I don’t know about you but my ideal life does not include going to an office for 40 hours a week. One of my friends and I were having a discussion recently. He moved from a super busy environment, one where he saw his family only on the weekends, to one with far less work to do and a normal 9-5 job. His reaction at the move has become somewhat confusing to me. He was worried he would lose his skill set in the slower environment. He actually wanted the high stress, long hour workloads that he has become accustomed to. What’s more scary is I actually agreed with him about my own job.

After reading about half of the four hour work week book I came away with a feeling of slight despair. I’m in the friggin matrix and didn’t even know it. Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m certainly plugged into the system. But on the backend of that despair I found a slight glimmer of hope. If this guy Tim Ferris can live the way he does, why can’t I? In fact on his website there a few testimonials of people that have challenged the system and have won. As for me, I”m a web developer over here. I can edit WordPress php and throw up a fully functional Joomla or Elgg website in under ten minutes. I can even do some pretty nifty css edits to them, just completed redoing my favorite local bar’s website from straight HTML to a WordPress theme, was fun. Bottom line, people are making some money on the Interwebs and that’s been my central focus for over a decade. What has stopped me in the past? Long work hours and a strange feeling of “it can’t be done”. I’m finding more and more that I don’t like negative opinions or ‘it can’t happen’. As soon as you say it can’t happen, you’ve just reduced your odds of making it happen by 50% (that’s really a guess but i’m sure it’s bad).

So, I’m going to give this thing a go. By this thing I mean working towards finding income streams not with the intention of being the next Google but of supplementing a lifestyle I want to have instead of one I am forced to have.

I found on Ferri’s blog a contest to make 100,000 dollars. In a nut shell, create a store on shopify.com, sell some products, and if you are the best in a two month period you get one hundred grand. I already have a site where I tried my hand at affiliate sales, didn’t do so good. But it has a pagerank of 1 so I could give it a shot and use that url.

I’m not dreaming of making an extra 40,000 a month, something that Ferris claims to be making through his web enterprises, but an extra 10k a year would come in very handy. If it does take off, or some other idea based on his workshops, I’ll be sure to mention them here.

Tim Ferris Blog: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

Shopify: http://www.shopify.com

What is a linkback anyway? Put simply, it’s when another website links back to you. Yes, I know, everyone and their great grandmother knows what that is, but bear with me. I am coming late to this game of blogging after all, even though I’ve been in the tech industry for 10 years +, but that’s another story. At any rate, I posted a note about a green cleaning product. I do so as it was stated the Travolta boy developed a disease due to being exposed to chemicals. It scared me of course, as it should anyone that has children around. So I naturally began looking for “green” and child safe cleaning products. Suffice to say, I found one, and talked about it on the blog post.

What happened next was a bit surprising. I was linked back to by the company of the product. That link back generated a small surge in visitors to this site. I was amazed at how many. It’s not even a popular site in it’s own right but enough so to generate a small bump. And even today, weeks after the initial post, I am getting a steady trickle of visitors.

What does this all mean? To a lot of you I’m sure it means nothing. You already knew this and in truth I did too. Getting a link back to your site from a high ranking site is equal to Internet gold. To me it’s a realization that to get a traffic increase you need to not only post good content but also be part of the blogosphere. Of course, here’s the rub. The blogosphere is a changed landscape from four/five years ago. Gone are the popular people and in their place the popular sites with armies of bloggers. Wired, huffington post, cnn, you name it. Hard to compete when those folks are putting out 30 blogs a day. I work two jobs and can just manage 5-6 big posts a month. Something I’ll have to modify if I want to hit the goal of 1000 hits a day for 30 days. I am beginning to realize it may take a good amount of time before that goal is reached.

Most of this is confirmed by others that have gone done the blogging path long before me. One that gave me a good starting point was a blog post by Steve Pavlina on his website. It’s chocked full of posts on a wide range of topics. Some I agree with and some I don’t. A little too ‘new age’, is that even a thing anymore, for my tastes but mostly good stuff. I’ve done a trackback to it.

