Blogging Inspirations

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!

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

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 taking the time to visit! Chris