Blogging regularly….the power of routine

I have posted 27 blogs so far this month, and this will be my 28th.

This is my second busiest, or as I would prefer to call it “most productive”, month after February 2013 when I wrote 35 posts all of them a minimum of 300 words.

See: 34 blogs in one month

However for all those aspiring bloggers out there who aspire to be successful (not that I am amazingly successful….yet) my advice to them is that there is no secret or short cut besides hard work. That hard work entails regularity in blogging.

Image source.

Regularity becomes normal…irregularity becomes abnormal.

Whenever you do something at first, it is a bit difficult or strange, maybe some discomfort is involved, some exertion. However the more you do it the less difficult it becomes until it becomes very easy and then….until it may even become strange if you don’t do it. This is what I have found.

In the past there would be months where I did not blog at all, so for example from August 28 to December 17th last year I did not blog at all. This did not seem particularly strange as I was doing other things.

NOW HOWEVER…

if I don’t blog for even a day, I feel strange as if  I have neglected something.

This is evidence of the power of habit, the power of regularity, the power of doing something so frequently that it becomes normal and perhaps even strange or painful if you don’t do it.

Regular, daily blogging with good content is what will get your blog to be read by tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands (not yet at that stage, just over 118,000 hits so far) or even millions.

What’s the big deal?

“Hey, what’s all the fuss and big deal about blogging?” you may ask. “Surely it’s just a bit of fun”. Yes you are totally right. However though it can be a personal outlet for people to share their feelings and experiences, it can also be something which helps the average Joe, the small guy compete in an ever more increasingly competitive world. We live in a world where we may no longer be able to be so complacent about getting money all the time from regular jobs, and will need our own space in the cyber-world to promote ourselves and what we do. There are many bloggers out there who get more visitors than websites of small or even medium-sized companies, showing the power of the web in allowing you to access and spread your message to readers all over the world.

Later in the future when my site hopefully has millions of visitors (now it has 118,000 hits) I will point back to this article to stress the importance of hard work and regularity in getting millions of people to read your blog.

 

Have a great day everybody and to all you bloggers out there, keep on having fun and keep on blogging!

– Jahan

 

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Using youtube videos for your blog

There are many webpages which give advice on how to get more people to read your blog, or what we call get “traffic” i.e. people coming to your site.

They all give great, fantastic and wonderful advice.

These include things such as:

1. Be patient!

Which I have to stress the first as it does take time, you also need to be persistent.

2. Post regularly.

You could have the world’s most famous Hollywood star going on TV telling people to read your blog, but if there is nothing there or if it’s not of good quality people won’t come back.

3. Make sure you have original, good quality content.

If your blog is just copy & paste articles, or heavily plagarized people will realize that. Also people want to read something interesting, fun, meaningful or useful not something boring or irrelevant.

4. Submit your blog to blog directories such as Technorati, Blogtopsites and others

and others as well as Yahoo and Google’s directories.

There are other pieces of advice that others give such as posting on others blogs and integrating your blog with social media such as facebook and twitter.

I will be totally honest and say that I did use facebook for my blog, that is I have a list of under 5,000 facebook contacts (though they are officially called “friends”) and my blog articles would automatically appear on my wall when I published them here on this website. However for a variety of different reasons I recently decided to stop that, though my blogs still automatically appear on twitter.

If anyone wants to know to build up a list of 5,000 facebook contacts then feel free to ask as it is quite simple and anyone can do it.

Very few people on my facebook list were interested in my articles and did not click on the links.

“Hang on!” you might be saying. “Isn’t this the internet, aren’t you supposed to project (even if a little exaggeratedly) about how successful, smooth and peach dandy is for you? Aren’t you supposed to potray yourself as a beacon of success?”

Huh?

Wouldn’t this perplex even some of the greatest minds?

Source.

Source.

Aren’t you supposed to keep setbacks, problems and the reality of not being as successful at everything you try a secret. Aren’t you supposed to keep shussh?

“Shussh!”

Source.

Well that’s not the way I am. In my own way I am successful and will be even more successful. However I also like to be honest. Plus in the long run people will appreciate the experiences of those who had disappointments on their path to success rather than people who pretend they had nothing but smooth sailing.

Anyway back to the main focus of this article, using youtube videos for your blog.

Youtube videos.

Audio-visual material tends to stimulate people more than having to sit down and read texts. This is why TV documentaries are so popular. You could easily learn about most of the contents of TV documentaries online these days. However it requires you to shift through different pages and for many the whole process of reading is just not as “fun” as watching images and sounds. This is why a Youtube video on a topic and an article on a topic may vary greatly in the number of people looking at them.

These days it is easy to produce your own videos and every Windows PC or laptop will have Windows live movie maker on the system which is an easy-to-use application that helps you make your own videos, which you can then download.

If you integrate you Youtube videos and your blog together e.g. have a video covering the same things in one of your blogs but with more pictures and music you are likely to get more interest.

Windows movie maker.

Image source.