So, bottom line, my next step is to get as many sites out there to link back to this one. And of course, to blog more. I need to have a lot of content to generate interest to keep a good following. All basic knowledge i’m sure to the experienced blogger/website owner but somewhat new to me. At least, new in the sense of doing it. Here’s to a successful month!

That fact is compounded when you procrastinate. A fact that I am very guilty of. So, if you look at the archives, you’ll notice that I came out of the gate with a full head of steam. A solid 15 posts October. In December, I had 4. Granted it’s the holidays and I am in a turkey/football coma for most of it, but a lousy four posts is nothing to write home about.

You can not be successful if you procrastinate. There I said it. For all to see and admire. Why are people successful in life? From actors to engineers, they are successful because they bust their hump making it happen. They work. They have their goal in sight and they do nothing but work towards that goal. They are not 9-5′ers, those people that arrive at 9 and leave at 5 and don’t care what is happening.

For the last few weeks I have not been putting all the effort into this site and as a direct result, traffic is down, visits are down, page views are down. No promotion of the site on other blogs and that equates directly to no promotion of my site anywhere. 

So, the big question is, what do you do about it. If you find yourself procrastinating about achieving the goals you have laid out for success, you need to, quite simply, cut it out. There’s no easy recipe for stopping the procrastinating circle. And it is a circle. The more work you have to do, the more you say you don’t want to do it, which of course piles up the work and makes even more work than when you started.

I have experienced this throughout college, especially graduate school. Once the procrastinating bug gets in you, it’s hard to get it out. The best thing I could do to avoid the bug was to not think about the work that was waiting for me to do. In a sense you have to just not think about it. If you find yourself thinking about it and not doing it, it will just spiral out of control. Go out for a drink, have dinner, visit friends, do anything you can possibly do that is not related to the task at hand. Get the weight off your shoulders and soon you won’t be thinking about it. Once you stop thinking about it, you’ll find that you’ll return to the computer and attack the task at hand.

So, that is where I am at with my measures of success. I month of holidays, football, turkey, procrastinating and no work on the site. This month I plan to post more often. One of my ideas to blogging was to post once every 3 days. I think I will be increasing that to daily, if I can manage. I also plan on posting about topics that are in the news. Perhaps adding a new category for current events. They say content is king, so I will be adding a great deal in the form of posts. I also plan on commenting on other blogs to see what the effect will be to traffic on this one. We’ll see where that gets us for the next monthly review!

Success, like most things in life, needs planning. We left off last time by describing what success really means, how it, in and of itself, is not something obtainable. It is just a classification of an act. You are either successful or not successful at doing something. I am applying that to this website. The mark of success I have decided on is 1000 hits a day for a 30 day period. What I did not provide was a time limit. And I did this with good reason as we will see.

Be careful about setting impossible goals.

It really doesn’t make sense to set a goal that you are unsure if you can make. “I will be rich in 3 years”. Oh really? What is “rich” anyway? How do you plan on being “rich” in 3 years? If you don’t have a gauge on revenue streams, decreasing debt rates, expense levels, and other key concerns, you may have just established a possibly impossible goal.

What if President-Elect Obama said, America would be debt free in 4 years? Some may cheer, some may cry foul, but regardless, it wouldn’t be likely to happen. Why? Because somethings are just not possible, no matter how much we want them to be. You are not going to get out of debt in 6 months if your earnings to debt ratio is not high enough to allow it. It’s that simple. Why set a goal for yourself that you are simply going to fail at? It may just destroy any chances of you ever reaching success. Set backs to goals can be more than just a set back. They can demoralize us and detract us from the objective.

What do you do then? Set reasonable goals. Goals that you have researched. If you make X, have debt Y and expenses Z, come up with a plan to pay of a certain amount every month and stick to it. When you do the math, you’ll figure out when you can realistically expect to have the debt paid off. Make it a hard date, a real goal, something you have researched and planned for. It will make your chances of success greater.

Applying that to this website, now that I have main a success metric, 1000 visits a day for 30 days, I need to come up with the way to get there. I still don’t have a time frame as I need to do more research. I know I need to shy away from impossible goals so what I have done was let the website simply sit there. Let the content I’ve added be indexed by search engines, join a few blogging websites and see how traffic builds. It’s not stellar in the beginning I can tell you. But it will give me a trend. A means to gauge how fast websites can expect to increase traffic based on content amount and time on the internet. Seeing the slow increase, however, can be a little bit demoralizing. Which brings us to another good lesson, do not fall for ‘instant success syndrome’.

