December was bad enough, and I said I’d turn it around. But that just hasn’t happened yet. It’s discouraging to have to report these numbers, but here goes…

Well, what to say? I won’t bother to make any more public commitments here. It’s time to just put up or shut up! Actions, not words.

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

Lesson learned from November: lots of focused content — with frequent updates — helps drive traffic to your blog.

Lesson learned from December: no content  — with no updates — helps keep traffic away from your blog.

Sadly, I “went dark” for much of November and all of December (and now almost a week of January.)  I know a lot of bloggers go through such stages, but probably not very many good, serious bloggers.  Because the latter know that you just can’t afford to hurt yourself in that way.

So it’s time to pick myself up and get rolling again.  Meanwhile, you can see the sad results here, in the interest of complete honesty and transparency (as embarrassing as it may be!):

Onwards!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

Great timing, because Chris Garrett of Authority Blogger fame is just now in the process of releasing his new e-book titled “Guest Posting for Quality Links and Targeted Traffic“.  I picked it up and devoured it in one sitting, taking some brief notes along the way.  Now I’m totally keyed up to getting back on the guest posting bandwagon ASAP.

Weighing in at 20 pages, I found Chris’s e-book to be of appropriate length for the topic.  Chris is a very succinct presenter; you never feel as though he is trying to fill up space so as to make the document heftier and therefore appear more authoritative.  At the same time, I never felt that a topic was being skipped or purposely shortened in order to maintain brevity.  Considering the length and quality of the content, I found the price point — $7 (US) at the time of this writing — to be very appropriate for this product.

Chris touches on every phase of the guest posting process:

• First, he defines the topic of guest posting for those bloggers who may not have heard of it or who have yet to consider using it as a means to generate traffic and backlinks.
• He then explains many of the benefits that can be derived from guest posting.  Though you may go into the guest posting exercise thinking only of generating traffic and backlinks, Chris points out a few more benefits you can enjoy as well.
• Next comes the meat-and-potatoes of the e-book: a look at the entire process of guest posting, from announcing your availability as a guest poster (including finding appropriate blogs to post at), through writing and submitting the article, and then staying tuned in to the post at the host blog so you can answer readers’ comments and thereby increase your trustworthiness and exposure.
• Chris also devotes an entire section on something equally important: what not to do when you are going through the guest posting process.  You’d be well advised to avoid some of the pitfalls Chris describes in this section.
• A useful section on generating topic ideas contains some interesting tips, one of which I found very intriguing: using the Google keyword tool to help you learn more about the host blog’s content and which keywords (and therefore topics) would be interesting to its readers.  Chris gives a nice example of using the keyword tool for this purpose.
• Finally, Chris ends the document with calls to action in a section titled “Next Steps”.  It’s my opinion that every “how-to” style of e-book should end with such a section, and Chris does not disappoint.  This is the section I’ll jump to soon to get me going on getting some more guest posts done for German History Blog ASAP.

If I had any criticism (or, rather, a suggestion) it would be that Chris should include — with each step of the guest posting process that he describes — an example of how he fulfilled that step with one of his own guest blog posts that he had done in the past.  I think deconstructing a guest post that proved particularly successful for him would have been a nice addition to an already fine e-book on this topic.

If you knew about guest posting but weren’t sure how to get started, or if you’re completely new to the topic and now convinced that guest posting is right for you and your blog, pickup a copy of “Guest Posting for Quality Links and Targeted Traffic” now and start putting its ideas to work for you.

See you soon with more ideas!

Bill Dawson

Good news: November showed significantly improved traffic results, despite the fact that I’ve done nothing on the blog for the last two weeks because of vacation. Here’s the rundown:

Two things worked well for me in November:

• Guest blogging. I did three guest blog posts in November, which gave me traffic from those sites to mine. Guest blog posts really are golden. I need to do more.
• Keyword SEO. For the first time ever, I worked on targeting a specific keyword phrase — “berlin wall” — above and beyond the very general keyword which I would love to dominate some day, “german history.” The reason I chose that was because November was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The targeting paid off — a lot of people (by my standards!) found me by searching for “berlin wall”. In all, a nice 73% of the visitors found me via search engines. I’m very happy about that.

