Mind the Beginner

Here we are again, another week has passed and what an eventful week it has been. I’ve set my three goals for the oncoming months, I’ve set my life goal and my reason for wanting to achieve it and I’ve entered the Project Mojave to make this life goal (which is a dream) become reality. Although we must not forget that goals are not the things we should be trying to reach, we should be enjoying the route that takes us there. Also, keep in mind what you want to do after you reach your goal. Many people who worked all their lives and saved up for retirement now sit at home, depressed, because they had no goal, no life plan, no idea what to do when the time came for them to start enjoying themselves.

Let’s have a look at this weeks numbers shall we?

Average number of pageviews over this week:118, a slight increase.

Interesting to me is the growth this blog has experienced in three months. If we look at the number of pageviews a month it get’s interesting. Remember, my first blog entry here was on March 13th.

• March: 145
• April: 1637
• May: 2240 (And we still have a week left! I’l probably get 400-500 more views)

Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: This has been fluctuating quite a bit. Google reader is still being a total git when it comes to displaying my feed. The number of subscribers maxed out at 40, but is now back at 32.

Where the traffic is coming from:I had another “powertweet” this week. Someone promised me a guestpost but things fell through as my post wasn’t exactly what they hoped. (Multi-author blog) So I could post it on my own blog instead and they would tweet it for me. It has resulted in some nice traffic coming this way although I doubt I’ve made them stick. If you must know, it was the blogpost about using twitter to climb mountains. Another small contribution in traffic has been made by the forum over at Project Mojave. Traffic sources are becoming more and more varied.

What I have done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned: I’ve learned that you can make friends in the strangest ways, as I wrote yesterday I’m now participating in Project Mojave and all the knowledge I’m getting there will certainly help me grow this blog further. As you might have noticed my blogposts are getting longer almost every day. I started out with blogpost containing no more than 400 words. My post on hormones this week was over 2000 and I felt comfortable with it. I can really tell my writing skills are getting better. Not only that but I’m making fewer  typo’s and grammatical errors as well.

I’ve also learned that google reader can be a real pain.

I did a new setup on the feed and found the problem, faulty HTML coding… Things are back to normal now.

This will be the first time I’d rather not do the weekly update. It would probably scare away some people who just discovered this blog. I have however made an obligation out do this post and so I am going to do it however. It’s a Saturday post after all and traffic is slow during the weekend. The great stuff will be back on Monday, stay tuned. You can expect around 3-4 proper posts a week from me and the weekend update.

For the newer readers here, my target is to reach 500 pageviews a day for 7 consecutive days or 300 subscribers to my RSS feed, whichever comes first. The deadline is the 12th of August. If you’re curious as to why I have that deadline you can read more about it here.

It’s all about getting known and being appreciated.

Average number of pageviews over this week: 104 With some help of a powerful retweet the numbers went up on Friday. My estimation for traffic on Friday was way off as you might imagine.

Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: The subscribers are at a steady increase. I have counted 35 of you who have subscribed to my feed. Thank you for that. It feels good to know that you like my content enough to want to read more.

Where the traffic is coming from: Traffic is getting more diverse every week. More people are coming in through search engines. Mainly around the topic of “minimalist living” (even had one reference from Google through “Living in a truck”) Although I didn’t know it at the time of writing the post on living on a small footprint is proving popular. Twitter is pitching in as always, the forum I talked about last week is still generating some traffic as well. Other than that, there are no real big sources, it’s all over the board.

What I have done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned:In accordance with what I write about I have rewritten the subheading to my blog (on my about page) it now states “Zen and the art of living the beginner’s life” In stead of “Zen and the art of beginning” I feel that it suits my niche better as I slowly but surely make a name for myself and settle in this quite comfortable niche. It’s very important that people get a good idea on what the blog is about after seeing the about page for a second. If it’s not clear you just lost a reader. I might start blogging a bit more about freedom businesses in the near future and where the zen is in that. It seems freedom businesses are becoming more and more mainstream these days and beginning one is exactly what I’m about. (The “beginning” is where it’s at or me.) Blogging is freedom after all and every blogpost is a new beginning. Setting up a business is also beginning. Let’s explore that further in future blogposts.

