Mind the Beginner

Do I look like I need help? Do I ?!

Writing a blog and better the world, provide you with great content that is going to leave a mark and changes lives. Just some of those ideals that bloggers strive for. Making a difference you know.

I’ve tried to help others with issues I though I had an answer to. Tried and failed I admit. For you see, there are a lot of people out there who do not want your advise. In the most extreme cases the only reason they won’t listen to you is because you’re younger than they are. I know, it’s strange sometimes, especially when you’re an adult deep into your twenties, a respected blogger or simply just know what you’re talking about. Age can be an issue, as can gender, religion, or perceived life experiences.

It’s a different matter when you’re acting out your profession, no patient of mine questioned what I told them when I was working as a therapist. Young and old alike, even the doctors would listen to me. Wonderful. But what if your blog is your profession? Or a patient won’t listen to what you have to say? Then what?

Frustrations

One of the biggest gumption traps out there is when you actually know what you’re talking about, you know what needs to be done to solve something. And people just don’t want to hear it. No matter what you do, they won’t have any part of it. You know people like this don’t you? It’s draining trying to reason with people like this. Actually, there is no reasoning with people who aren’t open to reason.

And so there comes a time when you just have to give in and give up. Yes, sometimes the only thing you can do is take your hands off of the whole matter and let someone live with what they think is right. Nothing you say will ever change their mind. Confronting them with the error of their ways will only make things worse. They don’t want to hear any of it and can become downright hostile. For a blogger this means you’ve lost a reader, for a therapist it means you have one less patient. For a human being, it means your ego got bruised.

Mind your own business! – Oscar Stephenson Trich

Ostrich Politics

I don’t recall ever seeing ostriches being involved in politics but if they would, their modus operandi would be sticking their head in the sand and refusing to view immovable facts as a practical, reasonable basis for further action. What can you do about this? Absolutely nothing and it gets under your skin if you let it. And so you won’t give up, you keep trying to convince others that you know what you’re talking about and can help them.

This is what we bloggers want to do, we want to offer our advice, our help to anyone and everyone. We know what we’re writing about, we’re at the top of our game and you should listen. But you don’t, you never listen. And we just don’t give up.

Who’s the ostrich, we bloggers who keep trying to have you flock to our personal cause, refusing to see that you don’t want our advice. Or you, refusing to get your head out of the sand and realising that we’re making a genuine effort to help because we know what’s good for you.

Back to real life

We should both face the facts, there are things that you don’t want help with and so there are things we should all just leave alone. On the other side of that coin, realise that you’re burying your head in the sand on some things and you really need to face the issues. Stop hiding, and I’ll stop badgering.

Looking back

On March 13th 2009 I made my very first blogpost ever, starting the blog on a wordpress hosted domain. Right off the bat I can tell you that that was a mistake. I should have started on my own domain from the beginning. My old domain is still getting more traffic every day than where you are now. Over the year this blog has had several small and big changes made to it. Ranging from new layouts, inserting images and discovering some useful HTML features all the way up to getting a clearer focus on what this blog is about.

I started out blogging about “A little blog on beginning, it sounds so simple but it’s quite complex.” this changed to ” lifestyle design and personal development with a Zen twist” and now I finally got down to what really gets me going: “Thoughts from a Zen mind in a Western World”. My view on just about anything and everything in my daily life. At times confronting and perhaps even a bit extreme, but always honest.

All I knew was that I wanted to learn how to write and connect with people around the world. I was looking for affirmation that there were more like-minded people out there. Also, I wanted to learn more about the dynamics of online marketing and social media. To do that you need some sort of platform to promote obviously. So it became twofold: connecting with minds and learning how to market.

Right now

Looking around at other bloggers who started out at just about the same time as I did (Corbett Barr and Carl R. Nelson to name two) you might be tempted to say that this blog is a very slow grower and I must be doing something wrong with the marketing. That could well be the case, I like to think the main reason is that these two put so many hours in their blogmarketing that they deserve it. There is no secret way of doing this, it comes down to putting in the hours. (That, and I haven’t done any guestposts)

Looking around you might also conclude that I’m doing rather well. For the first time in the history of this blog the feedburner counter jumped the 200 mark. It took me 8 months to reach 100, and 4 months to go up to 20o. May I conclude that I will be at 300 subscribers in another 2 months? (and 400 one month later). That would bring me well over 1000 subscribers in the next year. 300 Subscribers is one of my goals for this year as you might recall and it looks very much within reach.

