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: , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday Morning Surfing: How’s Your Blog Traffic Lately?

February 27, 2010 By 36 Comments

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Some high traffic blogs don’t earn much money, while some blogs with much lower traffic yield a substantial amount of revenue. But in general, more traffic is better.

There’s a lot of ways to increase traffic to your blog. Let’s make it simple and sort traffic generating activity into either

  1. Passive: You don’t go get traffic, the traffic comes to you via search engines, people linking to you, etc.
  2. Active: you go get traffic by commenting on other’s blogs, actively acquiring backlinks, purchasing advertisements, etc.

Passive traffic is really cool. I get a few dozen hits per day for a handful of articles that are really popular, and I estimate about 30% of my traffic is coming in from search or links.

Most of the rest of my traffic is a result of active effort. Commenting and posting on forums really works.

But no matter how you’re generating traffic, there comes a time when your efforts are not rewarded. You reach a plateau.

So, what to do…?

How your blog traffic reaches a plateau

Let’s back up for a few minutes, and read Mike CJ’s article on The Traffic Plateau and the One Dimensional Blog. Recapping, Mike claims most bloggers go into a feedback loop where writing for a self-selected audience stymies growth. You start writing what your audience wants to read, then your traffic plateaus.

This seems reasonable.

Consider Weird Al, or the Aquabats. Both have a certain audience that resonates with them; neither are likely to produce strings of hits doing what they currently do.

They are making a living, but they have reached a plateau.

On the one hand, having nice, stable traffic with nice stable income seems desirable. On the other hand you don’t want your blog to get stale.

Here’s my take (pure S.W.A.G.): once you have an operational system for running your blog, that system will inevitably take you to a plateau, and no further. You will find working harder doesn’t pay off.

This is good.

The key is put your system in place, then work like stink until you hit refusal. Then pull back until your effort matches your return.

Sometimes, you get the experience of pulling back imposed upon you.

Lessons from denial of service attack

If you don’t already know, Website In A Weekend was under a denial of service attack from February 11 to February 20.

This resulted in Akismet being non-functional, massive spam, and really slow load times.

I turned off commenting and stopped commenting on other blogs through that period of time.

I learned my audience measures about 100k on Alexa when I simply write, and do very little promotion. That’s a “natural” traffic plateau of about 175 hits/day (WordPress Stats).

If I spend time commenting, I can drive the long run average down. My Alexa 3 month moving average is back down around 60k now, and would probably be below 50k on Alexa had I not had (seemingly) half of February subjected to a denial of service attack.

Here’s what I found out over the summer of 2009: Once you have a plateau, it’s not difficult to twist the knobs and break out of it. Back in September, I started a commenting spree which broke Website In A Weekend into the sub-100k range on Alexa.

Another interesting thing, which seems to be true, is once you “build your audience” the first time, it’s easier to build it back a second time.

My end goal is acquiring a stable traffic base here on Website In A Weekend which converts at “ramen profitable,” so I can hunker down into some serious coding. That is, I’m working towards being a “self-funded startup.” Finding a traffic plateau which supports that would be very nice indeed.

There’s a lot left to learn acquiring and maintaining traffic. I’ll write more about it in the future, and I’ll have some traffic graphs and statistics covering the denial of service attack.

How’s your traffic? Have you reached a plateau? If so, are you going to try and grow beyond it, or is the amount of your traffic serving it’s purpose for you?

Filed Under: Building Traffic Tagged With:
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