Category Archives: Blogging

Guest Post: Why I Blog, my Lifestyle Project by FrugalNYC

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I’m very please to feature this is a guest post by my Twitter friend FrugalNYC. I’m looking for more guest posters to share an aspect of their Lifestyle Project. If you are interested please let me know!


2009frugalnyc

Why I Blog

So what is the definition of Frugal Living? To me, it is living below your means. Taking less from this blue planet than you give back. Spending less than your make so you have something for a rainy day. Better yet, it is about having a purpose and a goal. For me this is part being environmentally conscious.

Being “frugal” also means making the best of a situation with what you already have, and appreciating the fact that you have so much more than many people living today. Many people forget that Life is a “Gift”, and you need to live each day knowing this. You never really know whether you will still be around tomorrow. Just don’t let this fact stop you from living or preparing for the future. It’s all about having balance in life. Balance, in health, finance, spiritual and every other aspect of your life.

To really succeed, you have to be extraordinary. You need to believe that “YOU” are special and unique. You are the only one who can do things your special way. I’m not talking about self conceit. In a way, you have to fool yourself into being someone better than you are Today. That’s the journey I’m taking with my latest blog – Frugal Kaizen, and with all my other blogs. I aim to help and to be of help to anyone who find my writing useful.

Typical Tips From FrugalNYC

So what kind of tips do I usually have on my blog? I write about things that come across in my life. Things that inspire me to think and then write. Things that I can share and others in similar situations can benefit from. Some of what I write about are things that I find helpful as references for others as well as myself. I write a good deal about things to do in NYC for free. Public parks, Libraries, computing and I also delve into career and health. Frugal lifestyle practices are one of the staples of my blog as well.

FrugalNYC is part Travel blog, Finance blog, Tech blog, and little bits of other aspects of me mixed in. Initially, I had content about nearly everything of interest to me. Currently, the focus is more on Frugality, Finance and NYC as a destination for both visitors and locals.

I hope this post helps you identify who I am and what I believe in. I hope you’ll have a chance to drop by my blog and leave a comment or two on topics of interest to you. My blogs are in part, my “Lifestyle Project”.  I welcome any constructive criticism and ideas for improving my blogs.

I would like to thank Chris for giving me this opportunity to guest post on his blog!

For additional links to frugal tips and tricks follow me on Twitter. If you would like to contribute to FrugalNYC in any way feel free to contact me via email. Click here to add FrugalNYC to your RSS reader or Subscribe to FrugalNYC by Email.

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Blogging Inspirations

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blogging-heros

(There are a lot of links to great further reading in this post, so please set aside some time to have a look through them.)

A great blog, and therefore one I am likely to subscribe to is one that I can get lost in for a while. It will in someway connect with me and captivate my interest to make me click through the top posts and open up the archives for more nuggets of gold posted over the life of the blog.

In my current area of blogging there are some obvious ‘hero’ bloggers. There is Leo Babauta from Zen Habits who was one of the major inspirations for me starting a blog. There is Tim Ferris, the self styled guru of lifestyle design. These people enjoy the power of exponential growth in their following on an hourly basis. They all work very hard at what they do and collectively inspire millions of people around the world.

Aside from the above ‘A-List’ bloggers, I’d like to share some of my other favourite blogs. As you can see they all operate in different ‘niches’ and are excellent sources of information as they are aligned with my own Lifestyle Project. As with many blogs I can’t remember how I first came across them, and I’m sure if you are reading you might not remember how you go here. That’s how it rolls in the blogosphere.

Almost Fearless (@almostfearless )
I love this blog as Christine is on the journey that I am aiming for. A successful manager in an fortune 500 company, she earned a good living, worked hard and got great results. There came a time and, she just didn’t want to do it anymore. She had the realisation that there is more to life than a career and a few weeks away each year. The world is an amazing place. Don’t you want to do out and see it? Christine now travels funding herself through freelance writing and photography – and tells us all the story along the way.

Read Christine’s Lifestyle Project she shared on this blog here.