Instant success syndrome

Have you ever heard of beginners luck? Some times, some people when they first do something they do it and just get it perfect. Could be a poker game, could be a baseball game, could be anything. But when they try it a second time, not so good. This can, and does, derail people a good percentage of the time. Watch out for it. It even happened to me on this website. I joined another website to promote this one. In the first few days I was getting 40-50 people per day. I was excited. I though that the success metric for this site would be an easy target. Not so. Within a few weeks it fell to 2 people per day. I felt that sinking feeling of, “guess this won’t work”. I quickly realized i was suffering from instant success syndrome. I felt that if it wasn’t a success instantly, it must be a failure.

Truth is, that’s not true. Things take time, hard work and perseverance. I buckled down and did some research. What brings people to a site? Mostly, they say, is search engines. What are search engines hungry for? Content.

Armed with the knowledge of what to avoid, I make a plan for this month, December. I will add content and do more due diligence. Marketing strategies abound on the Internet. Blogs have been around for a while now and so have theories on getting people to visit your blog and/or website. I will be reviewing and researching many of them. The two biggest things I’ve found are content and having links form other blogs/websites. We’ll see how this month fairs. So far for November, about 300 people have visited the site. I’ve managed to avoid some pitfalls and have a solid plan for the next thirty days.

So, what is success? Technically speaking, and as you follow this blog you’ll notice I am a huge fan of literally definitions, the meaning of success is the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors also defined as a successful performance or achievement.

Have you ever gone to a reunion or been afraid to go thinking your old friends wouldn’t think you were a success? What were you using to base this opinion on? Is it just money, is that what makes us a success in life or not? Not if you read that definition above it’s not. Take me for instance, i’m not rich, as one of my previous posts will attest, am I then not successful? And doesn’t being successful at life have a whole host of other criteria? Raising kids, going to school, etc etc?

For me, I wanted to create a website, have people visit it and increase the traffic to it. This website has only been up for a month. I would say in that time frame that so far it’s been a success. Traffic has been going up, I’m commenting on it regularly and it feeds my need to write. Therefore, so far it’s a success.

People often get caught up in the notion that they are not a success in life. Someone I once talked to complained that they weren’t successful in life. I began to inquire with them more. They were working a job they loved and were in fact doing what they wanted to do. They were even doing it quite well. I then asked them, doesn’t that make you successful? They answered, but I’m not rich!

Being rich is certainly a means for success, if you weren’t rich before you became rich of course. Born rich, well, that’s not being successful that’s just being lucky. Don’t ever feel that someone is more successful than you simply because they are well off. Having money is not, in my opinion, a measure of success in life. It is a measure for one aspect of life, the accumulation of wealth, IF that was a goal you had set for yourself in the first place. You can only ever been successful at something if you are trying to be successful at it.

Ok, so now what. Well, as I intend this to be a series of steps you can take to become successful, we have to first define what it is. What we want to be successful at. So, lets pick something. Maybe it is money. Maybe it’s writing a book, or accomplishing some goal. Whatever it is, choose it. We’ll focus on one thing and one thing only.

Of course, this might be harder to do than you think. Choosing something as broad as “I want to be successful at life” is actually going down the wrong path. Life is vast. The reason this is a bad choice is there is no end game. When do you stop and say, “Yep, I was successful at life!”. You do it constantly, you take little opinions throughout life and say “Yep, I’m successful so far!”.

But for this experiment, it’s simply too broad. To get the taste of success, we should pick something that has a finite end. For me, it will be this website. The finite end to it is growing to 1000 visits a day for a 30 day period. To me, that is success. That is a well defined mission statement with a clear goal in sight.

Now your turn. Pick something that you want to be successful at. A hobby, a career goal, anything. Define the limits to it, when does it end, what will make it a success. Once you have what you want in your mind, we’ll go to the next step and build a road map for success.