I have a few problems as a blogger.  First, I’m not necessarily patient.  I look at the work I put into a blog, and I want to see better results as far as ranking, traffic, and most importantly, income.  When results aren’t happening quickly enough I get frustrated.  That frustration can get in the way of writing.  It can become a chore to get past the “Why bother” stages, and force myself to crank out more posts.  Then something will happen to show that I’ve been on the right track, and everything gets back on track.

An example of that is my working to improve my blogs Page Rank.  I’ve written about building links as a way to improve your blogs position in the search engines, but I wasn’t seeing any results for my own link building efforts.  Over the past several days Google has been doing updates of Page Rankings, and this blog went from PR-0 to PR-3.

Another of my problems is that I am not a marathon runner, I’m more of a sprinter.  I tend to write in batches.  There is a lot of activity, then I slow way down while I try to catch my breath and get ready for the next sprint.  It makes it much harder to post with any kind of consistency when my writing habits are so inconsistent.  So my blogs tend to show a lot of posts in a relatively short period of time, then long stretches with very few posts.

I’ve written about setting up a writing schedule, but I’ve not made it an important enough priority to actually stay with it.  Well, I’m trying a gain.  You’ll be able to see the results for yourself.

I’d love to hear what it is you do to stay on track.

I’ve written in the past that traditional outlines don’t really work all that well for me. Even back when I was forced to use them in school, I found myself writing the paper, then going back and recreating the outline. So I don’t typically use outlines for the majority of my blog posts. I do, however, find that I need to at least get some thoughts down on paper before I begin writing. I’ve also found that I need to capture those thoughts when they first hit me, or chances are they will be gone forever. Read the rest of this entry »

Slowly but surely the blog is starting to take shape. I have a pretty good list of categories to get me started, so I have a lot of areas to write in. The trick for me is to make sure that I reason of time every day to read my daily posts.

My other task is to come up with a new design. I’m not happy with one I have. It was an AdSense optimized template, but it has so many ads that there isn’t enough room for the other things I wanted my sidebars. Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s the plan.

Last year I got pulled off track by too many low-paying/low potential jobs. In a way they were necessary evils, but now they’re merely distractions. This year I am going to refocus my efforts on areas that have greater potential to get me where I want to be. Because this blog is focusing on my journey as a professional writer I’m not going to spend a great deal of time on my other goals.

My main goals for the coming year are:

1.) Build my current and future blogging projects so that they become a significant part of my writing income. I haven’t determined what “significant” is yet, but when I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

Tapping into the experience and learning from the mistakes of other bloggers like David at PureBlogging, Darren at ProBlogger, Ben at the Blogging Experiment, and Chris at ChrisBlogging (to name just a few), as well as some experimenting on my own, I hope to be able to build several streams of income in the near future.

2.) Begin to market my services to business that could use a good writer for their professional literature.

3.) Increase my earnings as a producer of quality web content. This can be quite difficult considering the rates that some writers are willing to work for, but I believe quality sells, and as I continue to build quality clips, the higher paying jobs will come.

That, in a nutshell, is the goal for the coming year. Over the next several days I will be working on setting the plan to help me achieve that goal. I’m looking forward to the challenge, and I hope you come along for the ride. I could sure use the company.