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- How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World
This guest post is by Jon Morrow of Copyblogger.
After all, that’s the dream, right?
Forget the mansions and limousines and other trappings of Hollywood-style wealth. Sure, it would be nice, but for the most part, we bloggers are simpler souls with much kinder dreams.
We want to quit our jobs, spend more time with our families, and finally have time to write. We want the freedom to work when we want, where we want. We want our writing to help people, to inspire them, to change them from the inside out.
It’s a modest dream, a dream that deserves to come true, and yet a part of you might be wondering…
Will it?
Do you really have what it takes to be a professional blogger, or are you just being dumb? Is it realistic to make enough money from this to quit your job, or is that just silly? Can you really expect people to fall in love with what you write, or is that just wishful thinking?
Sure, it’s fun to dream about your blog taking off and changing your life, but sometimes you wonder if it’s just that: a dream. This is the real world, and in the real world, dreams don’t really come true.
Right?
Well, let me tell you a little story…
How I quit my job
My van
In April of 2006, I was hit by a car going 85 miles an hour.
I didn’t see him coming, and I don’t remember much about the accident, but I do remember being pulled out of my minivan with my shirt on fire. The front end of the van was torn off, gasoline was everywhere, and my legs were broken in 14 places.
For the next three months, I had nothing to do but endure the pain and think about my life. I thought about my childhood. I thought about my dreams. I thought about my career.
And overall, I decided I didn’t like the way things were going.
So I quit.
I sold everything I owned. I stopped paying most of my bills. I turned in my letter of resignation, worked my two weeks, and then disappeared without saying goodbye.
Hearing about my insanity, a friend called and asked me, “Well, what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe start a blog.”
And so that’s what I did.
For the next three months, I didn’t just tinker around with blogging. I dedicated myself to it. I started work at 8 AM in the morning, and I kept going until 11 PM at night. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t see my friends. From morning till night, I was writing, reading, and connecting with other bloggers. Nothing else.
Within a month, I had On Moneymaking off the ground, and within two months, it was getting 2,000 visitors a day and Performancing nominated it for the best business/money blog of the year. A couple of months after that, Brian Clark asked me to become the Associate Editor of Copyblogger, and so I sold On Moneymaking for five figures and went to work at one of the most popular blogs at the world.
And amazingly, that’s just the beginning of the story.
How I moved to paradise
Have you ever woken up one day and realized you secretly despise everything about where you live?
The weather is horrible. Your neighbors are jerks. You don’t like inviting anyone to your home, because it’s always a wreck, and you’re ashamed of how it looks.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to me in January of 2009. I was sitting in my pathetic apartment, wrapped up in blankets to keep warm, trying to get some work done on the computer, when it struck me how monumentally stupid it was.
I was a full-time blogger, for God’s sakes. I could do my work from anywhere in the world. Why on Earth was I living in this hellhole?
The only problem was I had no idea where I wanted to go, but a couple of weeks later, the telephone rang, and it was an old friend who had retired to Mazatlan, Mexico. As usual, he was calling to gloat about the weather and the food and the general superiority of the Mexican lifestyle, but instead of just suffering through it this time, I stopped him and said, “No, don’t tell me any more. I’m moving there.”
My office
“What? When?” he stammered.
“I don’t know exactly when,” I told him, “but I’m starting right now.”
Two months later, I took a one-week trip to scout it out and look for places to live. When I got back, I started selling all of my stuff, packing the rest of it into storage, and saying goodbye to friends. Almost one year to the day after our phone call, I hopped in the car and drove just shy of 3,000 miles to my new beachfront condo in the finest resort in Mazatlan.
As I write this, I’m sitting on my balcony with my laptop, watching (no kidding) dolphins jumping out in the Pacific. It’s a sunny day, there’s a nice breeze, and I’m thinking about ordering a piña colada from the restaurant downstairs.
Lucky me, right?
Well, what might surprise you is I left out a piece of the story. It’s the part where I have a fatal disease, I can’t move from the neck down, and yet I essentially get paid to help people. Let’s talk about that part next.
How I get paid to change the world
You know what’s funny?
