Time or money, there’s no other blogging currency

October 26, 2011 By 10 Comments

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Sooner or later, ya gotta REALLY sweat

As previously noted, cranking up a self-hosted blog with absolutely NO blog tech knowledge is an exercise in digging holes, and digging holes makes one sweat.  At some point digging holes gets old and you are left with three choices:

  1. You can take the easy road, default to a BlogSpot or Blogger site, and let someone else do the lifting…just remember, you get what you pay for and you aren’t paying anything.
  2. You can dig a little deeper…in your pocket…and pay someone who knows what they are doing to put the site together for you.  Hell, if you have deep enough pockets you can even pay for content creation…I’m not all THAT expensive.
  3. Your third option is where the post title comes into play…Sooner or later ya gotta REALLY sweat.

Face it, a blog costs SOMETHING and there are only two kinds of currency in the world…and I’m not talking about dollars or francs or euros or yuan.

We only have two things we can spend… money and time… and that is our only currency.

Let me stop here for a second and dispel a myth.  Some of you think your knowledge…education, experience, etc., is currency, something you can “spend” to benefit yourself.  It’s not.  It’s an asset (think factory equipment) you use by spending your time to benefit yourself.  Your time is the currency.

So, back to the three options.

You can be cheap…spend neither time nor money…and go with option one, and get what you pay for.

You can look at the currency you have available and decide which you have more of, and if you decide your bank account is bigger than your time account there are plenty of folks who will lighten your money load.  Some of them will even do a good job for you.

Finally, you might be like me…far richer in time than in money.  It helps, in my case,  that I also happen to be a control freak and HAVE to know what is going on.  If this is the case, get ready, because…

Now is when ya gotta really sweat!

You can dance around it all you wish…I did for 17 months…but, at some point, you will accept the fact that an OK blog can be done using tools like the WordPress GUI , but if you want a REALLY kick-ass blog, you need to learn some…er…extras, and that will make you sweat.

On some you will sweat a little.  Scrounge around Website-in-a-Weekend.net and you’ll find some good info…for free, except time…on “toolchains” and which WordPress plugins are basic needs for a quality blog.  The web is full of blogs that claim to teach you all about SEO, and a few, VERY few, will actually help.  You’ll stumble across tools that will help you track your progress, like Google Analytics and Alexa, and you’ll be feelin’ pretty good about the whole blogging thing, and then…

And then you are gonna hit a wall.  In my case it was an inability to get a video to run on my site.  It looked good when I ran it on my computer, but it was too big to upload to my blog using the WordPress GUI, and when I tried to get it on my site through YouTube, YouTube trashed it, running it at quad speed…a 6 minute video running in 1:44.  Uh-oh.

My wall was videos… yours may be something else… but if you want a truly kick-ass blog, one that stands out, you WILL have a wall… and that’s when you really start to work.

There are some things you will need to learn that a non tech savvy type wouldn’t think of.

Robert Hayles is a semi-retired Luddite, who actually wished Y2K had been as bad as advertised. Bob's hobbies include fishing, homesteading, alternative housing (yurts), cooking, annoying politicians by constantly asking them, "Is that constitutional?", reminding them who they work for, and suing them when they don't get the message. In his spare time, Bob blogs while hoping to someday take us back to 1850. Meanwhile he's happy cramming sharing his opinions with everyone. Visit Bob at Juicy Maters.
Filed Under: Blogging success Tagged With: , , , ,

Mastery: Starting Over as a Student (Saturday Morning Surfing)

September 25, 2010 By 13 Comments

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

Way back when, decades ago in internet time, I started this little series “Saturday Morning Surfing.” It was fun. Chatty. Lighter Than The Usual Fare.

As weeks passed, I noted a few others picked up the “Saturday” theme and ran with it as well. That’s pretty cool.

Later, I had to give it up. Too much work, other projects needed attention. The Big Launch for Blog Post Engineering in July (An amazing amount of work, amazing). hRecipe plugin updating and upgrading. New! Improved! Now works with Google! Client work. Burning Man.

More importantly, it started getting stale.

Time to take a bit of a break.

Time to think about where I’ve been. Where I’m going. And, maybe, time for…

Starting over – the Master as Student

I’ve been publishing articles on Website In A Weekend since February 2009, and almost daily between June 1st 2009 and mid-May 2010.

Several related events, decidedly serendipitous came together in May 2010:

  1. Perry Marshall talks about Neil Peart of Rush, and the humility required to reengage as a student:

    The prima donna takes offense. The true professional takes notes.

  2. I found Cal Newport’s Study Hacks blog. As someone who has spent the (simple) majority of life as a student of one form or another, I didn’t know whether to laugh in frustation or scream in rage. So much wasted time, doing “important” stuff now proven to be crap.
  3. Lastly, I had been reading George Leonard’s Mastery, which now exerts a profound influence on my daily behavior.

By July, Website In A Weekend dropped way down my list of priorities.

Quality has a quality all it’s own

Cranking out articles by the truck load is easy. But such articles are not high enough quality for me now, and more importantly, not high enough for you. I realize quantity has a quality of it’s own, but I should be past that. I prefer to think that quality has it’s own charm.

Now, my interest is in writing much higher quality articles. Daily posting makes that harder.

I’d like to suck in readers like Steve Pavlina or Yaro Starak or Tim Ferris.

Who wouldn’t?

Unremitting daily posting won’t get me there.

Getting better may require stopping what I’m doing now, and learning how to do something different.

But what to learn? That’s a really good question, and I’m not really sure what the answer is. I am sure it will be a lot of work, and I now know that work has to be more or less daily, and it has to be intense. Thus:

  1. 1 hour of work on Blog Post Engineering, every day. It doesn’t matter if I never sell another copy, truly. I like doing the work, it’s fun, and I can afford the hour. The true pay back comes from the daily discipline and what I’m learning about publishing on the web.
  2. 1 hour of work on Website In A Weekend. This includes getting a blog post out, when possible, when appropriate. Progress, every day.
  3. 1 hour of dedicated to whatever fire is currently raging out of control. Right now it’s getting the books back under control. Some people prefer to outsource all the financial, and that’s cool, but I won’t ever do that. At some point, most of it, but not all of it.

Here’s the cool thing: I get 3 solid hours work done every day. After the 3 three hours is done, I can spend the rest of the day digging deeply in to whatever I want. Maybe more Website In A Weekend work. More Blog Post Engineering. Or take care of the chores.

As George Leonard asserts, mastery is a process. If you work it, it just works. You can watch mastery growing, in yourself and others.

Here’s the most important part of all: most of the time spent acquiring mastery is spent on the long plateaus, where nothing seems to happen. The plateaus are inevitable. Embrace them as they come.

Now, I’m growing from the last plateau, things are happening more better faster. There’s another unavoidable plateau in Website In A Weekend’s near future, but that’s ok. I’ve been planning for it.

Meantime:

Where are you on your mastery curve?

Filed Under: Blogging success Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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