This week I started to really chase around the people in the collaboration to get everyone to pitch in. It’s not working exactly as I hoped but there is some traffic being generated by it and I’m seeing consistent growth everywhere. I also started digging other blogposts of course. I’m not just in it to grow my own blog as quickly as possible over the backs of others but to really help everyone get to where they want to be and to get them noticed. I have used several lessons I learned in the 31DBBB to make friends. I gladly provide links to other blogs and pick out specific people to “make famous” as Darren puts it. It might not get my blog bigger directly but when the time comes and people see I’m honest about my links to them they will remember me. It’s all about getting known and being appreciated.

On a sidenote: I feel more and more hampered by having a wordpress.com hosted blog. The last few days thoughts have gone through my head about buying the domain I wanted (and is now in safe keeping) and just get on with things. All the links out there that point to my blog point to the wordpress hosted site. I’ll loose all those direct linkbacks as soon as I transfer. Also, setting up a little bit of advertising is very hard to achieve on a wordpress hosted blog. I’m restricted by this theme (that I like a lot but would redesign to add a third column I think).

I have talked about mental mountains before, those peaks in success that we want to climb. For most these peaks are dreams, for some goals and for the happy few they are reality.

Twitter as you probably know is a social media tool that exploded onto the Internet a while ago and has been a great success. It’s almost unheard of to not an account there. If you watch CNN you can’t even get around twitter anymore because they use it as a source of information to see what’s trending at the moment.

Twitter has become mainstream and all over the world millions of people are following each other. Mostly just for the social chat but there is some serious business going on as well. Social media are an easy way to promote yourself or your business and to meet up with other people, twitter gives us the added bonus that we learn how to say just about anything in 140 characters or less. Great for productivity, not so great for people who want to share their life stories.

Twitter is a very powerful tool to climb your mountains with. To harness that power you need three things:

1. A twitter account
2. Socializing skills
3. A little spare time to tweet in

Let’s state the obvious first

Getting followers on you twitter account is slow at first. The first 100 people you follow are probably people you know directly through blogs, other sites and perhaps real life. Some follow you back. You have made a beginning and start to socialize. The more you tweet the more chance you have of being retweeted. Your name reaches people you don’t follow yet and who don’t follow you. Have your name pop up often enough and you’ll get more followers.

Getting a retweet does involve you actually adding something to the community. You do that by being interesting and helpful. If you keep that up more people will flock to your banner. Your name gets out there and the ball starts rolling faster and faster until you get dozens of new followers a day. People will recommend you through #followfriday and you’ll get even more followers. (And hints on who to follow yourself)

Being helpful

Being helpful to others is what climbing mountains is all about. Someone asks a question through twitter and you answer it. If you think you can answer a question and your answer will be helpful try to always answer. Again, this gets your name out there and gets you recognized as a helpful person who doesn’t use twitter solely to promote yourself.

The more you help people the more followers you get, got it?

The power of twitter: All you have to do is ask.

The power is with the followers

And now they key to all this. If you have 1000 followers and you have a question, even if just 1% of those people can help you, you end up with 100 answers to your question. Not every answer will be great but combined they will get you another step towards the top of your mountain.

Ask to be retweeted and you will be. (seriously!) Reaching even more people who haven’t heard of you yet. Given enough time and skill you’ll rise through the “ranks” of twitter and come up top somewhere with thousands of followers who want to help you whenever they can.

The wider the base of followers the higher you can get. Logically maybe one person in a thousand will be able to help you in such a way that you leap forward. Having thousands of followers means several leaps. Getting you up your mountain that much faster.

Try to be that one in a thousand person every time you help someone. When the time comes they will remember you and do whatever they can to return the favor.

More reading on mental mountains:

Is that a mountain?

Stand still please, the future will still be there tomorrow

The three essentials of an uphill struggle

The truth about positivity, stop dreaming!

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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.