Yours truly
The worst part about having a disease like SMA isn’t how everyone treats you like a charity case. It’s not the frustration, anger, or depression. It’s not even the inability to reach over and pinch a cute girl's butt when you want to (although that’s pretty bad).
No, the worst part is the freakin' bills. The doctors. The medication. The nurses.
I added it all up, and the total cost of keeping me alive in the US was $127,000 a year. That’s not rent. That’s not food. That’s just medical expenses.
Granted, I didn’t actually have to pay all that. I had private insurance, Medicaid, other government aid programs, but all that support comes at a price: they control you. The government allotted me only $700 a month to live on, and I had to spend every single cent above that on medical expenses, or they would cut me off.
So for years, that’s what I did. If I made $5,000 one month, I set aside $700 for living expenses, and I spent the other $4,300 on medical bills. Nothing was left. Ever.
And eventually, I got sick of it.
I wanted to make money without having to worry about losing my healthcare. I wanted to take care of my family, instead of them always having to take care of me. I wanted to actually live somewhere nice, not some ratty little apartment built for folks below the poverty line.
The only problem was, it just wasn’t possible for me in US. No matter how I played with the numbers, I couldn’t make it work. So, I did something crazy:
I quit Medicaid. I moved to Mexico. I stopped worrying about myself at all and started a business based on one simple idea:
Helping people.
I found up-and-coming writers who wanted a mentor, and I trained them. I found businesses who wanted to cash in on social media, and I developed their strategy. I found bloggers who wanted more traffic, and I created a course on how to get it.
In exchange, they paid me what they could. Some folks gave me $50 an hour and others $300 an hour, but I treated them all the same, and I dedicated myself to making their dreams a reality.
The results?
Within two months, I was making so much money so fast PayPal shut down my account under suspicions of fraudulent activity. Today, not only am I making more than enough to take care of myself, but a couple of months ago, I got uppity and bought my father a car.
Do you understand how precious that is? For a guy who can’t move from the neck down to buy his father a car?
And the best part is, I’m not making money doing mindless drudgery. I’m changing people’s lives.
Every day, I get emails from readers who say my posts have changed their thinking. Every day, I get emails from students who say my advice has changed their writing. Every day, I get emails from clients who say my strategies have changed the way they do business.
I can’t really believe it. Normally, a guy like me would be wasting away in a nursing home somewhere, watching television and waiting to die, but here I am speaking into a microphone and essentially getting paid to change the world. If my fingers worked, I’d pinch myself.
And here’s the thing:
I don’t want it for just me. I want it for you too.
The reason I told you this whole story wasn’t just to brag but also to convince you of one incontrovertible point:
YOU CAN DO THIS!
You want to quit your job and become a professional blogger?
You can.
You want to travel around the world, living life to its fullest?
You can.
You want to dedicate your every hour to helping people and making the world a better place?
You can.
Because listen … I know it’s horribly cliché, but if I can quit my job, risk the government carting me off to a nursing home because I can’t afford my own healthcare, convince my poor mother to abandon her career and drive my crippled butt 3,000 miles to a foreign country, and then make enough money to support myself, my mother, my father, and an entire nursing staff using nothing but my voice, then what can you accomplish if you really set your mind to it?
My guess: pretty much anything.
No, it won’t be easy. At some point, I guarantee you’ll want to quit. I guarantee people will treat you like you’re insane. I guarantee you’ll cry yourself to sleep, wondering if you made a horrible mistake.
But never stop believing in yourself. The world is full of naysayers, all of them eager to shout you down at the slightest indication you might transcend mediocrity, but the greatest sin you can commit is to yourself become one of them. Our job isn’t to join that group, but to silence it, to accomplish things so great and unimaginable that its members are too awed to speak.
You can do it.
I believe in you.
So get started.
Right freaking now.
Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger. If you’d like to learn more about what it really takes to become a popular blogger, check out his free videos on guest blogging.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World
Переслать - 5 Tornado Ingredients that'll Ensure Your Next Post Turns Viral
This guest post is by Martyn Chamberlin of twohourblogger.com.
