This Blog Stuff

I guess I should start by giving you the rationale behind it. Both Nathan and I have been regular consumers of paid forums, courses and programs over the last couple of years - I dread to think how much we've spent between us!

Many of these have provided some tangible benefits, and a few have been total failures. But one thing they have all lacked has been genuine help for our specific businesses. All have used a generic module approach providing the same general information to a large body of people.

So we decided to do something about it, based on a lot of the feedback we got from the consultancies we did as part of the Beyond Blogging book.

I don't know if you saw Jordan's original post a couple of month's ago: Regift and win $500.

Here's the story - he won a prize, and decided to regift it to someone else, so he ran a contest on his blog. But he added a twist:

The winner, and each subsequent winner, could either take the prizes, or add something to them and regift the whole lot by holding their own competition. Each person choosing to regift, will then be put into a prize draw for $500!

I got lucky today - I won the prizes being offered on Rhys Wynne's blog - you can read about it here: Happy Birthday to me

Eventually the value of the prizes will be such that someone will break the chain and take them.

I’m feeling a little low at the moment. I keep stumbling across more and more negative stuff on various websites. Stuff that’s criticizing Third Tribe or whatever program or book is in the news this week, posts that seem to serve no purpose other than to complain about other (usually much more successful) bloggers, and  most recently, a whole post telling the world it’s impossible to create an income based on a blog. I guess I should be strong enough to realize that it’s small men (and it always seems to be men) with small minds who are writing this kind of thing. But it has got to me recently.

So I’ve decided to do something about it.

I’m going to spend a year proving the naysayers wrong.

I’d like to take four bloggers, and give them the benefit my own experience in taking a travel blog from zero to a full time income in one year. I’m going to help them as much as I can, and more importantly, I’m going to leverage my much smarter friends to help as well. We’re going to work together using all the latest tools, wherever we are in the world. We’ll talk, we’ll chat, we’ll Wave. We’ll do whatever it takes to help the four bloggers to achieve whatever they want to achieve with their blogs.

I tried to order some new business cards from Vistaprint a few weeks ago. I had one of their super duper offers, and decided I couldn’t be bothered travelling to my local printers – much easier to let Vistaprint mail some to me.

I won’t bore you with the details, but Vistaprint are hopeless. Something went wrong in their system after I spent an hour designing the cards, and then it took two full days for their customer support to get back to me, and not solve my problem!

Their saving grace was Jerome, who works in one of their US offices. He picked up a desperate Tweet from me, and worked like a dog over two days to solve my problem. Finally he was let down by the company’s processes. Frankly, he deserves better support from his employer.

Anyway, the upshot of all this was that I took a screenshot of the card I’d designed and sent it to my local printer.

Straight away, he started adding value. He suggested some changes, fiddled with the colors and resolution, and sharpened the image. His proof captured what I wanted, but just looked so much more professional than my effort.

Let me pause for a moment so you can get your bearings:

While we weren’t paying attention, blogging became ordinary. The established players, with a couple of notable exceptions, are the same established players who were around a year or more ago. And they’ve become The Establishment. And what happens then? They become ordinary. They don’t take risks, they recycle ideas, they constantly aim for the status quo.

I remember seeing Blondie perform live many years ago, before they became famous. They were raw, they were punk, they were cutting edge, electrifying. And then they became superstars, and suddenly they were safe, and warm, and ordinary.

It’s our time now, my friends. We’ve learned and observed and copied. And now we have to push past the establishment, explore new places and new ideas. It’s time to push the boundary, expand the envelope. It’s time to galvanize and excite our tribes.

It’s time to be extraordinary!

Are you with me?

I don’t know if you caught Nathan’s post on Copyblogger? It was typically good, but the comments were world class! Take a look, but get a coffee first – there are quite a few!

Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The ones that really struck me were those posted by Brian Clark and Sonia Simone. They were saying that we shouldn’t try to market our blogs to everyone, that we should focus on the smaller number of people who we can really connect with. And that kind of switched a light on for me. Let me explain why:

Here’s a quick list of all the products reviewed here on Mike’s Life during the last year. Most are free, some are paid:

Google Chrome Browser

Adgitize ad network

Moleskin notebook

Viral Tweets free software

Switching to Aweber

Using Livewriter for blogging

David Risley’s three day money

It’s late afternoon here, and time to start winding down from work and get ready for the party to celebrate the new decade. Here are a few of my thoughts:

In my round up of 2009, I promised to share my objectives for 2010. I think it’s a good thing to go public with these – it’s a kind of affirmation putting them out there in the public domain, and it’s also a good way to clarify your thoughts – if you can explain them to everyone else, then it means you really understand them.

So let’s have a look at what I hope to achieve, with your help:

Content

I’ve posted around once a day during 2009, but I’ve noticed a marked increase in traffic when I have put two or more posts onto the site. For that reason, I want to up the posting frequency. I plan to do this by adding Firas’ techie posts, and also doing more “newsy” short posts on stuff of general interest to bloggers. I hope that will increase the value to readers, and make Mike’s Life an even better resource for new and learning bloggers.

Objective: 10 posts a week, 500 for the year.

Traffic

This blog is a year old. In some ways the time has flown, in others it seems a lifetime since I wrote the first stumbling words on here.

I’m happy. Thanks to you, the objectives I set out have been achieved.

• We’re consistently getting over 1000 visits a day
• There are more than 800 people who are part of the Mike’s Life community
• I’m earning a reasonable living from it
• It’s consistently climbing in the Alexa rankings, sitting at 130,000 today
• I’ve had loads and loads of fun

I wanted to share some thoughts with any of you who might be about to embark on a blogging journey – hopefully distilling what I have learned into a few pithy sentences.

I believe you need the four “C’s” to make a blog successful in a year:

• Courage
• Content
• Community
• Conviction

Courage