blogger templates and free software download

You probably heard about the launch of “Outsource Control”, right? It is a program created by John Reese (one of the most successful marketers around) that guides people on how to achieve better results by learning how to outsource parts of their businesses.

I was not planning to promote this launch, but I have always been interested in outsourcing, so I went to watch the free videos that John was giving away as a promotional material. Once I watched the first two I thought to myself “Man, this is some good stuff,” and that is why I decided to sign-up as an affiliate and recommend them.

Even if you are not considering to buy his product at all you should still check the videos out. You’ll need to subscribe to his email list, but that is it, and the videos are really worth it.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn:

• The basic outsourcing principle that leads to wealth.
• A couple of websites you can use to find full time workers for aslow as 300 dollars per month.
• A gadget you can use to brainstorm ideas and communicate them toyour workers.
• The test you can use to verify whether the worker is smart/proactive or not.
• The software that John uses to manage all his workers and projects.

Click here to sign-up and get access to the videos. Just to give you an idea of how much people are liking them, a couple of videos got over 1,000 comments already.

As you probably saw, last week I published a group interview where 12 top online entrepreneurs shared their work habits. Some readers emailed me and posted comments asking how my answers would have been to the same questions, so I figured I would write a post with them. Here we go:

1. How many days do you work per week?
I work 7 days per week. From Monday through Saturday I work full time, and on Sundays I work part time.

2. How many hours do you work, in total, every week?
I would say 65 hours. I work around 10 hours on my full time days, and 5 hours or so on Sundays. Obviously this is the total time I spend in front of the computer, so it is not only “productive output.” It includes reading RSS feeds, browsing through sites, answering emails and so on.

I am trying to push this up though, to around 75 hours per week. This would mean 12 hours on full time days, plus 3 hours on Sundays, which I think is doable. Why am I trying to work more? Because I don’t consider myself particularly talented, so I must worker harder than my competition if I want to beat it. Hustling, as Gary V. would say.

Obviously you need to optimize other aspects of your life to make this possible without going crazy. For example, having a home-office (or an office you can walk to in 5 minutes) is a must, so you don’t waste time in the car. Secondly, it is also important to plan your sleeping time, exercise time and diet carefully, to make sure your body will keep in shape, too. Finally, you also need to live a pretty minimalist life (e.g., no television, no video games, going out once per week only and so on).

And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is the “right” way to live, nor that everyone should do it. It is just the way I wanna live, because it allows me to focus on the thing that is important to me right now (i.e., building a successful business). Other people will have different goals/important things in their lives, and this lifestyle might not be suitable for them.

3. Do you have a fixed work routine? How does it look like?
I don’t have a fixed routine, but I am a big fan of to-do lists. Usually I have a list of tasks I need to complete on any given day, and I go through them sequentially.

One aspect I need to improve is to finish the tasks I start before moving on. Sometimes I am writing an article and I open RSS reader to check the latest headlines. Needless to say that this is terrible for your productivity.

4. How many times per year do you take vacations, and how long are they?
As far as real vacations go, where you go away for at least one week and completely unplug from your work, I don’t take them. First of all because after a couple of days offline I start to get an urge to work on my projects again. Second because there is no one else to manage the sites while I am gone (and some require customer support).

Just to give you an idea earlier this year I planned a 5-day vacation with my girlfriend, where I would bring my laptop to work only a couple of hours a day and get the essentials done (i.e., answer emails, write a post and make sure the sites were working properly). Upon arriving there we found out that the hotel had no Internet access, and the 3G modem that I took with me couldn’t find a signal because the city was not covered by the mobile operator. Long story short we stayed one night and returned home the following day. You can guess how happy she was….

What I try to do instead is to take 2 or 3 weekends away every year. Usually I go to the beach with some friends and try to surf. It is not ideal, but enough to recharge the batteries.

5. How many hours per day do you spend on email?

I would guess 2 hours, which is more than what I should. My goal is to limit the email time to 1 hour per day, so a session in the morning for 30 minutes and a session in the afternoon for 30 minutes. I need to get more disciplined to achieve that though.

6. When you are not working, what are you doing?

I have a couple of hobbies. The first one is weight-lifting/Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I train at least 5 times per week, and have been doing so for many years. The other one is playing the saxophone. I am not that good, but I sure get a kick from improvising some blues. Other than that I just go out or watch a soccer match with friends occasionally.

If you heard about “Web 3.0? or “Semantic Web” please raise your hand. If you are not really sure what the terms mean please raise your hand. I am guessing we all raised our hands twice huh?