You know what it’s like to blunder into an article that seizes your attention?
I do mean seize. Not something that charms your gaze for thirty seconds, then falls apart. I mean something you are absolutely compelled to read. Don’t misunderstand me to mean flicking through the bullets and skimming some juice. I’m talking about the business of being perfectly glued to every word.
Image used with permission
In such a construction, the blog post is a dense nugget of gold that cannot be ignored. It forces you to leave a red-hot comment. It induces you to shout and thank the writer from the bottom of your heart. It literally changes your day. It refuses to be forgotten.
Content that demands such behavior is termed viral. If you ever encountered such content, I need say no more—you know precisely what I’m talking about.
You don’t grudge reading this sort of content. It reads itself to you. You don’t guiltily sense a squandered ten minutes’ precious living. You return to your labors fresher and jubilant.
Have you ever contemplated the fate of viral content? I tell you, it spreads. It gets an unholy amount of likes and retweets. It hogs traffic and steals comments. It snatches email subscriptions and hugs them forever.
In the opening three months of my blog, I experienced the sensation of having more than a thousand people read a single article. It was enough to kill a better man than I.
Traffic is power, and power is addictive. If you resemble the average healthy blogger, you crave to write just one article that spreads like wildfire. If you more resemble the likes of an obsessed writer, you dream of constituting wildfire every single time you hit Publish.
Regardless of how gravely Blogging Syndrome has stricken you, there are five tornado ingredients that ensure your next post turns viral.
1. Steal your first 50-100 subscribers in solid guest posting
If your blog already has subscribers, you can skitter past this step. But the opening prescript to viral content is building an audience. It doesn’t have to be a big one—but it’s important in getting step two right.
Play your cards wisely and you’ll breeze through this step quickly. My brand-new blog had 89 subscribers after I appeared on ProBlogger. Even if you’re a painter or dentist, write a guest post for ProBlogger. You don’t have to be “professional.” If you’re a blogger at all, you’ve some fresh fodder to share with the community. Readers will subscribe to your blog because after all, some of them are painters and dentists too. I know this for a fact!
2. Write what your audience is passionate about
Hands down, this is the single most important component to viral content.
Nobody cares what you’re passionate about. If you write with gusto and expect every one to catch your enthusiasm, you’ll fail. As Sonia Simone likes to say, just because you’re a serial fangirl of broccoli ice cream doesn’t mean you’ll be able to persuade anybody to buy it. Don’t bleed your dreams and enthusiasm on the screen and assume it’ll rub into your readers. It usually doesn’t.
The fundamental key to crafting viral content is to write what your audience needs to read.
Pay close attention to what your subscribers talk about. Read their comments and blog posts. Talk to them through email and Twitter. Tickle their pulse. Learn what keeps them awake at night.
Once you have a sense of their problems, write about it. Confirm their suspicions. Allay their fears. Encourage their beliefs. Support their ambitions. Reveal their mistakes. In a word, be viral.
3. Develop a smashing headline
Ninety percent of bloggers don’t understand the crucial job their headlines play. On social networks and email subscriptions, the headline is the first or only thing people see. It needs to be bang-up for them to click. There’s lots of noise on the Internet and you need to dynamite your way into people’s attention.
Take your time. Do research. Analyze synonyms. Write and rewrite. Sleep on it. Choose nouns, adjectives, and adverbs that are clever, unique, evil, exciting, extraordinary, provocative, or stimulating. Example: it’s not every morning you see “tornado” in a headline. It catches your eye, see?
4. Don’t write for just your audience
In order for your content to spread outside your own network, craft it to suite a large audience. This doesn’t mean you become generic and lose your flavor. Rather, make the article stand alone without a lot of necessary introductions and inside information.
In short, a total stranger needs to be able to understand and benefit from your article without having to read six preceding articles. I visit blogs that don’t make sense because there’s too tight a flow from the last five months. It’s very difficult to get bulky, presumed knowledge off the ground. Viral content must stand alone.
Write with a newbie’s eyes. Those are the ones you need to attract. Once you get a complete stranger to properly relate to your content, your regular readers will relate to it too. If you wordsmith your content correctly, everything falls into place beautifully.
