blogvp

Chanding places, changes your thinking…. Darren mentioned some places where he blogged from:

- friends houses - I have a mate’s house who I occasionally spend the day at so that we can work in the same room - it’s nice to have the company - even though he’s not a blogger I find our conversations lead me to try new things on my blogs
- net cafes - I did this for a day recently when my broadband went down
- public libraries - I did this for a week 18 months back and it totally gave me a new perspective on blogging - once I got past the frustration of having to book a computer and blog in one hour blocks of time
- other rooms in the house - I have a bit of a daily rhythm now where I move rooms during the day to keep things fresh - bed, office, couch, kitchen table, back yard - wireless is my friend
- local cafes - I have one cafe that i regularly take my laptop to. They don’t have wifi but I just write there (offline) and upload later. I find it’s a great place to blog without the distractions of incoming email and IM.

So I’m going to add some of my favorite place to blog or just bring my laptop to:

• College Libraries - this is always a fun place, although it’s usually very quite, during the two weeks leading up to the finals it’ll be pretty full. The atmosphere is usually really good for writing.
• Starbucks - They have the T-zones provided by T-Mobile, and if you’re already a customer of Tmobile, it’s only $19 per month for any of their access points for unlimited usage.
• Bookstores - Most of these have internet already also, and usually you can get some nice coffee too, and if you need to look something up or stir your brain cells, you can browse different subjects to get the mind going.
• Wardriving - I don’t know if this is legal or not where you might be living, but you can just turn on your laptop and drive around seeing what networks you can pick up and where you can just park and have net access for blogging.

What places do you go to get away and blog/use the net?

wifi, blogging, places

So I’ve been going over my October and I’m not reporting, yet, what I’ve earned from blogging because it’s not groundbreaking, but from all of the reading and research that I’ve recently done, I’ve come to one conclusion, which is this:

If I want to be successful in blogging, where I’m only supported by blogging, than I need to commit to at least two years of constant blogging and it’s over

The evidence for this comes from many different places, but two places recently mentioned. Darren, and his photography blog and Jeremy and this ensight blog. If you look carefully, both have been operating for at least two years. So now they both have serious income coming in.

successful+blogging

Darren has a nice write up on how it is in the best interest of bloggers that want to earn all of their income from blogging to take the long view, and not be discouraged in the short run.

So if your goal is to grow a substantial online business - one of my main piece of advice is to take a long term view of it. While a very small percentage of successful online business people do seem to make it big overnight - the examples of this are increasingly becoming fewer and farer between.

Go to your nearest brew house, get yourself a nice Americano, then take in the following:

When I worked for the banking industry, I found that the people that succeed, either at production or managerial levels are numbers freaks. The company literally tracked everything that had an impact on sales and production. No, I don’t mean like the number of calls you do, and how much you broght in at the end of the month for the company, but everything that could be quantified was tracked. And in real time, or updated every couple of hours.

I didn’t know what the numbers meant in the beginning and I hated keeping up with all of the numbers, it would be too confusing and I would become frustrated. But after about a month, once I learned how all of the numbers and stats worked, and no longer had to consiously thinking about what they meant, I began to use them to my advantage. I became obsessive about the numbers, they spoke to me.

The numbers told me what I need to work on, what to fix, what to focus on and they also told me where I was doing a great job, and when I should celebrate.

Moral of the story?

What is driving your blogging productivity?

So lately, with so much to do on my plate, I’ve thought about my productivity and am asking myself the following questions:

• What’s driving my blogging productivity? A system or random burst of feelings?
• If I’m to succeed, what do I need to produce? How many posts per day? Per month? per year?
• How many blogs should I have? and what is the reason for each blog?
• How do I divide my time so that I can maximize on results?
• What is the best method of planning and tracking my productivity?

I’ll be considing these questions and writing about them here, and it will do you a great deal also to answer these and related questions to increase your blogging productivity.