Almost two years passed since I quit my job inside a multinational company to work from home on the Internet. For me it was pretty a straight forward move. One year inside a corporation was enough to clarify what I wanted to do professionally, and working for someone else was definitely not part of it.
Another aspect that facilitate the transition was the fact that I was 22 when I decided to quit; meaning no bills to pay or responsibilities that extended beyond “staying alive.”
Now I am sure that there are many people out there wondering if they would like to work from home. Others already know they would love to, but they are not sure about the downsides, or how to make the switch. For those, I think it would be interesting to share what I learned along these two years.
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This is a guest post by Hans.
Everyone loves music. Some of you are fans of Pink Floyd, David Bowie or U2 while others may be fans of Mozart or Brahms. Moreover, some may love Blues music while others prefer Punk music. In fact, there are several aspects that may influence your relation with music. You may adhere to a music style or be an unconditional fan of a particular singer. No matter what your music preferences are, the fact is that you based it on precise and personal criteria.
The same seems to be completely applicable to blogs. In this article, I suggest you to make an incursion into the music to find the criteria that would most influence your music preferences. These criteria will then be apply to blogs to better understand who your audience really is or what kind of audience you should target for your blog.
Let’s start the list.
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Jump-Starting Freelancing Productivity: 9 Reasons Why and 5 Reasons How Working Smarter Works
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Applying The Principles Of Kaizen And Bootstrapping To Build Your Freelance Skills
Probably my most valuable possession as a blogger is my idea notebook/journal. Because I maintain two blogs of my own and I write on a regular basis for a few other blogs, post ideas are priceless. Without a constant flow of ideas the results of my writing would suffer and my income would drop. I know just about every blogger out there faces the same issue of constantly pumping out ideas for new posts.
For me, the idea notebook is the cure to blogger’s block, and I know many other bloggers use the same approach, or at least a similar one. If you don’t already use a notebook or a journal to keep track of your ideas, I highly suggest that you start one as soon as you finish reading this post. If you do already keep a notebook, here are some keys that I have found for maximizing its effectiveness.
1 – Available When You Need It
The main reason for having an idea journal is to get your ideas on paper before you forget them. Most of us have plenty of ideas, they just don’t come at the most convenient times. With an idea journal you can write down your ideas as they come, and then when you have time to write you can refer to the journal for possible post ideas. If you just leave your journal next to your computer it will not be very effective.
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If you don’t know what creative writing is all about, or if you have an idea but would like to get started, you should check out our latest article on Daily Writing Tips, titled
Creative Writing 101. Here is a quote:
There is a common belief that because most of us are literate and fluent, there is no need to serve an apprenticeship if we want to become a successful wordsmith. … That’s what I thought until I tried to write my first novel. I soon learnt that a novel, like a piece of furniture, has its own set of requirements, laws of construction that have to be learnt. Just because I had read plenty of novels didn’t mean I could write one, any more than I could make a chair because I had sat on enough of them.
What does creative writing has to do with blogging? Well, for one thing all bloggers need to be able to write efficiently, and to be able to express and raise emotions from time to time. That is, they need to go beyond the mere facts once in a while (or more often than that depending on your niche). That is what creative writing is all about.
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This past few days have seen me experimenting with a new type of post here at ProBlogger -
Speed Posting.
I set myself the challenge to answer 20 or so questions from my Twitter followers in no more than 3 minutes per post. I then handed each post over to readers for them to continue to posts.
The Results? Well I had a lot of fun, got some good feedback from those Twitter followers who asked the questions, and there were a lot of great comments left.
Lastly - I wrote the following 19 posts. I hope you enjoyed them and will stop by those you feel you’ve got something to say on and add your thoughts.
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Most bloggers at some point face the decision of launching a new blog or just focusing on their existing blog(s). Whether you currently have one blog or ten blogs, adding another is something that should be given careful consideration. Typically, bloggers choose to branch out for one of the following reasons:
Income Potential – Sometimes a blog’s income gets stagnate and in order to increase the amount of revenue from blogging activities, the blogger will choose to launch an additional blog.
Variety – By launching a new blog that focuses on different topics, you can get some variety in your work that may be very much appreciated.
Lack of Results – Sometimes a new blog is launched simply because the existing one isn’t producing the results that the blogger was hoping for. The new blog is then an attempt to reach the goals by starting off in a new direction.
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Do you have moments of total inspiration when everything falls into place and your blog writing just flows? I bet you do, we all do at some stage or another. But unless you can take advantage of this without losing unnecessary time, you will have to go back into your WordPress admin and publish the posts a few days later.
Not so with the timestamp feature. Instead of saving a draft post and then having to go back to publish you can stager future posts at your peril.
This is especially useful when you are going on holidays. Instead of worrying about keeping up with your publishing schedule, why not prepare some posts ahead of time and then publish them to be released every other day, or whatever your posting schedule might be.
You can find this feature in the right hand side of your posting screen. Just change the date to a future date and the adjust the time if you like and then hit publish. If you forget to click on publish it will only save the post as a draft and unless you go in manually and click edit, then publish it won’t be live.
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