Anyway today I came across a cool documentary by Kate Ray, called “Web 3.0?. The video was licensed under the creative commons license, so I am embedding it below (RSS and email subscribers might need to visit the site to see the video player).

Some takeaway messages:

• The main problem on the web right now is that we have a huge amount of information, but few tools and processes to find, analyze and interpret that information effectively.
• The semantic web might help to solve that.
• The semantic web is about analyzing the links between things (including web pages, files, documents, real things, people and so on) and extracting information from these links.
• In a sense the semantic web will organize all the information in a more structured fashion, like in a database.
• Not everyone buys into the semantic web theory, however.

This is a guest post from Adam Diver. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I would say over 90% (actually there is no way to actually know, but my assumption makes better reading) of bloggers started out by creating their own unique blog. Included in this assumed 90% of bloggers would be myself. Being a “web log” it makes sense that any blogger would like to personalise the experience as much as possible to reflect them as a person and a blogger. However starting a new website is always difficult and it may be advantageous for many new bloggers to buy an established blog as opposed to creating their own from scratch.

About 6 months ago I actually bought an established blog to use as my own, Scribblescratch.com. I don’t write this because i’m compelled to promote my unbelievably high quality blog everywhere, but merely to add some context to the idea of buying an established blog. I have started my own blog and I have bought an established blog, with each option having their own advantages. The experience of both sites has allowed me to reflect on some of the issues bloggers may encounter with both types of blogs, particularly when starting up.

Blog = Web Log

I have already touched on this but its an important point so I will re-iterate. The greatest amount of consideration has to be, “how does this blog reflect me as a person and as a blogger; and how does the blog fit with my blogging ideas and goals?” For the most part a blog is an extremely flexible platform and established blogs can be changed considerably until they reflect your goals. The main issue here is the domain name as it remains as the only definite permanent fixture of the previous owner. Lets say your niche is pets, but specifically you write about how much you love dogs. You could not really justify buying an established pet blog with a domain such as siamesecats.com. It would just make your blog hollow. So you need to consider how important your domain is to you and how well an established blogs domain can fit in with your blog.

Content

When you buy an established blog you will no doubt have some content already published and indexed. This can be a double edged sword in that whilst you have something for your visitors and search engines it may not be relevant to your needs. With scribblescratch my content was both good and bad. Part of the blog included 20 plus unique wordpress templates with the rights to use as I wish. But the blog itself consisted of 1000+ post from a female designer about her designs and personal life. Obviously these post were not aligned with my personal views and aspirations for the site. Needless to say I removed the post, much to the disliking of her loyal readers. But those readers were never going to like what I had to say anyway, so what was the point of pandering to them. It was quite funny to see the comments on my first post when I began changing the content; “who the hell is Adam”, “Oh No, Teresa has your site been hacked, I checked the about page and there is a picture of some boy” where probably the pick of the bunch.

Traffic

Without doubt, the hardest part of starting a new blog is getting traffic. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if no-one sees it, it becomes worthless. I know how deflating it can be to write post after post, only to check your traffic statistics and find that only a handful of people have even seen it. Buying an established blog can alleviate these initial pressures. It does not mean you don’t have to continually actively promote your blog, but it sure makes promotion a lot easier. Particularly if you use social traffic methods, getting an article dugg or tweeted becomes much easier if there are social visitors actually viewing the article to begin with.

One thing to consider is how related the traffic is. I have already mentioned how I had many female visitors looking for content on the personal life of the previous blogger. The chances of them reading my new post are about the same chance as Conan O’Brien getting another gig on NBC. So on that basis buying an established blog for traffic would be pointless. However in my case the blog had a lot of traffic for its free wordpress themes (i.e bloggers), which is exactly the type of traffic I was targetting. Buying an established blog for traffic that won’t enjoy your content is a pointless exercise and can be a costly one at that. Be sure to view the traffic sources of an established blog and decide if that type of traffic will be suited to what you have to say.

Revenue

Similar to traffic, revenue can be excruciating to make at the beginning of a new blog. Generally it is all one way, in that you keep investing in your blog and see no returns. Whilst I don’t speak for the most successful bloggers I can assure you most of the bloggers out there went a long time before seeing any returns. Possibly the best thing about buying an established blog is the revenue it already generates. Even if its not much, it can help pay for your hosting, domain renewal and promotion. Its a hell of a lot easier to stay motivated when your actually making some money.

