I bet your mouth is watering for a nice juicy steak right
about now. My mouth is always watering for one, because I love me some
steak. I like mine medium rare and my mom like’s hers well done. She
told me the medium rare steaks are cooked to fast for her, and all the
red meat isn’t good for her diet. I know I might start a war over
which way a steak taste best.

That is not my point today, so let me explain further.

One day while watching my dad cook the well done steaks I
had what you could call a blank out. Where you forget about everything
else around you and focus on what you’re looking at. Watching the
patience that goes into cooking a well done steak made me think about
blogging in a powerful way. I know you think how could they possibly
relate? Keep reading and you’ll be more than surprised at what you
find out.

Patience Is Key

Patience isn’t a trait everyone’s lucky enough to be born
with. For many of us we have to practice having patience. This helps
in a multitude of situations throughout our daily lives. With time
your patience will improve and more time will go by without losing
focus. Having patience with your business is the right thing to do.
You always have to give yourself the time you need to develop.

When you truly take the time you needed there won’t be a
goal out of reach. No matter how hard you work you always have to
remain patient. Good things come to those with patience. Just look
back at all the obstacles you had to approach time and time again to
get by. Even when you fail miserably get right back up and persist,
persist, and persist.

Success usually follows those that value the true meaning
of patience. It may take you twice as long or even twice as fast as
the next person to reach your destination. Learn patience and focus on
your own progression.

Time Equals Perfection

If you have ever watched anyone cook the perfect steak,
then you would know the secret code is time. It has to be flipped over
and seasoned many times. You can’t rush the process or it won’t be as
good trust me.

Through all my trials and tribulations I have learned that
anything pure in life I want takes time to achieve. You can rush the
process or cheat the system all you want but, that’s only going to
last so long. If you have any plans of doing what makes you happiest
and living your dreams sometimes you have to sacrifice. That would be
all the time it takes for your skills to develop. Some people are
blessed and develop much faster, and then there are us who have to
have complete patience.

Just like cooking a well done steak you have to give your
business time to develop just right. You better know that when you’re
developing you will realize it. You will be able to physically watch
yourself progress. Soon you will notice yourself rising up in the
ranks. Think smart and work on developing a patient mindset. Keep it
cool, calm, and collective.

Reaping the Benefits

When you give yourself the time you need good things will
start happening. Offers will be thrown your way that you never thought
you’d get the chance of seeing. People will start recognizing that
you’re in it to win it. Your words will seem to reach new heights with
every passing day.

Reaping those benefits of hard work will boost your
motivation even higher. More positive things will fall into pace and
more doors will open. All that time, effort, and persistence you put
into growing your business will shine bright like the sun.

I can personally tell you that I’m starting to see the
light through the dark. Every day that goes by only seems to get
brighter. My vision only becomes clearer as time goes by. Just like
this steak I’m cooking everything looks good!

Conclusion

Throughout your everyday life there are many things you
can learn from if you let your mind wonder. Sometimes it’s good to
think outside the box. Look for inspiration within the weirdest
situations, because believe me when I say it’s all around you. I know
to compare steak to blogging might be weird, but that’s thinking
outside the box for you.

Developing my patience and letting things unfold by
themselves is what’s helping me the most. In order to get where you’re
going the legal way you’re going to need to have patience while
fighting the war. Let the right things happen to you on their own
time, because that’s when it’ll happen at the right time.

Community Discussion

Do you treat your business like you’re cooking a well done
steak? If you’re anything like I was you try to speed the process. I
would love to hear more of your thoughts.

Author Bio: William Veasley is a young aspiring entrepreneur who
enjoys inspiring as many people as possible. W. Veasley also blogs for
a living, on diets and weight loss programs and offers Medifast
diet coupon code.

Blogging is a process. Every process is systematic.  Blogging entails a systematic approach to it and most rookie bloggers don’t seem to get it. Buy a domain; buy a hosting account and slap some content with some makeshift graphics and then wait for the cash to drop in; it’s not going to work that way. Here are some secrets for you to get started with blogging:

Start professionally and don’t monetize for the first 6 months: Don’t monetize your blog with ad sense scripts and other things. One or two banners are fine, but don’t really bother with monetization for the first 6 months at least; even better if you can stretch for as far as one year. You do this because you don’t want to make your readers think that you are in this for the money (even if you are).  Also, ad sense and affiliate marketing ads tend to take your readers away from your blog even before they begin to show you some love. You want them to stay, read and begin to trust you.