So I’m quite pleased by the increase, particularly considering the lack of activity during my vacation. It makes me think that if I really set my mind to it, I can grow the readership considerably.

Income from the site is still at zero dollars and zero cents! Of course I haven’t really been offering anything other than Amazon affiliate links, and those links (I’m told) typically convert at about 0.5%, which means I’d have to get 200 clicks on product links to get even one sale. There were not 200 clicks on Amazon links at GHB in November.

So I’m still far away from GHB paying for itself, which is my initial goal. To do that, it would have to take in — I guess — about $30 per month.

Onwards!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

P.S. A big thanks goes out to the guys and gals at the SSWT Elite forum, who have always told me to keep on going with GHB and give it a chance to grow and — perhaps — make at least some money some day. They’ve also offered some great suggestions which I hope to start implementing when I finally get back from vacation.

I am a very skeptical person when it comes to programs or offers that are related to sales or marketing, so I went into this group — which emphasizes learning how to create and market online content — full of skepticism. Now, a month later, I’m not skeptical at all about the group itself, but rather my own commitment to doing the myriad of fantastic suggestions that are offered up in that group. I’m definitely sticking with it, because I firmly believe that if I commit my time to it, I can enjoy making money on the internet some day. That won’t come primarily through my (currently) one and only “interesting” web property, German History Blog, but it could come via one of the many ideas that have been part of a veritable storm in my brain since joining Lynn’s group. Has one month with SSWT Elite made a single difference in my income? No, absolutely not. Has it given me hope and lots of ideas? In abundance.

So with one month down, I’m not in a position to judge overall success, because it’s too short of a period in which to see monetary benefit. But I want to be able to evaluate the performance of the group — with respect to my benefit from it — with some kind of numbers, because that’s just how I am: I need concrete proof. So I took the opportunity to scroll through the forum and look back at the first month of my own activity in it, in order to evaluate the level of responsiveness that I’ve received from others, including Lynn herself.

• I have made a total of 53 posts across 24 threads in the group’s online forum. I’m not taking the time to go back and read each one, but I can tell you this for certain: I never once felt ignored, and I never once felt that my participation (be it in the form of a question or a comment to someone else) was not acknowledged in a timely fashion.
• I have started a total of 4 threads so far. Not a single one of those “died” with just the first post and one follow up. I have a 100% success rate getting answers or some other kind of interaction to each of those thread starters. I can’t see the exact time that each reply was received, but my general impression is that it is within minutes when I post during the US daytime.
• Of those threads that I’ve started, Lynn Terry herself has participated in 100% of them. I believe the same is true for every single of those 24 threads that I’ve been involved with, though I’m not going to back to each one to find out!
• Lynn Terry herself was the second person to greet me to the forum when I started a thread to introduce myself. Stephen T beat her by some minutes!
• There have been 4 webinars exclusively for the SSWT Elite group since I joined. These webinars are very useful. We take the time to evaluate some of the members’ businesses (those of them who are looking for feedback), we go through case studies, and Lynn frequently shows us how she does things herself. That’s very valuable, considering her own successes with internet-related businesses, most especially affiliate sales.
• There have been 8 total webinars since I joined, if you count the free (non-Elite) ones.

So that’s the experience so far in numbers. From a qualitative perspective, I can say the following:

• I have never seen anyone be treated with disrespect. If anything there is an abundance of enthusiasm and respect.
• That being said, there is still however plenty of constructive criticism, which is absolutely mandatory in a group like this.

The only thing that disappoints me so far is my own participation in the group. I have only rarely given others constructive feedback. I’m not quite as involved as I should be. I’ve been more of a taker than a giver, though I’ve even been a bit hesitant in the taking role: I probably should be seeking help even more than I have so far. And I definitely should be offering help more.

The long and short of it is this: I can’t yet prove that I’ll ever make money thanks to the ideas or encouragement I’ve gained through membership in this small group. But I can say that I’m glad I joined, that I have no intention of quitting, and that I better do some stuff soon to get this storm of ideas in my head implemented. The storm is loud and distracting, but I’m very happy that it’s here. And it’s here thanks in large part to the stimulating interaction available within the group.

If you are looking for an intimate, online mastermind group that has a mix of newbies and experts, that is very responsive and that will hold you accountable (if you want it to!), I definitely encourage you to join Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips Elite group.

