NOTICE: This is a stream-of-consciousness post, or a “brain dump” as I’ve loving come to call them. I find sometimes that when I’m feeling blocked and that when putting together enough energy to organize what I’m thinking and writing into something coherent is too hard, that I can just write and put that filter of “getting something good out” on the shelf. This helps me to be kind to myself and to remove the block I was experiencing.

Now, I gave you this notice so that you can decide for yourself if my “streams” are worth swimming in. If not, please visit another post to decide if your time here will be worthwhile. I hope so. That said, I’m now turning on the hose:

Thought 1: To develop my voice Michael Hyatt says I just have to write and that over time I will discover it. He also said that he never hit 1,000 visitors a month until he got serious about blogging. Daily blogging (5 days a week) was one thing he did consistently and although his thoughts about that have now changed, it did help him to get serious about his content. The other two things that he did to break 1,000 unique visitors in a month were to write for his audience instead of himself and to get involved in social media.

He also said that some of the early blogging mistakes he made were as follows:

1. He didn’t collect emails from his visitors and just assumed that they’d come back on their own
2. He was inconsistent with his blogging. You build trust when you’re consistent. State your intention to blog write (he chose 3 times a week). Put it on the calendar. Sit down at the stated time and write.
3. He didn’t have a template. It soon came down to this: Descriptive headline from the point of the reader. Include a relevant story that pulls them into the story. Include an enticing image. Make lists. Create a summary and then end with a question.
4. He played the lone ranger and didn’t network with other bloggers. He was separate from best practices and other important resources.
5. He obsessed over the technology and it took away from his most important role, to create quality content.
6. He was a bit of a perfectionist. While the “WOW!” is important to have, at some point you have to ship the product.
7. He was too focused on the numbers. Checking stats became an obsession, so he created a scorecard that he updates once a day: traffic, blog comments, twitter followers, Facebook ads, gains & losses, etc.

When all is said and done, creating content and making small improvements along the way on my site is what’s important.

Thought 2: I have made so many plans, but keep changing directions too quick to ever realize the potential of any of them. Are they merely stepping stones to other things or do I need to legitimately find something to stick with? Is it time that I begin acting on what I know in my head? Michael also spoke of the fear that he experienced when he became the CEO at Nelson Publishing and of the fear and doubt he felt as he would sit down to blog. I too feel this fear, but I know that what he says about it is true, that when I walk just outside my comfort zone, just on that edge of fear, I really begin to experience life.

I really like to think strategically, create grand schemes, run numbers and get excited about possibilities. Like the time I made a plan to purchase 100 domain names around niche concepts based on a very specific type of keyword research and then build sites around each one. I set a plan to generate Google Adsense revenue from those “Sprouts.” Ah, such a good plan…on paper. We learned after starting to rank the websites on the first page of Google that they weren’t bringing in the traffic we thought they should be bringing in. Diving in, I discovered that we had done the research incorrectly and we had a bunch of sites and little to no revenue. My enthusiasm tanked after that.

I have created so many sites, one for the many interests that I have. I created a site for politics, one for ADD, one for technology, one for my business, one for myself and many more. I set them up with excitement and inevitably (at least up to THIS point) I stop working on them to pare back and take care of the basics when I get overwhelmed.

Perhaps I get bored. Perhaps I lose vision. Perhaps I was never meant to succeed…but I don’t really believe that. If there’s one thing that I have learned about myself, it’s that I love working with people. I also love pondering, discussing and sharing ideas. I am going to commit to writing more.

I have begun this year as I did 2 years ago with a goal to read a book a week. At the present, I’m pretty flexible about the type of book, but classics, self help and health books are at the top of my list. When I did this last time I didn’t read 52 books, but I DID read about 35 more than I may have otherwise. When I read those books, I often would take notes, thinking that one day I’d write about them on my blog. I created another grand plan to create a podcast, interviewing people and authors about the books. Perhaps that plan was too big then, so this time, I’m going to just write up a little summary of the books as I read them.

Thought 3: In the end, I can’t control how many people visit, read or even like what I write, but the more I write, the more I will run up against that wall of public opinion and the more I will discover what people are looking for and how to better help them find what they’re looking for.

Thanks for letting me share in a fairly unstructured way.