Another awesome thing happened to me this year of blogging. For the very first time in my personal history I actually earned money through without selling a physical object. Although I’m no where near my goal of the $500 a month goal I set seeing money being transferred into your paypal account from a sale is empowering, no matter the amount! It gives a sense of accomplishment. And thinking about one of my initial intentions to start blogging, I’ve marketed my blog effectively enough to earn a few dollars. The theory that you can earn money through blogging is now a fact to me. I can now honestly say I know.

Personal things

Learning how to write has had a significant impact on how I think and express my thoughts. Developing the skill to put to words what you are thinking is very powerful and if this was the only thing that blogging would have brought me I would be a very happy man. But of course there is more to blogging than just that. It also thought me how to stand up for what I think a bit more. I’m still trying to keep friends with everybody at times but there are moments when you can quite simply agree with me or be wrong!

I am a blogger and I am in it for the long haul. Personal experience and thought will never dry up and as long as that is there you’ll be reading about it here. Blogging taught me how to express myself, how to market a website and how to use social media to that end. Through blogging I’m very happy to have made friends all over the world, loyal readers and honest critics. Thank you!

Looking forward

We made it this far. So what’s next? Life and business are nowhere without a direction, a goal, a set of values. You can always come here and read about the world through my eyes, I will keep doing the best I can to offer you high-value content and meaningful blogposts to think about. Ruthless honesty and simplicity are my main values here and that is what you will get. My ultimate goal is to have this blog grow to well over 1000 subscribers, for however long that takes. Once there, nothing will actually change except the number of readers you can connect with to discuss my thoughts.

Are there other plans as well? Of course! I’m thinking about a few things: guestposting, a second blog, an eBook, learning CSS and HTML, more serious marketing to get my name out there as a blogger, the blogger on the subject of Zen thinking and the effects it has on life in terms of personal development, lifestyle design, minimalism, productivity and simplicity. You get the idea don’t you?

This first year was awesome! Thank you for your continued support. Hang on to your seat, it’s going to be a wild ride from here.

A small request

As a closing thought on this blogpost I’m going to ask you for your help. If you think this blog has added value to your life in any way, please spread the word. Backlink on your blog, tweet  and urge others to subscribe to my RSS feed.Thanks again, I would be nowhere without you.

I’ve been blogging for almost a year now and last week I tweeted a question, asking how people got their blog to grow. You can read stories all over the net of people having a hugely successful blog within a year. I’m defining success as a lot of comments on each blogpost and hundreds/thousands of subscribers. Although this blog isn’t exactly what you call unsuccessful, things could be so much better. And that’s where I really could use your help.

Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers is key. That and being useful to your readers  -  Corbett Barr

The quote here is what I got back on my question via twitter. Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers isn’t to hard. My plans for that are simple: Guestposting on any blog that will have me. Small blogs and big blogs, none will be left  out as long as they fit in the same niche. To get in touch with more readers I’m going to dive deep into the blogosphere and comment on at least three blogs every single day. Of course those comments need to add value, a simple “First! hahaha”  or “What a great post, please visit my blog” won’t cut it. The most effective is looking for new blogs out there you didn’t comment on before, it’s getting your name out there. Frequently posting meaningful comments on the same blog will get you noticed by the writer and readers and so that’s also a good idea to get out there.

What is usefulness?

Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there

But I’m left with a single problem: I have no idea if my blogposts are useful to you. Am I writing things that matter and help? Or is it all a load of **** that nobody really finds interesting to read and/or is just dime a dozen content? How would you describe usefulness when it comes to blog content.

A long while back I laid out the plan on growing my blog  A blogpost filled with 16 building blocks to a succesful blog was what resulted. Back then the goal was 500 pageviews a day or 300 subscribers. I haven’t reached either – yet-, but the blog is still growing slowly every month and it’s only a matter of time until those goals are reached. There is no doubt in my mind about that. If there is one thing that I’ve learned from the successful bloggers out there is that things very rarely happen overnight. You’ll have to really commit and it can take years to build a really useful blog which is successful. Being useful by writing good content, answering questions and providing help is one side of the coin, it’s useless if you don’t reach anybody with it so you’ll have to market your blog as well. Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there.