Write content first and populate before publishing: One of the other mistakes most bloggers do is to write on the fly or just before the designated date of publishing. This happens because that’s how you got started in the first place – set the blog up, write content regularly. If you write content this way, you could face a lot of pressure trying to publish regularly. The clever thing is to buy yourself some time by creating ‘buffer content’ – write a lot of posts worth 2-3 months of posting and use the auto-schedule feature to post them on the designated days of the month. This gives you a lot of time to think about future posts and publish regularly.

‘Targeted’ traffic is everything: It’s been said often that traffic is the key to your success online. However, it isn’t any traffic that will work. For blogging elements, as an example, the blog is for rookies and veterans of blogging who would like to know the basics of blogging and also new insights, tips and techniques on blogging. Would people looking for gardening tips be a part of meaningful traffic for us? No, they don’t. Focus on generating targeted traffic which makes sense of the time and effort you expend.

Have you used any of these secrets before? What worked for you?

Beginners on the Internet – be it for Internet Marketing, Writing, Web designing, Blogging – are taught to go the ‘free’ route. Although starting for free is a really a no-headache, no-risk, no-heartache way of getting started, there is no so much impact you can make with it. For example, consider blogging. How much of an impact are you going to make when you start out with a free blog based on wordpress.com or blogger.com.

Please be warned that there are a few exceptions here as well. One of good old friends Dana Prince has been writing on her blog for a long time now and it has quite a dedicated following .Want something more sensational? Check out Seth Godin’s blog if you are looking for a truly successful example of a free blog rocking the Internet; well, it works if your name is Seth Godin).

Apart from those examples above, everyone else must make some investments and do some due diligence. Here’s a list of them:

Invest in a domain name and hosting: No, I am not going to recommend any hosts here. All I wanted to communicate was that with a self-hosted wordpress blog — or any other CMS like Joomla, Magento or Drupal – would give you tremendous amount of flexibility to do what you wanted. It’s not even about monetization; it’s about being professional and giving a serious image to your readers. A hosting account and domain name wouldn’t cost you much and if you did what you were supposed to, you will very well make up for the money spent many times over.

Invest time on continuous learning: This thing never stops; when you think you mastered the art of developing content, the question of knowing design inside out kicks in. When you think you mastered design, the field is forever changing with new technology such as jqueries, Javascripts and Ajax.The world of affiliate marketing is constantly changing. Blogging has evolved from simple online dairies to full-fledged informational powerhouses. If you aren’t investing in learning, you are still under a rock?

Invest in a great theme: Mike and I have always been debating whether a paid theme is better or a free wordpress theme is better. While we haven’t been able to come to a conclusion yet, what’s more important is the look and the presentation of your site. Be it paid or free, it’s important that it looks good. Design plays a vital role in your online success and hence you must invest in either a ready-made paid theme or pay up for proper customization.

Say, have you made these investments yet? What other things have you spent on?

There are posts on blogging and there are some really good posts on blogging. I happened to be reading a lot last weekend and I came across a post on Problogger – this is one blog you should read, if you haven’t yet done it – that made me stop and think about blogging as a business model, yet again. This is something I have always been thinking about and now David Risley drives the nail into my forehead. Soon after reading the post, I could help but think about some really valuable lessons those posts have to teach us:

Dude, where the hell is the product?

The one thing the post advocates: Have a real product you could sell, throw a blog for effect, value and marketing returns. Point made case closed. It is the product makes who make the most money and it is one model that has always been on the move. If you are running blogs as mini-newspapers on mini-subjects, you can only go so far – - a refreshing insight on Internet business. Isn’t it? Could you make a living on ads- here and there?

A Bad business model is bad, no matter which medium you choose

The newspapers and magazines are going to be out of business what with all that paper, gloss, expensive printing systems, journalists, systems, processes and licenses. David opines that the newspapers are going to be out of business soon and I second his opinion. If you are blogging and focusing on just providing information, aren’t you doing the same thing the newspapers are doing but on a much reduced scale?

The Blogging Myth Reinforced

If you were the owner of Problogger or Copy Blogger, you would make money and if you aren’t in the top 100 listings of Technorati, you just have two choices. First, you do all you can to get there or you quit and create an actual product that you could sell. The only way a blogger can make money by making the “blog” itself as the product is to follow the first choice. An easier and much more rewarding way to make money is to create a product and sell it through your blog by invoking trust of your readers by providing valuable content.

If you have great content on your blog, half of your work in making your blog a success is already done. However, that aspect of blogging – the ability to bring out high-quality, impeccable posts – is easier said than done. There are some really nifty ways to make sure that your productivity levels are improved while your posts reek of quality information and are accurate in terms of syntax, grammar and spellings. Here are three ways you can produce quality posts:

Have a process in place: Most of the blogging that we do is either non-existent or improvised heavily. Blogs are produced when the blogger feels like doing it and most bloggers don’t have a process to follow when approaching their blogging. Blogging is much like running a business – you need to have systems to produce consistent blogs all of them written, uploaded and linked in the same way. That’s possible when you develop a system. Look at the image below to get an idea of how I developed a system for one of my blogs.