See you on the inside!

Bill Dawson

P.S. In addition to the personal connections and encouragement available via a mastermind group such as Lynn Terry’s, I’ve also been enjoying curling up with two publications which have really increased my excitement about getting some business going on the internet. They are:

• Darren Rowse’s “31 Days to Build a Better Blog”.  Darren is also known as the famous “Problogger” at Problogger.net.  He is absolutely one of the most successful bloggers in the world and someone whose opinions and methods I am very interested in soaking up.  I haven’t gone through all 31 days yet, but I can see already that this meaty, 100+ page e-book is well worth its $19.95 price.   Darren is very positive about making money via blogging and he dedicates much of this book to income generation ideas.
• Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook.  This amazing book is actually causing me distress!  How?  I’ve promised myself that I will concentrate on blogging and building traffic before setting up affiliate sites.  But I’m reading this book and I’m simply dying to start putting into action.  If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, it’s basically putting up a website to sell other people’s products, so that you don’t need to maintain inventory, support customers, etc.  You recommend products and then receive commissions for any sales you generate.  I’ve made it sound easy, and it’s really not rocket science, but you need to know how to do it right in order to be successful.  Let the “Affiliate Marketing Queen” show you how.  Believe me, you will want to start right away when you read this book.   I know that I’m going to break down and start this stuff even though I’ve told myself I should wait!

In fact, I’ve not implemented those strategies as of yet.  Thanks to a very timely challenge at the SSWT Elite group forum, I’m on the brink of doing some guest posts at other blogs, which should at least temporarily spike the visitor numbers to points they’ve never been before.   I have three to four bloggers who are ready to receive these guest posts from me, but I haven’t written them yet!  So that should be done in the next few weeks, which means I’m hoping my November numbers will be noticeably higher than the October numbers which I’m about to show you here.

Despite my lack of strategy implementation so far, the numbers in October did show some improvement, as you see here:

Considering that all I did was continue posting blog content during the month, I’m pretty pleased with these results.

I’ve noticed a few other improvements as well:

1. Previously, on the Google Toolbar, the page rank said something like “No page rank information available.”  Well that’s been “upgraded” to “0/10″. I’m on the radar!!
2. Search Engine traffic now makes up more than 50% of the incoming visitors.  Previously, my inbound traffic sources had been a lot of Twitter and “direct traffic”, which (I believe) is people using desktop Twitter clients.  I’m very glad to have Twitter traffic, but ultimately it’s extremely important to get traffic from search engines, since it means people are finally able to find the site via Google, etc.
3. I’m pleased to see that some visitors are finding me with the Google search “german and history”. “German history” is the keyword phrase that I would absolutely love to rule someday, so this excites me a bit.
4. I’m also pleased to see people finding me with the keyword phrase “berlin wall resources”, because I’ve devoted a lot of time in recent weeks to the topic (with the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall coming up.)  So when I noticed in the statistics that people are finding me with “berlin wall resources”,  I did a check in Google and I’m surprised (and happy) to see myself sometimes at number 1, sometimes down to number 4.  Cool.

Next Steps

Well the way forward is pretty clear: get those guest blog posts finished and submitted! After that will be some article marketing and Squidoo lenses.

Onwards!

Until next time,

Bill Dawson

P.S. In that previous post I also mentioned Trish Lindemood (fellow SSWT Elite member) and her 90-day challenge to increase traffic. She’s just updated her numbers for October and is also excited to see more traffic coming via search engines.

I have a few reasons for wanting more visitors to the blog.

• Personal satisfaction — In fact it is somewhat satisfying to write about German History (a passionate interest) even if no one is reading it. But playing the lone wolf does get a bit boring after a while. I think it’s probably pretty rare for a blogger to remain motivated without an audience.
• Money — Even if I successfully increase the site’s readership ten-fold, I realize that German History Blog will never be a bread-winner. But hey, if I pulled down even 50 bucks a month in Amazon affiliate sales and AdSense clicks, I’d be pleased as a dog with two tails. $50 would more than pay for the web hosting and the cost of the AWeber list management service. (affiliate link)

So, how to get traffic? Well there are all sorts of free reports and guidance out there on this very topic; just try searching for “increase blog traffic” and you will see tons of results.