I’d like to ask you two questions:

1. Is this blog useful to you?
2. What would make this blog more useful to you?

Blogging is very different from writing a book, you can actively engage with others and address issues that come up. It’s a great way of communicating and I want to make your experience on this blog better. Help me help you and we’ll both profit from it.

Thanks for the support my friend, I hope to hear from you

If you’re not interested in effective writing or have mastered the skill of writing skip this blogpost. If you’re like me and always on the lookout for tips to make things more effective, this one if for you!

Block quotes are one of the three attention-grabbers when scanning an article to see if it’s worth reading. Read the blogpost to discover the other two.

Yesterday I dug up and old syllabus from my previous education as therapist. It was about effective writing and there were some nice pointers in there I really want to share with you. Over the years there have been a lot of blogposts and entire blogs on writing effectively. But as of yet there is one rule in my syllabus that I haven’t found out there yet. It might be, it might not be, at least now it’s here on this blog.

The rule of seven:

• No more than 7 sentences to a paragraph
• No more than 7 paragraphs to a chapter
• No more than 7 chapters to a text

With a margin of 2 on all these.

The word count

Simple isn’t it? But there is more of course. The maximum length of a sentence that  people can comprehend is related to education. It’s bit harsh but people who didn’t finish high school can’t handle sentences the way academics can. If you want to write a text that’s readable for everyone sentences should be no longer than 10 words. High School drop-outs can take 14 words and 24 words is a suitable length for academics. It’s not set in stone but it’s a good guideline to keep in mind when writing. Who is your audience? It’s quite easy to overestimate your readers.

Combining these two rules we get between 1250 and 7290 words to a text for everybody, and 3000 to 17496 words for academics. Somewhere in the order of 7000 words seems the ideal length for the typical eBook and 980 for a blogpost. All these are rough estimates of course but using these you can expect that an eBook over 17500 words long will surely be a bit on the long side.

Improving readability can be done by including underlines, bold, and italics but especially underlines are not a particular good idea in blogposts. After all, links in blogposts are almost always underlined and you could send the wrong signal. A text full of underlined words at first glance would seem like a text full of links. It could get even worse if you underline a word and make it blue as well. Now surely your first impression is that it’s a link. Did you try and click it?

Subheadings

are another way of grabbing attention and dividing a text to improve readability. It draws the attention and effective subheadings will almost lure the reader deeper into the text. The title of the article is the first thing people see and so that too should grab attention while covering the essence of the article. Not to long and definitely to the point, it should leave the reader with the feeling of “I need to read this”. These aren’t all the tools you have to write effectively. Blogreaders are a special breed of readers, they want the information in quick, scannable bits and are always in a hurry. As a blogger you can help your readers with that and provide highly scannable content.

One of the easiest things to scan is the:

• The list
• it’s short
• easy to scan
• and provides structure
• see what I mean?

Chances are you already scanned the list before actually reading the blogpost. Together with the subheadings these are two of the three most scannable features in any blogpost. The last one you’ve probably already scanned as well before deciding to read this post. It’s the block quote at the beginning of this blogpost. These three text-based eye catchers are what grabs you at a first glance. (Four if we count the title of the blogpost.) That leaves us with one non-text eye catcher that is absolutely crucial. A picture is worth a thousand words and doesn’t increase the word count! A bad picture or no picture at all will seem dull and uninspiring. The right picture makes or breaks a blogpost.

The closing line to a blogpost is where you make your statement. Use all the tools you have, make your blogpost scannable, make a clear statement, and don’t forget to write both a good opening and closing  line, they really matters.

A few hours ago an e-mail entered my inbox. Sent by Problogger, a blogger you might now as Darren Rowse, one of the biggest bloggers out there and one of the happy few who makes a six figure income by blogging.

A long time ago when I started this blog Darren was offering a cycle of the 31 Days to Building a Better Clog challenge. I eagerly jumped on the project and the following 31 days was total pandemonium. Thousands of bloggers took part in the challenge to make their blog a better blog in just 31 days. Every day a new assignment would come online and we’d all implement what Darren was suggesting and follow things up with discussing about the assignments on the forum. THousands of bloggers doing so at the same time, hundreds of bloggers looking at each others blogs.

In 31 days my blog got a really good start in it’s digital life and the lessons learned are still being applied to this day. Now you must be wondering, what does that mail have to do with things and why am I trying to sell you something?