SEO and Links

Whilst blogs (and their post) are notoriously quick in being indexed and ranked by the search engines, it doesn’t mean that buying an established blog is any less advantageous. When it comes to search engine rankings, backlinks are still key. Consider how much you would pay for 500 or 1,000 natural one way links? Compare that to the price of an established blog. Not bad hey. In addition to backlinks, domain age and content age still factor prominently in the search engine algorithms and an established blog is practically cheating. My own blog had over 120,000 inlinks, mainly from the free templates. The home page had a pagerank of 3 which has now become a 5. Whilst that doesn’t automatically mean my content will rank well any new post I write in essence has a related PR5 link from the blogs home page straight away.

Whilst I have obviously come across pushing the advantages of buying established blogs that was by no means my initial intention. I am not biased to either method of establishing a blog, so long as it fits into what you want to achieve through blogging. From my own experiences buying an established blog made blogging so much easier and allowed me to focus more on content as opposed to generating traffic and revenue. However it leaves a little hole in my heart to know that I didn’t create the blog from the ground up and that I had to initially upset and disappoint some loyal readers to the blog.

Something I haven’t fully explained is the process of buying an established blog is not as easy as I may have made it seem. It is an art in itself and requires a lot of research. Perhaps I may be allowed another guest post to explain this in detail. Until then keep your options open and best of luck in your blogging endeavours.

About The Author: Adam Diver writes primarily for his personal webmaster and design blog Scribble Scratch. He aims to seperate myth from fact through experimenting with products, services, theories and myths help by many in the webmaster community.

This is a guest post from Walter Adena. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

When I started my blog seven months ago I was not aware of the challenges I will be facing. I thought that having the essential knowledge in building a blog and basic writing skills was enough to bring me to success. But I was dead wrong! Never would I have imagined that maintaining a blog is hard work requiring strict discipline and unbending will to keep on going.

Many times I felt like giving up. I feel depressed knowing the fact that I’m the only audience of my own blog. Nobody seems to care about what I write. Not even a single comment was received to encourage me to pursue. I’m sure established bloggers have experience this scenario once in their blogging careers.

Fortunately, I never give up. Instead of wallowing on a perceived defeat I studied why I am not making any progress; it’s amazing how one can learn if he truly seek. The reason most bloggers fail is that they don’t take the necessary moves to study their approach concerning the ineffectiveness of their methods. As I learn from my mistakes, my blog evolved.

Here are the lessons I’ve learned that have benefited my blogging endeavors tremendously:

1. Learning to see what works and what doesn’t. And doing something about it

In our efforts to build a successful blog, we implement methods to put us closer to this end. However, most of us fail to see that some of the strategies we use does not work for us in any way. Expecting that our methods are full proof, we are under the impression that it will work. And when we finally realize that it doesn’t, we stop without reconsidering our approach. It is wise consider the fact that what works for others may not work for you. Many otherwise successful bloggers commit this fatal error.

2. Discouragement is part of the struggles of blogging

Discouragements will always be a part of any struggles to succeed. The catch though is not to wallow on it. Instead of harboring the feeling that our efforts seem not to fruitful, we should find ways to make us more effective in our blogging endeavors. Looking for ways to fortify our endeavors could prove helpful than entertaining the “fact” that we are failing.

3. Giving up is the greatest mistake you will ever make

One powerful attitude of a successful blogger is perseverance. Unfortunately, few are wise enough to accept this challenge. Who said success would be easy? If we want to achieve our goals, we have to face the struggles inherent in its pursuit. As we work our way through, there will be times when all our effort seems to be not paying off, and the idea of giving up beckons its comforting release. But we should be smart enough not to fall for it. What most of us don’t realize is that every difficulty we face is a test of our determination. Giving up easily means we are not determined enough to make an achievement.

4. Allow time to do its work. Never fall for instant gratification

In these fast times, most of us want immediate result. But never attempt to employ this kind of rush in blogging. Every road to success requires time to achieve. Every method we use in enhancing our blog needs time to arrive at an ideal result. Impatience on this aspect leads to unwise decision making. In whatever endeavors we are working with our blogs—be it community building, social networking, link building, site promotion—always remember that result comes with time.

5. Hard work pays off

We will never know how good it feels like once we enjoy the fruits of our labor. While most inexperienced bloggers run from the idea of hard work, some are wise enough to take its challenge; these kinds of blogger knows what it takes to succeed online. Building a solid foundation on our blogs requires hard work, but the reward we get far exceeds the sacrifice we have given.

There are still more lesson I will learn along the way, but the learning I have acquired above are the most important. Success is an option available to us all. By choosing to succeed in blogging, we commit ourselves to take on the responsibility of facing all the challenges that will come, and winning at all cost.

About the Author: Walter Adena is the author of the blog LionSlinger.com. His compositions circle around life, blogging and personal growth.