But what pops foremost into my mind after a few weeks of discussing and reading about these kinds of things with other people in Lynn Terry’s Mastermind group as well as by reading through Problogger.net’s (Darren Rowse’s) 31-Days to Build a Better Blog (affiliate link) and Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint is this: hard work and determination!

I know I’m stating the obvious when I say that traffic does not just magically increase, even if you put up fresh content every single day. Fresh content is damn important: particularly when you already have some sort of page rank at Google. But if you’re not even on Google’s page rank radar (like, sadly, German History Blog), then the fresh content is not really working for you.

Above all else, Google’s page rank system is based on your site’s “authority”, meaning how many other sites link to your site. Google’s thinking goes, “A bunch of sites are linking to this site — it must be fairly authoritative, so let’s rank it high.”

So: links into your site; that’s what’s important. These kinds of links are called backlinks. How to get them? There are some kinda, shall we say, non-kosher ways, such as by paying into a network wherein links to your site will be distributed across several sites. This is a bit artificial and fake, but apparently some of these systems have been known to work. I’m not into that (yet, anyway.)

The other, more standard way, is to do some hard work and accomplish a few things:

• Do some research to find other, related blogs, and send a nice note to the other blogs’ owners suggesting that you write a guest post for them. Include at least a topic idea or two, if not a completely finished, ready-to-be-dropped-in article. You don’t need to select your direct competitors, but of course those other blogs should be at least tangentially related to your topic.
• Write several articles and submit them to article sites such as EZineArticles.com. If your article is selected for publication on their site, then you can put a little “about the author” blurb in there that includes a link back to your own site.

These examples are covered well in the resources I linked to up above. Of course there is a difference between reading and actually doing! I’m at the point where I really need to start doing. In this stage, motivation and discipline play enormously important roles. Those are areas in which the mastermind group really help me. We members are challenged to set specific goals by the week and by the month. As time progresses, and people start updating the progress of their goals online, the enthusiasm becomes infectious.

I’ve been particularly impressed with what web copywriting expert Trish Lindemood is doing with her 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge. Trish has quite an ambitious plan. If you have a look at it, you’ll notice that guest posts at other blogs, and submission of articles to article directories play a very prominent role.

With my “real” job and my 8-month old daughter, I’m definitely not in a position to be quite as ambitious as Trish. But I have challenged myself (and have been challenged by others) to at least get moving on guest posting at other blogs and writing articles for submission. I will also be transparent with the traffic numbers like Trish has been.

We can start with what we already know about German History Blog’s traffic: the results from August and September.

I’d sure like to see those numbers go way up, just as Trish’s did at the end of the first month of her challenge. (Great job, Trish!)

Time to go work on it.

Until next time,

Bill

P.S. I learned about Trish’s 90-day challenge because we are both part of Lynn Terry’s Mastermind group (affiliate link). I’ve been getting to know about other interesting people and their projects as well in the group. I’m quite glad I signed up — it’s really helping me with ideas and motivation.

Photo credit

The lead photo accompanying this article comes from Flickr user kengz. It shows a Bangkok traffic jam at night. Kengz has graciously made it available via the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. The suggested attribution is as follows:

In my humble opinion, Mark has a real gift for speaking and teaching. I know he’s an engineer by day, but hopefully his company is taking advantage of him for some internal training, because he really has the perfect voice and calm demeanor for teaching. Words like “soft and clear” yet also “authoritative” come to mind when I think about his podcasts (I’ve listened to every one of them.) Don’t get me wrong, I like loud guys too (Chris and Bryan over at Jupiter Broadcasting come to mind), but Mark is a refreshing contrast.

Anyway, while listening to his podcast on blogging, I thought of a few other resources about blogging and wanted to throw them out there.

• First is “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” by Darren Rowse (Problogger.net.) This is an inexpensive product that is, in my humble opinion, well worth its price. I was lucky and bought it for half-price when Darren celebrated his 5 year blogging anniversary. Now I think it’s back to its previous price (just under $20). The link I’ve given you there is an affiliate link. Like I already said, I think it’s worth it because Darren is the man when it comes to professional blogging. It’s 94 pages of juicy PDF goodness and is structured like a class, replete with daily assignments. It pushes you right along the perfect pathway to making a better blog.
• Next is Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint. The landing page for that link is, in my opinion, a bit hyped (replete with the obligatory “Earn 5,000 Per Month!…”). That’s surprising, because this excellent report and its audio version are not hyped. This product is free — Yaro just asks for your name and e-mail address. I got it a long time ago and can tell you that I have not, thank goodness, been bombarded by daily spam e-mail from Yaro. He mails out newsletters only occasionally and they are in no way offensive; on the contrary, they are often filled with interesting ideas.