Posts to get you started on Almost Fearless:

Caroline Middlebrook (@cmiddlebrook)
Before you jump over to Caroline’s excellent blog which is essentially a blog about making money online, understand that it is not my primary motivation for subscribing to this blog. Caroline’s back-story is inspiring and this is what is important to the Lifestyle Project blog. Caroline also quit her day job to pursue what she wanted to do. She is an absolutely excellent writer and has a particular talent for teaching through writing. She demystifies the world of social media, blogging and making money online and shares here journey with you at a detailed level with monthly earning reports. Caroline is able to communicate simply the concepts in this minefield niche.

Posts to get you started on Caroline-Middlebrook:

MuscleHack (@musclehack)
Mark’s passion for muscle building, diet and communicating his message is outstanding. He has an excellent system for building muscle and loosing fat. His free eBook is exceptional if you want to learn about this. Mark cuts through all the fuzz in this area and gives you the cold hard facts based on his own learning. Currently I am working through Mark’s Total Six Pack Abs programme, the results are already showing! Expect a review of his book here soon. Mark is a great writer of focused informal posts, and has build up quite a following in just over a year of blogging.

Read Mark’s Lifestyle Project he shared on this blog here.

Posts to get you started on MuscleHack:

One of the reasons I believe the above people are successful bloggers is because they have a genuine voice, and really make you feel that you can succeed doing what they do . They are passionate about what they do and are truly inspiring to my Lifestyle Projects and me as a blogger. An interesting thing to note is the above blogs, like mine, are all under 18 months old!

Q&A with Leo from Zen Habits

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The other week Leo Babauta of Zen Habits fame did a live Q&A on his writing blog Write to Done. I was fortunate enough to get my question in and answered by Leo and it was great to be able to interact with a true blogging hero.

Here’s my question:

“I am a fairly new blogger. I don’t have a problem coming up with ideas for posts, defining post structure and writing the first draft, I do however struggle to finish, and edit my posts for publication.

Have you any tips for applying the finishing touches to posts, and editing to take them from a draft to publishable form. “

And here’s Leo’s answer:

“@Chris: Tips on taking a post from draft to published post … I generally follow the same structure and write my posts this way:

* I’m a list-maker, so I’ll often start with a list of tips or main points
* Then I’ll write an intro that shows the reader why he should care about the post. It might be anywhere from 3-7 paragraphs. Not too long.
* Then I’ll expand the list — it might turn out that each point in the list is a subsection of the post, or they could just be items on a list with a few sentences after the main point.
* To put on some finishing touches, I’ll often do some quotes from great people, maybe links to relevant articles (on my site or others), and definitely a great photo that attracts the eye.
* Of course, don’t forget a great headline!”

I’ve been following Leo’s blog for a long time now and it was one of the main inspirations for me to take up blogging myself. I do follow a similar posting pattern to above and it seems to work for me.

It was great to get an insight from such a great blogger and I recommend you check out the post to see all the other questions and answers if you are a blogger as well (as I know a lot of my readers are).

Incidentally if you are a new, or not so new blogger and haven’t read Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint then I can highly recommend it (you can download as an audio book for free too – I listen to it in the car).

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Bits & Bobs:

  • Had a great time in NYC, thanks to all those staying in touch via Twitter.
  • I’m planning a series of competitions on my blog starting very soon. Make sure you are subscribed for more updates.
  • I made my first money online with an affiliate sale via my blog! It’s nice to get some money towards to costs of hosting etc.

Image Credit: by Oberazzi on Flickr via Creative Commons

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Time for Three:
Reading around the web:

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Thanks for reading.

I hope you enjoyed my post. I’d love to hear your comments below or get a Digg or Stumble!

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11 Things I’ve Learnt about Blogging (so far)

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Image by adactio on Flickr via Creative Commons

Image by adactio on Flickr via Creative Commons

“I blog, therefore I am” (by loads of people)

I’ve been blogging for six months now, albeit haphazardly. As I prepare to re-launch my blog and take it to the next level I am reflecting on what I have learned in the last 6 months.

