Achieving Escape Velocity on your Blog

"Success in most fields is a combination of skill, knowledge and activity."

Interestingly, there are a lot of bloggers with some terrific writing skills. And getting the knowledge, with all the free information out there, combined with some of the excellent courses and books you can buy, is easy.

But what about activity? Are you doing enough?

You're a salesperson. You're selling yourself. You want readers, subscribers and customers, right?

I have people who work in my real estate business, selling property. I tell them that the only truly productive time they have is when they are talking to potential clients. Face to face, on the phone or via email. Sure, there are plenty of other things they do, but that won't sell a house. Only those three things will do that. I tell them to measure each day on how many conversations they've had.

And it's exactly the same for us as bloggers. The only thing that will get us readers, subscribers and customers is by talking to them. In posts, through books, in comments and via social media.

None of the other stuff will do it for you. The design and coding, reading other blogs, adding widgets and doing research. Again, you need to do those things, but they aren't productive.

Escape Velocity

You know the notion of "Escape velocity" - which is the speed an object needs to reach to escape the earth's gravitational pull. I like to apply that to blogging. Of all the millions of blogs being written today, only a few will achieve the escape velocity needed to rise above the common herd. And what of those left behind?

Many will be written with consummate skill.

Most of their writers will have built up great knowledge of the art and science of blogging.

But, they almost all will have failed in large part due to a lack of real activity.

Look around you at the winners. You know who they are. Chris, Darren, Nathan, Pete, Gary, Chris.

They all have something in common - prodigious output. Some do it on their blogs, some with guest posts, some on video, others on Twitter, and several with books. But you find their stuff everywhere, all the time.

High activity is not something to aspire to one day. It's essential. Right now.

I'm by no means in orbit yet, but:

In the last 12 months I have:

• Written at least three blog posts a day, seven days a week (not all for this blog)
• Written and published three full length books
• Sent out more than 12,000 tweets
• Commented..I have no idea how many times - 4000?

I'm lucky, I know - I get to to this full time, and maybe you can't yet.

But how does your activity in the areas that matter match up? Are you doing enough?

And then there's:

1/ Setting up a DIY affiliate scheme

2/ How to analyse the posts on your blog

3/ A story about selling