I’ve been working on losing weight for some time now and it has been quite a challenge. A lot of things have happened unexpected and I’m still adapting myself to some of those things right now. One thing, though, is that the journey has been quite adventurous and it is full of lots of great lessons.
Thinking about my weight loss experience brought some things to light about blogging success, and I’ll be sharing some of them with you below.
1. Plan Things from the Get Go
One major thing I realized with losing weight is that you have to plan things from the get go. You need to know what kind of results you want to get from your weight loss efforts and how to go about it. No, you don’t just wake up in the morning and start running today, then you wake up in the afternoon the following day and decide to do push-ups. What do you want to achieve, and what kind of plan will accelerate you towards achieving it?
The same applies to blogging!
Bloggers need to learn to plan from the beginning, and I’m not talking about mind mapping your goal for the next few years. Instead, I’m talking about having a solid plan aided by a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time Bound) goal system. By this, I mean you shouldn’t create plans about things you have no knowledge about or just based on assumptions.
When you see a lot of new bloggers today and ask them what their plans are for their new blog the first thing they will tell you is that they want to be making $20,000 a month from blogging in 6 months time. For God’s sake! Even though it is entirely possible to make money blogging, it is plans like these that burn people out and makes them give up, and as a result they end up believing blogging doesn’t work.
Planning is good, but you can’t plan what you know nothing about. Always be ready to plan as a blogger but make sure your plan is S.M.A.R.T.
2. Always be ready to evolve Your Plan
Like I said above, it is totally impossible for you to plan what you know nothing about, so while the above planning I’m referring to might be something basic you need to be ready to evolve it as your knowledge increases.
One other thing I learned from learning to lose weight is that the same trick that worked for someone else might not work for you, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it either. Instead, include it in your plan, monitor it for a few weeks to see how it works and let your plan evolve accordingly. If something doesn’t work for you, don’t just follow it blindly. Let your plan evolve, keep on learning and trying new things and you will be on your way to success.
3. Early to Rise, Early to Bed
Just like Benjamin Franklin says in his book, The Way to Wealth; early to rise, early to bed makes a man wealthy, healthy and wise. This particular saying has been so helpful to me when trying to lose weight and I have also noticed it is completely applicable to blogging.
I have never seen someone interested in losing weight jugging or exercising in the afternoon, inside the hot sun, and I rarely see people planning to lose weight exercising in the evening either. Most bloggers live a very unhealthy lifestyle not because they eat junk food, but because they spend too much time sleeping and hardly make effective use of the most productive time of the day, the morning.
If you want to succeed as a blogger you need to make it a principle to rise early and you need to look for a way to get the best out of your morning, just exactly like someone losing weight will make use of the morning for most of his/her exercise.
4. Don’t EVER Give Up
Not for a single day…or even a minute.
If you’re trying to lose weight and you lose a day because it is not comfortable for you that might be spelling disaster for your plan. Comfort is what makes us lax, or even give up sometimes. Make sure you don’t give comfort a chance.
Yes, I know your reason for blogging is to be comfortable but you should also realize that there is time for everything. It can spell disaster for you if you give up now because missing a single day will lead you to missing the next…and before you know it your blogging will be on the verge of collapse.
Yes, blogging is difficult, but that is the fun of it. If it were so easy everyone will be doing it. Keep pushing harder, keep persevering and never give up…not even for a minute. You will have yourself to thank for it soon enough.
So you get an idea of what I mean, Problogger and six figure blogger, Darren Rowse, published at least a post on his Problogger blog every day for years, and even after commemorating his 5000th blog post on Problogger he said he has never missed a day, not one! That’s what it takes to succeed!
5. Invest, and take care of, Your Emotions
What weight loss also taught me is that success in every field requires both physical and emotional investments. In other words, marketing the hell out of your blog and writing a lot of good articles would do little to help if you are not emotionally invested in your blog.
Take a look at example of successful bloggers – such as Darren Rowse, Brian Clark and John Chow – and you will notice that one thing they all have in common is that they are passionate about their blogging. They believe in it, they have dreams about it and it is one of the few things they wake up to every day. In other words, they don’t just plan for success, they are committed to it.
Blogging when you don’t believe in blogging will only hurt you because you will always fail with that kind of mindset. The real key to success is to really believe in what you’re doing, be passionate about it and never give up, and you’ll be able to achieve success sooner than you expect.
Are You Doing These Things?
These are some great adventures in weight loss for me and while losing weight is a good thing, something even better is that I have learned some lessons to help my blogging. Do you think all these lessons are applicable? Share your thoughts below in the comments section!
This is a guest article written by John of WeightLossTriumph.com, an expert that helps people get a Diet to Go Coupon. Diet to Go is a popular company that helps you lose weight through chef-prepared, restaurant-quality food delivered to your door.