The truth is, yes this is an attempt to sell and the link I’m offering here is an affiliate link. << Click

Now I might have already lost you right there, I sure hope not because I have a very good reason to do this. By following the link you will be taken to the product page, but what it doesn’t tell you as far as I can tell is the temporary (7 days) bonuses that are on offer.

• A report by the name of 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track for the New Year – it is a 9 day extension of the 31 Day workbook and contains 9 extra tasks, particularly designed for the new year. This means you have 40 days of exercises to get you going.

• A 55 minute podcast with Leo Babauta from ZenHabits.net – this podcast is rich with tips on how Leo has launched his blogs and leveraged them to sell successful e-books and a best selling book.

• A 45 minute podcast interview with Neil Patel from Quicksprout.com – another practical podcast with Neil on how to drive traffic to blogs as well as tips on personal branding, SEO and more.

Now If you are still with me after all that you might be wondering why I’m doing this, why am I lowering myself to this shameless promotion. It’s a simple truth: blogging is an enrichment of your life, at the very least you become skilled in putting your thoughts to words and sharing your thoughts with others. By themselves writing skills are already very useful. Interaction is very likely to follow and you’ll get in touch with people who share your way of thinking or are really interested in what you have to say.

The main item itself is a workbook filled with tasks to get your blog up to speed. If you’re a first time blogger or thinking about writing a blog but don’t know where to begin this is just about the best resource around. You can work through the workbook in your own time and have it all in a nice bundle.

To sum things up: No, this blog is not permanently lowering the standards. I just feel that if you plan on blogging, have a beginning blog or have a writers urge then this really is a good place to start.I really do endorse this product, the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog is the single most significant thing that helped me start this blog and give it the flying start.

 Time and time again I look at this screen and think about what to write next. Where to get my inspiration and how to make an interesting blogpost. Today I had no inspiration at all so I decided to look through some of my old blogposts and the comments I got there.

One in particular did manage to inspire me. The comment came from Stephen over at ratracetrap stating that he liked my short blogpost style. Now you might have noticed that lately I’ve been writing longer and longer blogposts so it seems I didn’t listen to Stephen.
Short blogposts do have their advantages, there are whole blogs dedicated to the tao of short posts. They usually post several times a day and have multiple bloggers working on the same blog. This blog of course has only one blogger so multiple posts a day would seem a bit steep.
Now what is this tao of the short blogpost. Again, it’s quite simple after someone tells you:

• Short posts make for quick reading
• Short posts pack a punch (a quick one of course)
• Short posts get to the point quickly

The overall theme here is being fast and being witty.

That’s the tao of the short blogpost in a short post: Make a statement, do it fast and get away with it!

Thank you for the two minutes of your time. 

It’s almost every day that you notice how unhelpful people can be. Everyone is minding his or her own business and not caring about what others do or what they can do for the other. Self first is the way to go it seems.

But doing things alone has two major disadvantages:

• You’re restricted to only the knowledge you have yourself and your perspective on things
• Your social network stays small

Working together might not be for you but through the internet there are certain things you can work on together without ever having to see eye to eye. In this perspective online life doesn’t mirror real life. Online we seem to want to help others with just about anything we can. Social networking is a force to be reckoned with online. Take the problogger challenge I took part in for instance.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Soon after starting with that challenge the realization came to mind that doing it (building a blog) all alone won’t be easy. You need “blogging buddies” who can help you when you’re stuck and who can help you promote your blog. This of course, works both ways. You might even get guestposts both ways. One of the powerful tools to reach a bigger crowd.

The need we have to work together and to tell others about our discoveries lies at the basis of forums. There are thousands (millions?) of forums on the internet in every single niche you can imagine. There are people there who are interested in the same things as you. This is especially useful when you’re in a very small niche as finding people in real life with the same interests might be very had indeed. The problogger forum that accompanied the 31DBBB helped me reach a bigger crowd. Everyone there is a blogger so specific questions still got answers.

There was another possibility however that got set up. A blogger’s collaboration. For beginning bloggers it’s hard to get noticed and to build traffic. There is only so much you can do by yourself. You can tweet all day long about your blog but you’ll only reach your followers (a few hundred?) and if you get lucky you get a retweet and you instantly reach more people. Other channels might be digg, stumbleupon, del.ici.us. They all depend on luck however.