Part of writing for a larger audience means you cannot talk about yourself much. Don’t begin your posts with “Lately I’ve been thinking” or “here’s my opinion.” Cut out the Is and mys. When you refer to yourself, make sure you’re doing it to create value for the reader, not just mumble your diary. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Never forget that.
5. Don’t blog too much
Write your hands off, but don’t blog too much. It’s impossible to offer viral content on a daily basis, so don’t publish often. Instead, spend more time writing each article. Jon Morrow, the associate editor of Copyblogger, spent four hours on a recent headline—just the headline. I spent a good five or six hours on this article.
As you become renowned for publishing viral content, people will eagerly read everything you write. The viral strength of your work will build on itself. Publishing less often requires patience, but the rewards are worth it.
Get with it
Maybe you’re asking yourself, “If it’s this easy, why don’t more bloggers go viral?” In a word, most bloggers are lazy. Being viral isn’t extremely difficult, but you have to know your plan and stick with it. If you’re serious about writing a blog that’s read by thousands of people, I can assure you from experience that you’re only a few weeks away.
Have you had your posts go viral? What are your tips for making viral content?
Martyn Chamberlin is a fiercely passionate blogger who recently wrote an eBook called “Everything You Know About Traffic Is Wrong.” Get your free copy today.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
5 Tornado Ingredients that’ll Ensure Your Next Post Turns Viral
Переслать - Writing for You, and Why it Works to Draw Others to Your Blog
There’s one common thing about the four blogs that I run today—I started them all for myself.
- ProBlogger Blog Tips: When I started ProBlogger I was experimenting with the medium of blogging to make a living. I was already doing it to some extent, but I’d been looking for a blog on how to do it better and couldn’t find it. So I started it myself with the goal of improving my blogging and connecting with others who were blogging for an income.
- Digital Photography School: My previous photography blog was about camera reviews (which I partly started because I was researching cameras to buy), but after a couple of years of using a digital camera I wanted to connect with other digital camera owners to learn from them. Most of the photography sites around back then were either focused upon film or were stagnant info sites without dynamic, updated content, so I started dPS in an attempt to document what I was learning and connect with others in the space.
- TwiTip Twitter Tips: Similar to the start of ProBlogger, TwiTip was a blog that I wanted to read about a medium that I was experimenting with.
- FeelGooder: This blog was all about topics that I’ve always wanted to have a blog on. I’ve long wanted to read a blog that helped people lead a more positive life, and while there are some great ones about, I started FeelGooder based upon some core topics that I wanted to grow in and explore.
I started each of these blogs at least partially with my own need to learn and grow in mind. Interestingly, in each case I’m not sure I’d call myself an “expert” on the topics I’m exploring. In the beginning of each blog I certainly had an interest, but I was also still growing in my understanding of the topics involved.
I contrast the above list with most of the other blogs that I’ve started over the years (ones which failed), and in most cases I feel that they at least partially failed because I didn’t really have an interest in the topics—I was writing them more because I thought they could be popular or profitable.
Why writing for you works
Why does writing for yourself work? Three main reasons come to mind.
Firstly, since you’re writing about something that you are personally interested in, you’ll find people are more drawn to it because it’ll be written in a more engaged and personal tone. People tend to have pretty good intuition in this way—if you’re not really engaged, the chances are that your audience won’t be either.
Secondly, because you’re engaged, you’ll find it a lot easier to sustain the blog for the long term. It’s tough to keep a blog going for a year or more when you’re not really interested in the topic!
Lastly, you’ll be writing about real needs, problems, and learning. Because you’re writing about a topic you have something invested in personally, you’ll be a lot more in tune with real needs of those who are reading. For example, on dPS in the early days, I was writing about the basics of digital photography as I discovered them for myself. While I wasn’t an expert teaching a comprehensive guide to the topic, readers seemed to connect on a deeper level because I was writing from their perspective about challenges that they were feeling and facing in their own photography.
Do you write for you? I’d love to hear your take on this issue in the comments.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
Writing for You, and Why it Works to Draw Others to Your Blog
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