  1. Your most popular post may surprise you
    My most popular post is “Top 10 ways to Implement GTD Simply”. I knew that GTD was a big topic of interest for my target audience but a stumble here and a back link there certainly made a big difference in my traffic volumes. As did being on the front of wordpress.com with it.
  2. Comments breed comments
    Your first comment is the hardest to get when you are new. I notice that once some has left the first comment other people will comment. This rule isn’t true for bigger blogs where people compete to be the first to leave comments.
  3. There are a lot of brilliant blogs out there
    There are so many well written, orientated and focused blogs out there that you can often find yourself quickly de-motivated about your own blogging skills. I have had a lot of ideas for blog posts which have been done before many times over. You have to see through this and just knuckle down to it and focus on generating your content.
  4. Writing good content isn’t easy
    Well for me it isn’t anyway. I have a short term personal goal to significantly improve my content generation. I would ideally like to posts 2-3 times per week. I think that posting everyday can prove to be information overload.
  5. Quality over quantity
    A well written short post is better than a rambling long post. Most people skim through the web anyway so you need to deliver the hard hitting messages in a concise way.
  6. Readers are nice
    The vast majority of people in the blogosphere are very nice. Most comments are positive and rather than being in competition with each other, bloggers are keen to go out of their way to help each other. This online community is something that is great to be a part of.
  7. There is a lot of information out there about blogging.
    I have spend a lot of time reading about how to blog, monetizing blogs, SEO, design and more. Then I realised that it would be far more beneficial for my blog if I stopped reading about blogging and actual took action and blogged. I now take a pull approach to getting information about “how to” blog. This means that I seek the information when I need it, rather than having it pushed at to me causing information overload and a never ending list of things to do with my blog. Really all you need is two action points: 1) Write good content 2) promote your blog.
  8. People like memes
    My “What’s your Lifestyle Project?” page has been very successful.  I really want to create a good meme with this, any ideas on how to achieve it?
  9. Hitting publish feels nice
    Too nice. Sometimes it is too easy to want to get something published and out there rather than spending those extra ten minutes re-reading and checking your writing flows correctly.
  10. Inspiration is everywhere
    I have ideas for posts all of the time and have a list longer than my arm of draft post titles. I could be driving in my car, reading a book, doing a particular task or reading another blog. If blogging was just about coming up with ideas for posts I think I’d have it made. I always make sure that I’ve got something to capture these ideas wherever I go.
  11. WordPress is great but…
    Sometimes editing the layout of your posts can get pretty frustrating!

There’s a starter for ten of what I’ve learned about blogging so far. I’m sure in six months the list will be rather different, and I hope I am keen to act on what I’ve learnt so far to grow my blog significantly over the coming months.

What are your perspectives on blogging (and how long have you been blogging if at all?). I’d love to know in the comments below. Thanks.

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Thanks for reading.

I hope you enjoyed my post. I’d love to hear your comments below or get a Digg or Stumble!

Also be sure to check out my other blog Lists for Life.

This your kind of thing? Please think about subscribing via RSS or eMail (it’s free).
Thanks for taking the time to visit! Chris

Blog Action Day | The Power of the Internet

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This post is part of the excellent Blog Action Day.

So what’s Blog Action Day?

In summary, Blog Action Day is about raising awareness on a particular topic, this year poverty. The idea of this worldwide blogging event is that each blogger participating posts about poverty within the context their own blogs topic. This way the readers of the blog will be engaged as it is a blog that they normally read and like the style of. I think that the idea and principles of Blog action day are excellent and I am glad to take part.

Poverty is an issue that has been around for a long time (forever), and despite the riches in the world it is still not going away. A significant percentage of the world’s population live below the Poverty Line (on less than $1 per day). Poverty is not something that only effects third world countries, chances are that there are a lot of people in your local community that live below the poverty line.