In the next few articles I will give very basic advice on how to make videos.

Please click on the pictures below to enlarge them, if you need a clearer view.

The first step, setting up a Youtube account

1. Go to your browser (e.g. Explorer, Firefox, Chrome) and the white bar at the top of the screen called the “browser” and type “www.youtube.com”

or you could just type “youtube.com”

2. Then go to the top right hand side of the screen, which says “sign in”

3.  Then on the next screen, click on “Create Account”.

4. In the next screen fill in your details as you would with any other similar sort of account creation on the internet.

Upon doing that you will find the screen below.

5. When you see the screen just below, click on “Back to Youtube” in the middle of the screen.

6. On the next screen, you will see your username on the top right hand side with a little arrow to the right of it. Click on that arrow.

7. The first thing you must do is go to “My Channel” and set up a channel. You cannot go to “Video manager” and just instantly upload videos you have on your computer.

8. On the next screen, fill in the details and then click on continue.

In my picture (or “screenshot”) below, I used the name “Mr Example”, this would not work and you would have to put in an actual name like “Joe Smith”

9. Finally you would get to the screen, where you can start to upload videos.

Now you have created your Youtube channel.

The next step is to learn how to make videos!

I will be covering this in future articles.

– Jahan

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I am back!

I am back!

I have been on a break from my blog due to working on various other projects and commitments but now I will be posting more regularly. In February I wrote 35 blogs and quadrupled my traffic from 42 to 168 hits a day.

On the week ending January 22 2021 I had 42 hits per day and then 4 weeks later on the week ending February 26 2012 I had 168. See the image below:

A quadrupling or 400% increase in traffic within 4 weeks.

 To read more about that month, February and all my blogs there please click on these links: 1:  Target 34 posts for February. 2: My first 10 blogs in February. 3: My second 10 blogs, i.e when I reached 20. 4: I wrote 5 blogs, each 300 words +, in one day. 5: 30 blogs done, with 4 left and one day to go. 6: 34  blogs written, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Now due to lack of blogging, remember CONSISTENCY IS VITAL, my traffic has gone done as you can see in the image below. I am currently on 262 hits per day this month, whereas I was on 313 in April. 

 Now success comes about through three things and they are namely: 1. Hard work. 2. More hard work. 3. …and more hard work. Providing you are working hard on something which will actually produce results and not merely waste your time. If I had kept on my February work rate of an average of over one blog per day (I wrote 35 blogs in 29 days which is 35 / 29 = 1.2 blogs a day) and quadrupled my traffic every month it could (nothing can be guaranteed except for death, and some say “taxes”) look like this: End of February: 168 hits per day. End of March: 672 hits per day. End of April:  2,688 hits per day. End of  May: 10,752 hits per day. End of June: 43,008 hits per day. End of July: 172,032 hits per day. End of August: 688,128 hits per day. End of September: 2.7 million hits per day (i.e. 2,752,512). Would that have happened? As I said, there is no guarantee that it would have happened, but however would my traffic have gone up immensely, we can safely say almost certainly. The real world does not work as mathematically neat as the scenario above. There are always ups and downs and nothing is predictable, however my traffic would definitely have increased a lot. Why am I saying all this? To prove the value of hard work. You only get what you put in. Input = Output. Work hard…and then work hard….and then work hard. – Jahan Choudhry

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Target of 34 blogs, 13 more articles in 3 days.

I have completed 21 blogs out of my total of 34.

The deadline is the end of the 29th February. A special day in more ways than one!

Image source.

I therefore have 3 days in which to complete 13 more blogs, which will go down to a number of 12 after completing this blog. Let me just remind you of a few things.

Why am I doing this?

The reason I am doing this is to demonstrate the principle of hard work. That nothing comes from nothing. To be successful you have to work hard. What differentiates “achievers” from “non-achievers” is essentially hard work.

Also blogging is a verifiable way of finding out if I have indeed “worked hard”, because you can see it online.

Why 34?

34 is a doubling of the number of blogs I did last month which was 17. I want to increase my productivity by 100%. I have already seen the results and that is not even a doubling of my daily number of hits, but a quadrupling. Below is the evidence.

Penultimate week of January had an average of 42 hits a day, the week just gone had an average of 168 hits a day, an increase of times four, showing hard work does pay off.

How has my progress been so far?

To be honest I am not happy and I have underperformed. I like to be honest and “call a spade a spade” as we say. I had set myself a sub-target of 9 blogs a week, which I have failed to do! This however was just merely a means of attaining the overall end goal which was 34. However things should be accomplished in a comfortable and systematic way, a smooth way as opposed to uncomfortable, hectic and haphazard.

Do I think I can achieve 34?

Yes, I think, I can but I have left it very late, which shouldn’t have been the case. However it is not just about achieving a number, which anyone can do, but also about producing quality. I want to write quality articles which will be meaningful to people and help them in some way. Anyway let me now start writing my next blog which is about “self-accounting”.

– Jahan Choudhry

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