Those are the two main reports that I have been referring to as I work on improving my blogging. Pepper in some ongoing wisdom from people like Lynn Terry, and I feel like I’m getting a pretty complete education these days!

Blog on,

Bill Dawson

P.S. If you know of any other articles or reports that assist with blogging as much as these do, I definitely want to know about them, so leave a comment!

For a while now I’ve known very generally what a mind map is, but I’ve never sat down and made one in order to see whether it really “feels” like a good way to to brainstorm ideas and concepts. I quote the word “feels” because, now that I’ve just created a mind map, I can say that it “felt” easier and more natural than trying to create a structured outline. I can’t really explain why — I’ll leave that to psychologists, neurologists and professional mind hackers.

Today I finally sat down to make one after reading yet one more article about mind maps. This time the article was Nicholas Cardot’s “Accelerate Your Blog With Idea Mapping” over at sitesketch101.com. He references and recommends the web-based MindMeister, but I decided for no particular reason to find a Mac desktop alternative.

I came across MindNode and downloaded the free version. It’s extremely easy to use:

• Start the program.
• Type your big concept in the single field (“node”) available in the center of the screen.
• Branch out from there by clicking the little plus (+) sign on the node.
• Keep doing that! You can click the plus (+) sign on other nodes to break them down further.

Since I’m interested in trying out mind mapping software to help come up with blog ideas (just like Nicholas’s article suggests), my first — and, to date, only — mind map was for “German History”. (Surprise surprise!)

I typed “German History” in the center (“root”) node and stared at the screen for a while. I wasn’t sure if I’d just start branching off concepts about German History (such as, for example, “Sonderweg“) or approach it more chronologically. I chose the latter. Since lately I’ve been concentrating on the Berlin Wall over at my German History Blog, the first branch (child) node that I made was “GDR” (East Germany).

But then as I kept making nodes, I rearranged things a bit and GDR eventually became a second-level child under “2 Germanies – Cold War”.

You can see the result of about 20 minutes of mapping here (click for bigger, readable image):

Beginnings of a German History mind map

As I stepped back and looked at this, it told me a few things:

• Several of the nodes contain topics that I have not yet written about at German History Blog. So there are some ideas for future blog posts.
• There are really some big holes in my knowledge, most especially the periods prior to the Weimar Era. And I know this is already reflected in my history blog. And I definitely want to correct it. So the mind map helps point out areas of further study.

The long and short of it: I will continue to use mind maps for the time being and see if it continues to “feel” natural and helpful. The version of MindNode that I’m trying out is anyway free, so I’ve got nothing to lose.

Happy Mappy,

Bill

P.S. Relatedly,I’ve also just started reading Mind Performance Hacks (affiliate link, also available at Amazon UK, Canada and Germany.) I’m still near the beginning, but I can see it is very interesting. When you get to be the ripe old age of 41, every mind hack counts!

1. A nice new Mac Mini (though they are lovely!)
2. Desktop blogging software.
3. A catchy blog title.

Because, you know, the strangest thing happened to me: I bought a new Mac Mini, I downloaded a very popular blogging program for the Mac, I came up with a catchy title for a new blog and I bought the domain, but then … the blog posts didn’t write themselves!   Doesn’t matter if you’re thinking of running the best blog ever on mobile phones uk gig venues or restaurants and your private life, you have to actually type stuff in for it to happen!  I would turn on my nice new Mac and fire up that blogging software and … there would still just be this white window with no text in it!

Previously I had thought …

“Yeah, I’m totally going to start getting into the whole blogging thing.  That’s like creative stuff, you know.  And creative = Mac, so I totally want a Mac.” 

Got the Mac. 

“I bet there’s some really good blogging software out there for the Mac!” 

Googled it and found it.

“This program rocks!  I’m going to write some awesome blog posts with this stuff!” 