Hire an editorial and writing team: As the image above would have shown, it makes tremendous sense to hire a panel of editors and writers to do all the work of producing content for you. When you do this, you will realize that you are now left with a lot of time in your hands which you could use to do revenue producing tasks like marketing, creating joint ventures, creating new products, etc. Also, needless to say, the writers and editors together can produce post of incredible quality – something you would have struggled to do if you had to do it by yourself.

Develop your marketing process: Just like for any business, blogs can survive only when you have flair to market it. Do all you can to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. Internet marketing is an ocean in itself and you could start with some free methods and gradually move on to advanced methods or paid methods. Develop a system for your marketing process to such that you can outsource most of the mundane work.

A blogger is usually a lone ranger, battling to bring out his blog into the open and pump traffic to the site. He does all he can to set-up and run the blog, to produce content, to bring in the traffic, to do the link building and to do all kinds  promotional activities like article marketing, forum posting, etc. Can you image the amount of time a blogger has to put in? What is your time worth really? That’s why leverage is a beautiful thing; it is the ultimate wealth builder. Here are three ways you either make more money or save more of it using leverage:

Build a team of virtual assistants: Be it localized or virtual, bring in a team of virtual assistants and train them to do all the mundane and repetitive tasks online. Think about all the blog posts you need to upload in a day, along with relevant images, tags, linking to other blogs, doing the SEO for each blog post. I noticed that it takes about 30 minutes to one hour to write a blog post, it takes almost the same time to upload it correctly. If it is one hour per blog, and if you have 10 blogs to post in a week, it’s almost ten hours a week wasted. At the rate of $ 20 an hour, you are losing $200 a week, almost $400 a month. Allow others to do these tasks for you and use the time saved for work that is more rewarding for you.

Use Automation and mass duplication of efforts wherever possible: I personally know many fellow bloggers who spend a whopping 3-4 hours a day just writing parallel content in the form of articles and manually post them to Ezine articles or other article directories for syndication. Although these efforts are commendable, it is incredibly time consuming. Using automatic, professional article submission services like Content Crooner, for instance, you can almost automate your efforts, save considerable time and bring in results faster.

Bring in a team for everything: While running and operating your blog, you might have to get a lot of banners done, blogs need headers, you will need a logo, and you your blog will need customization along with regular maintenance. It will need content regularly and it will need someone (if not yourself) to post them each day, in the right way. Why not have a team – at least one person per team – to do each of these tasks for you. You could even do this virtually without spending too much on office space and infrastructure.

Blogging isn’t easy. Anyone who tried making money off blogging would stand testimony to that fact. However, the mistake basket lies entirely on a bloggers’ lap. Knowingly or unknowingly, bloggers commit a lot of mistakes and we have covered these mistakes in great detail. However, it just doesn’t seem to end. As I continue blogging, I am aware of the many mistakes we make at bloggingelements.com and I thought sharing it here should help some of you be aware of the potential pitfalls bloggers make:

Changing focus too soon, too many times: I was guilty of this many moons ago when I first started blogging. My attention span isn’t great enough to write home about and I tend to be disinterested very easily. I crave for variety and change. With me being like that (and some of you are just like me in this regard), staying on course and blogging about just one thing for years together might just not be the thing. Well, I trained myself to go against my natural tendencies. Now, I don’t shift my niches and my focus anymore. However, it could be one single problem you will really need to deal with.

Shifting schedules: Mike and I had these problems here a t BE; It’s a huge problem of not being able to discern as to when your posts need to go live and at what time. We are still trying to figure out what the best times and days are for posting on Blogging Elements. We have tried 3 posts a week and eventually settled at 2 posts a week. We then tried day-clusters like Wed-Fri, Fri-Sun, Sat-Sun and many more. For a while now, we are doing Thurs-Sat combination which seems to be doing well. So, we might just coast along.  Shifting schedules isn’t as bad as shifting focus, but still, we must find our best posting frequencies as soon as possible.

Not promoting enough: I rant and rave about this a lot and I will continue to do so until I am able to scream this sub-heading out when you kick me awake from a deep slumber. We buy hosting, domain name, post like crazy, invest time, effort and money into it all but we just don’t promote it enough. It’s time you wear your sales hat and go out to the streets (or the virtual streets, for that matter). Promote the heck out of your blog because nothing else matters.