That leads me to my post. I signed up for Blog Action Day quite a while ago, and aside from checking back at the site a few more times I’ve not thought too much about my post topic. I thought somehow that I would find inspiration from nowhere. I have to admit that I have not found it easy to write outside of my ‘normal’ topic area and will make it a personal goal to focus on my content generating skills a lot more.

Lifestyle Projects

Charities often say that the best gift you can give is time. Whilst this isn’t always possible for a lot of people, giving your time to fundraising, community work or other charity activities could have a profound positive effect on your Life and obviously the lives of those that benefit directly from the Charity. I’ve noticed that a few people defining their Lifestyle Project want to make a difference, or leave a legacy. What better way is their of doing this than making your mark on the charity scene?

Time isn’t easy to make, so I’m looking here at a few quick ways to make a difference.

Help beat Poverty online

Something that interests me greatly is the Internet, so I’ve decided to promote a few sites that help poverty for free just by using the sites whilst sticking with the idea that we are time poor so they are quick and easy ways to make a difference. What could be easier than that? With the credit crunch so widely reported (and in my opinion exaggerated) in the media, people may not have as much money to donate to charity at the moment. Here are some ‘free’ ways to donate to charity.

As Blog Action Day shows the power of the internet to quickly spread memes, I thought I’d keep it online and suggest some other sites that can be utilised in the fight against property.

Agoodcause.com, shopping for a better world.

This site has just launched globally and is a partnership between 700 of the worlds most important NGOs. The site enables online shoppers all over the world to support their favourite charity when they shop online.

Hungersite

This site enables you to donate food to the hungry around the world simply by clicking a link each day. The site works by the sponsors paying for a small advert on the site that fund the food.

Free Rice

Quit procrastinating by reading crappy celebrity news, and expand your mind and vocabulary by using this site. For every word definition you get right you donate 6 grains of rice to charity.

Charity Search engine

This search engine supports charities by donating

There you go, some quick ways to make a difference to poverty. Giving you time to make a difference whilst stilling having time to focus on your Lifestyle Projects.

I’m very interested to hear from anyone in the comments that has a personal goals to spend more time volunteering etc.

Bloggers Launch TrainforHumanity.org Humanitarian Initiative

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Image by darkmatter on Flickr via Creative Commons

Image by darkmatter on Flickr via Creative Commons

Train for HumanityI know that a lot of my readers (judging by the Lifestyle Projects people have been leaving – thanks!) are interested in running and fitness. I myself enjoy am a (very) amateur triathlete, and I like to support charity. Therefore when I heard a few weeks ago about TrainforHumanity.org I thought it was a great idea. I also thought, how the hell does Leo execute so many good ideas! (I think that the point is that he does take action. It’s all very well having ideas but what makes people successful in their pursuits is taking action on those ideas).

Here’s the blurb, I hope you will support in any way you can.

Over the past five years, 200,000 civilians have died due to violence, malnutrition, and disease in Darfur and an additional 2.2 million people have been displaced. We want to do something about it.

Fed up with watching humanitarian crises on the evening news and not doing anything to help, a group of bloggers (most notably, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits) have created and founded the non-profit Train for Humanity, which is an online humanitarian awareness and fundraising organization.

Over 150,000 new blogs are added to the internet everday. Train for Humanity’s mission is to utilize the web, social media, and blogging, in tandem with athletes in training, to support organizations that help prevent suffering and alleviate the pain of children, orphans, and refugees who have been displaced due to genocide or internal strife and war within their country.

Quite simply, they believe – getting fit + social media + blogging = social good

The three pilot project athlete-bloggers, Mark Hayward, Dan Clements, and Leo Babauta are hoping to raise awareness for the current crisis in Darfur and funds for the organization Darfur Peace and Development. All three are training for endurance events of varying distances ranging from a triathlon to a marathon.

They hope to show people that with a little creativity and innovation, anyone can assist and make a difference in the world. If you would like to learn more, have a look at the Train for Humanity website and please consider sponsoring one of them or spreading the word.