boss is a traveling entrepreneur and writes at Escape Normal, where you can gather inspiration and resources to become self-employed and travel, starting with 8 Reasons to Quit Your Job to Enjoy Life and the World.

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How to Be a More Productive Blogger

This is a guest post by Amey. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

At its core blogging is about sharing ideas and personal opinions. While bloggers may have ideas bouncing all over the place, a crucial choking point is trying to convey those ideas from our mind to paper.

Blogging typically requires generating loads of content, so if we can find a way to create that content at a more efficient pace it only makes our job that much easier.
Below are 5 action items we can follow to become more productive bloggers.

Create an idea list

Great ideas can spawn anytime, and we need to make sure we have a system to capture those eureka moments before they slip away. Whether you use a sophisticated application like Evernote or just pen and paper, come up with a set way to store blogging ideas and reference it when you are ready to create.

Focus on one article at a time

When it is time to actually write an article, focus on one at a time. While it may be tempting to flip back and forward as ideas pop into the head, it actually makes the final product take longer, while dropping the quality at the same time.

Outline your article

As useless as I thought creating outlines in English class were, I have never found them so important and useful as I do now.

Outlines allow us to visually see all pieces of an article and how we can best craft it together. In relation to blogging, an outline also makes it easier to see where we can link to other articles from our blog and insert any appropriate affiliate links.

Finally, an outline will let us know if the idea is actually meaty enough to be a full fledge article as sometimes the ideas in our head turn out not to be so grand or in-depth when we break it down onto paper.

Write all the way through the article before editing

When putting together an article you may be tempted to stop and go back earlier into the work to fix or add onto something, but that just ends of breaking the current concentration or flow of the article.

Write all the way through the article once, and then edit, remove, and add stuff as you see fit.

Create a checklist for post-article publication

Whether you submit your articles to social bookmarking sites, social networks, or email distribution lists, create a set checklist of tasks that should be done once an article is published.
Perhaps you could even pawn those tedious tasks out to somebody else, and by writing them out it makes it easier to share what needs to be done.

Wrapping it all together

Regardless of where we are trying to improve our productivity, creating a defined list of tasks or action items to follow is a great way to master that activity and achieve increased efficiency.

The less we make our brain focus on administrative tasks, the more free it is to be creative.

If you want to be a more productive blogger, stop thinking about quantity, focus on one article at a time, and rinse and repeat. Before you know it, you will be spitting out great content faster than ever before.

About the Author: For more productivity tips and solutions check out Amey’s blog at Organeat.com.

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6 Reasons Blogging is a Good First Business

This is a guest post by Jacqueline Boss. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The dream of becoming self-employed is the fuel that takes so many bloggers from the first few months of scraping for followers to the successful later years of making a comfortable income. But what is it about blogging in particular that makes it such a great option for first-time entrepreneurs?

1. There is a wealth of information about blogging

What entrepreneurs of big businesses do is search for an unfulfilled need in the market, and fill it, often with a fancy new product. This is a great money making strategy, but an extremely risky one because there is so little data for them to base their businesses on. Even if they are entering a market that is saturated with competition, it is unlikely that their competitors will want to share any insider information. And market research is expensive and time consuming.

Not so with blogging. You can find free, online, step-by step guides for almost any blog-related topic under the sun, from SEO and drawing traffic to which WordPress plugin to use to run contests and how to leverage your blog to get free products and services. Blogs are in the business of giving away free information. Unlike Coca-Cola which feverishly guards its secret formula, bloggers happily give theirs away for free.

The rest of this article can be found here.

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Bloggers, There’s More To Focusing Than You Think

Focus is a hot topic. Those who do it are always talking about how great it is. Focus helps us be productive, isolate problems, and change aspects of our lives.

There is, however, a huge problem I’ve noticed with the topic of focus as I perused the blogosphere. Nobody tells us what it means to focus and exactly how to do it.

I thought I was focusing several minutes ago, but it was a form of faux focusing. This made me realize that I had never clarified what focus entailed. Multi-tasking online is what I was doing, and it was under the label of focusing.

Bloggers often have a tough time focusing. Why? The internet is a very challenging medium to focus in. Endless entertainment and news’ websites/blogs are available to you at any instant. In addition, research sessions can turn into hours of jumping from article to article.

There isn’t anything wrong with that – if you’re not trying to be productive. But if you are trying to be productive, you have to focus for real, and this is how you do it.

1. Set Boundaries

This is especially crucial online, but applies to real life as well. The reason we need boundaries is because we live in the Age Of Distraction™. Very few of us spend time plowing the field and sowing seeds anymore. In that situation, there is little else to do besides the task at hand.

In the 21st century – we have phones sending us text notifications and emails, our Xbox 360s are beckoning to be played, the kitchen cabinet is tempting us with snacks, and the World Wide Web is stealing our attention with millions of websites containing information on anything we can imagine.

But boundaries can “free us” from these distractions that draw us in with gravity-like consistency.

Setting a boundary is drawing a line that prevents you from engaging in an activity aside from your intentionally-chosen focal point.

It is an extremely simple and powerful tool to use – and simple, powerful tools are the best!

• I will not open up an unrelated tab until I finish this article
• I will not eat anything until I finish this article
• I will not consider starting any other articles until this one is finished
• I will not answer any notifications from my phone until I finish this article

Those four bullet points alone have convinced me that I’m going to finish this article soon. You can (and should) apply this to any area of your life. It is a critical component of focus.

2. Engage in Specific Actionable Focusing

Earlier – in addition to lacking boundaries – I failed to focus on one actionable item. I set a goal that was too vague and had too many possible actions. The goal was to write two guest posts today.

Why doesn’t that work? Simply, I can only write one post at a time.

But even saying I’m going to write one guest post is not narrow enough. Writing one guest post is still a multiple step project. The initial action is to open up WordPress and start writing, and I immediately made progress when I focused on doing that. After that, it’s editing and revising, choosing a host, and sending an email.

3. Master The Refocus

Humans lose focus often. Very often. Our attention span as a race seems to always be decreasing. I think that Ritalin – used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder – will soon be so common that it will end up in the candy aisle.

Focusing is more accurately called “refocusing.” I nearly lost my focus by wondering about the guest post policy for a couple of different blogs. When I did that, I was tempted to break one of the boundaries I set in step one. Boundaries are helpful reminders to refocus.

We are not wired like cameras – which stay focused once set. We must manually refocus, constantly.

This shows how language can be problematic. When someone says they are skilled at focusing, they probably mean that they are skilled at refocusing as well. But someone who hears that and wants to focus might not understand that they also need to refocus.

Deciding to refocus is a small detail that can make a big difference. Just being aware of the need to refocus keeps my mind alert and responsive when I begin to lose my focus and drift away. I have refocused many times in this writing.

Conclusion – How To Focus

1. Set boundaries to prevent easy focal escapes and poor excuses
2. Concentrate on single action-oriented tasks to eliminate unproductive multi-tasking
3. Master the refocus to withstand distractions

I hope that you see the merit in what I’m telling you, because if you implement this advice, it will change your life. You’ll get more things done and your work will be high quality because of the power of true focusing (and refocusing, of course). This works.

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