It’s been over 5 years I spent online and at least two of these years I spent blogging. I noticed a few patterns on the Internet and my own behaviour in response to these fluctuations. A lot of it has been improvised, a little has been strategic. However, a few responses always turned out to be more profitable than others for me. I thought sharing that here for you would help you cut out the mistakes I did while capitalizing on the valuable lessons I picked up from there.

Give and Then Take: I have been trained, from the very beginning, to understand and revere the law of averages. It has been drilled down deep into my psyche that “business is always a game of numbers”. I can’t tell you how much this simple law reaches into your everyday life. Think about it – talk to ten women, one will talk back to you and it could lead you to get involved in the relationship of your dreams; pick up more than just one stock (diversify your portfolio) so you will minimize your risk to a great extent; bid on more projects relentlessly and it is imminent that you will land a few for yourself; talk to enough prospects each day and a sale is inevitable. The rule is everywhere. How does that apply to blogging? Couple of ways:

• Diversify: Why just have one blog? Once you know the process of finding a niche, doing proper research, setting up a blog, producing content and promoting it, you could have as many blogs as you like. Some will earn, some won’t. However, in any given month, if one blog doesn’t perform or earn enough for you, you have other blogs that will route income streams into your bank account, won’t you?
• Joint ventures: You very well know that for some of the Internet marketing rockstars and blogging veterans like Darren Rowse or Yaro Starak, Joint Ventures have always been pivotal to their success. Have you, as a blogger, tried doing that? If yes, how many people did you talk to? Most of them turned you down or didn’t even respond? So what? Haven’t you tried again? You gave up, didn’t you? The secret is to become a raging bull; to bash on regardless.
• Joining Networks, Tapping into Monetization schemes: I remember putting up my first blog ever and I was eager to monetize my blog. I tried everything Internet had to offer – affiliate programs, text link ads, Chitika, clicksor and much more. My applications to some of the elite affiliate networks were turned down and most of my applications to monetizing channels didn’t work because I lacked sufficient traffic to my blog. You know what I did? I tried some more and finally gave up. Lesson learnt? If I only I kept pumping content in and continued to approach these networks and money making channels, I would have been doing really well for myself.

All You have to do is ASK: I learnt this after a long time. The power of this simple, little word “Ask” was beyond comprehension for me. I couldn’t believe that it actually has the power to change your life completely. Yet again, it is applicable everywhere in your life and not just blogging. Need a raise? Ask. Want to ask that attractive male/female out? Ask. Want to partner with someone and run a business? Ask. Want to set higher rates as a blogger or a freelancer? Ask. Want to marry someone? Ask. Want to guest blog on other blogs? Ask.

Learn copywriting: I think I mentioned it once before and I will do it again because it’s THAT important. If you just had to pick up one skill, let copywriting be it. The power of the written word is incredible. Needless to say, it is the thread your blog will hang on to for success, popularity and traffic. These words will pamper, cajole, influence, pre-sell and finally sell. It is totally another post on how to master the art of copywriting.

What have you learned as a blogger? New or experienced, every blogger has a story. What’s yours?

Internet entrepreneurs are a different breed; they start with almost nothing, they work without knowing what lies on the other side of the browser, they go penniless for years before the first dollar rings at the cash register and certainly does share a lot in common withthe good old offline entrepreneur.

A blog is an entrepreneurs’ voice – offline or on: It brings out that lonely parched voice of rebels who wanted to do things their way. It documents the journey of their creation and helps to spread it out for the common good in exchange for a possible commercial reward. They are the proud makes of engines that drive capitalism and make thousands of dollars possible for the federal exchequer.

A blog is an entrepreneurs’ weapon: Think about what an entrepreneur can do with a blog – he can promote, educate, attack, inform, pamper, cajole, entertain and touch your heart. Entrepreneurs can be in touch constantly using a blog and that’s an amazing way to get closer to your customers.

A blog is an extension of an entrepreneurs’ personality: I don’t want to enter a shop I don’t know. I am an incorrigible mall hater and I detest shopping offline ( I don’t do it unless I need bottled water while cruising through the Sahara desert or if I need to buy myself a pack of oxygen if I am hard-pressed to breathe). I love the Internet and hate it when my equipment gets busted. I don’t believe in “We are a Fortune 500 company, with 165 years of experience making electric motors kind of speeches…”and I love writing that reflects some personality; not the usual corporate “we are big so you listen to us when we speak you little two-legged-nothing-overdeveloped-insect-with-a-dysfunctional brain” kind of condescending copy. Now, that’s why I think an entrepreneur or a business person should blog.

What does blog mean to you? Why are you here? What’s your purpose? Do I ever get to hear your voice?