“I need a name for my blog … yeah, that one would be perfect!  Is the domain available?  … Awesome!  Bought it!”

What followed was an extraordinarily long period of time during which I created … let me to try to remember … how many posts was it?  Oh that’s right, I remember now:  ZERO.  Nada.  Gar nichts!

So the day finally came and it was time to start!  Fire up that desktop blogging program, ready to rumble, … cool, it’s loading now … what’s this? … 30-day evaluation period expired!

You get the point.  Guess what it actually does take to be a successful blogger.  I’ll tell you:

1. An editorial calendar.
2. The discipline to follow that schedule.
3. Other people who keep you honest and on your toes.

Editorial Calendar

If you want to be serious about blogging, you need to operate somewhat like a newspaper.  Plan the content and schedule its delivery.  The worst time to write a blog post is probably when this happens to you: “Oh my God it’s been eight days since I did a post I need a topic and I need to write about it NOW!”  You can image how that post will turn out.

Give yourself an hour, at least once per week, brainstorm some topics, choose the ones you want to pursue, and put them on a calendar.  Look, you don’t need to get fancy with this.  Just like my Mac Mini didn’t actually help write blog posts, neither will a gorgeous wall calendar make much difference as to whether you actually follow the schedule!  I take a piece of white paper, mark up an ugly grid showing Friday to Thursday (because we have our brainstormings on Thursdays at Lynn Terry’s mastermind group — more about that later), and fill in the grid with the topics, putting each in the day it should appear on the blog.  Then I tape it to the wall.  It couldn’t possibly be uglier and cheaper.  But it’s all I need.  You can see mine from this week in the photo here.  Problogger also had a nice example a couple of months ago.

Discipline

Well I can’t really help you too much with this one.  But I think we can all acknowledge that discipline improves when you’re working on something that actually interests you.  If you feel passion for your topic, you will (eventually!) write about it.  I’m assuming that you do have passion for your topic; otherwise I’d have included “a topic you are passionate about” as one of the things that you need to be successful.  And it would have been number one on the list.  So I’m just assuming you’ve got your passionate topic to blog about.  I already had a passionate topic in mind when I bought that Mac, downloaded that blogging program and dreamed up that catchy blog title.  You know what happened after that.  So passion alone is, unfortunately, not enough, but at least it helps with discipline.  And you know what else helps with discipline? …

Other Peeps

I find it hard to believe that “lonely bloggers” — those who just put up content and don’t really engage with anybody — are successful.  If so, more power to them; they’ve got a skill that I don’t, and it’s called “operating in a vacuum.”  Doesn’t work for me.

Imagine that you tell yourself — and only yourself — that you are going to start doing 30 pushups everyday.  Now I want you to rate the likelihood that you will actually do it.  Then compare it to the likelihood of you doing it if you tell everybody in the office that you will.  I think probably you’re more likely to follow through if you’ve got someone else to “answer to”.  If you fail to start doing those pushups and you only told yourself about them, big deal — you suffer a momentary “aww shucks”.  But when you know that nosy Joe in Finance will keep asking you, “Hey Bill, how’s that pushup program going?”, you get that added bit of motivation to actually do it. 

So having someone to answer to, someone to keep you honest, can help with motivation and discipline.  I get that by being part of a mastermind group run by Lynn Terry.  For me, that’s more than just having any old person to answer to — at the mastermind group, I’ve got a bunch of experts — whom I cannot yet call my “peers” — as well as a bunch of people just like me.  The experts help setup goals each week, hold brainstorming sessions, etc.  People like me take the bold steps of announcing — in writing, so to speak — the goals that we have.  When you announce your goals to people as successful as Lynn Terry, two things happen: 1) you keep the goals ambitious yet realistic; 2) you really feel like you want to meet those goals!

So save your money and skip the new shiny computer (or not), don’t worry about blogging software just yet, and be happy about your catchy blog title but don’t kid yourself into thinking it means anything as far as creating interesting content goes.  Instead of all that fluff, just sit down, make an editorial calendar, commit to sticking to it and announce your commitment to others such as in a mastermind group (I recommend the one I’m in!).  If a mastermind group is not in the cards for you, at least find someone, tell them about your blog project and ask them to help you stick to your plan.

And don’t forget to enjoy the process!