Influencing luck

Can we help luck to be in a our favor? Sure we can: Find other bloggers who are willing to help a bit. It’s quite simple, digg their blogposts, stumble them, tweet about them, help them with questposts on your blog. Scratch their backs an they scratch yours. And if you have blogs-specific questions you have a group of bloggers you can ask to help. There’s bound to be someone in the collaboration who is good with webdesign. Another might be a wizz with twitter and everything he retweets can count on loads of traffic.

The results:

• Reaching more people
• A fresh perspective
• A bigger social network
• New friends
• A helping hand is never far away

Get out there, set up accounts at twitter, digg, stumbeupon, facebook, del.ici.us, technorati and any other place you can think of. Ask your readers if there are people there who want to work together for the mutual interest of building a better blog. Help yourself by helping others. Blogging is only one of many ventures that can benefit from working together. At the very least you get a fresh perspective on your preconceptions. At best you might end up with a friend for life.

In the near future I’ll be guestposting on other blogs and others will be guestposting here. It’s all part of the collaboration I’m taking part in that resulted from the problogger forum. There are fourteen bloggers in this collaboration and I must say, there are some real gems in there. 

This week I want to get more structure to my blog. To do so I need your help, there are a few questions I really would like your input on. Please do answer them in the comments, as the answers will help me build a better blog for you.

I’ve numbers the questions so it’s easier to answer them in the comment section:

1. How would you describe the niche this blog is in?
2. How many blogposts a week do you want to see here?
3. What is the optimal postlength for you?
4. Are there things on this blog that you are missing?
5. Are there things you think I should do more?
6. Are there things you think I should do less?

As a second option you can of course mail me the answers if you feel uncomfortable about posting them publicly or have other reasons not to use the comment section. The mail is Mindthebeginner(at)gmail(dot)com. 

Also, if there is anything else that isn’t covered by this inquiry but you feel I should know please do tell me. I need your help.

Thank you, I really appreciate it.

The weekly update is here again and by just looking at the numbers it hasen’t been a great week:

Average number of pageviews over this week: 70

Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: 21 (very nice!)

Where the traffic is coming from: Again it’s mostly from problogger but twitter is pitching is as are the blogcomments I’ve posted elsewhere. I think it’s getting a bit more stable now. The initial hype is over and now I have to work even harder than before, jut to keep it up.

What I’ve done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned: I have added a lot of people on twitter in the hopes if getting to know more of my readers. A lot is defined by going from 158 following to over 400 and doubling my followerd to over 250. As I said last week I havn’t jumped on every blogpost at probloger anymroe and I don’t think it has caused my to much traffic I musts say. Most traffic is comming from the forum, not the blog comments. I’m also working on a collaboration of bloggers and it’s growing, we have about 10 members at the moment and it’s still growing. Somewhere this week I’ll be posting my plan in how I would like this collaboration to function. So stay tuned and hang on to your hats. This is going to be a wild ride.

Another post comming this week will be ” What’s in my bag” . I’ve always loved these things and I just have to do one of these. (I’m a regular at the EDC forums after all) Besides, I saw one the other day at The simple dollar and wrote in the comment that I would be doing one too. I have to keep that promise. 

Have a nice weekend everyone.

As you know I’m taking part in Probloggers 31 days to building a better blog challenge. Last Thursday we got the assignment to create a sneeze page. “The idea is simple – to create a page that propels people in different directions deep within your blog by highlighting a variety of posts that you’ve previously written.”

I looked into the statistics of my blog and realized there are older posts on my blog that hardly anyone has viewed let alone commented on. For whatever reason, these posts haven’t been seen so I thought, why not dig them up and present them in a sneeze page  for you. Today’s assignment is “breathe life into an old post” which means as much as give a post an overhaul to get it up to par with the rest of your blog. I realize now that those early posts (I’m talking about them like I wrote them ages ago, although it feels that way they are at most less than two months old.) are written differently than the current posts and although the concepts are there, some of those diamonds are still stuck deeply in the rough.

I will be exploring the concepts of those earlier posts in the near future but as it stands I would like to present you with the unseen posts of my blog:

Exploring beginner’s mind about the key of zen and preconceptions

Is logic really that logic about reacting vs responding

To blog or not to blog exploring reasons to blog

Is that a mountain? A post about the mental mountains I’ve talked about several times

Stand still please, the future will still be there tomorrow Getting your mind out of the future and into the now

I hope these earlier posts provide with a nice read. Bear in mind they are a bit rough around the edges but I’m slowly getting a better feel for writing as I hope you’ve noticed. Your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.

Have a nice read