Tag: productivity membership site

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Sometimes You Have to Stop to Move Forward: A Montville Break

View from Montville

 View from Montville

Over the weekend, I spent two days in a cabin in Montville, a mountain village on the Blackall Range in Queensland, Australia.   It was great to take in the mountain air and the glorious vistas and to stroll through Montville village, an arts and craft centre that I featured in one of my Squidoo lenses.  

I had deliberately left my laptop behind on this trip and took a real break from computers, the Internet and work generally.  There are times when you need to stop to move forward – to slow the momentum of your body and your mind.

Improve your blogging productivity with a rest

Without rest and relaxation, you can become stale in what you are doing whether it is article writing, social media marketing or writing blog posts. 

With a break, you can return to your daily blogging with renewed energy, insight and enthusiasm.  A break can also improve your productivity through the energy renewal and new perspectives you gain.  Often you will find that the solution to your current issue or problem lies in front of you – you just need time out to see it.

 This is particularly true when you are engaged in running a small business offline.  The daily demands can mean that you are constantly ‘chasing your tail’.  Eventually, you can’t ‘see the wood for the trees’ – you are blind to the bigger picture because of reacting to small things. 

Stepping back, taking time out, is essential to develop a new perspective.  You could take a weekend away to refresh your mind.  The beauty of a place like Montville can be really invigorating.  

View from The Potter's Place Montville
View from The Potter's Place Montville

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Time seems to stand still when you stop – minutes turn into hours and hours become days.  This is in stark contrast to when you are busy chasing deadlines. 

I was able to take heaps of photos on my Samsung Galaxy S11 Camera (8 Megapixels) on my Montville break and now I have these available for blog posts (see images in this post) and for creating videos via Animoto.

I was also able to identify ways that I could add more content to my personal productivity membership site:

  • Re-purpose articles I have written for Ezinearticles.com
  • Create a series on MP3’s on productivity and energy levels
  • Expand productivity tips from some of my Squidoo lenses
  • Develop a series of promotional videos for the membership site.

By taking a two day rest at Montville, I am now able to resume my blogging with improved productivity through an increase in energy, resources and ideas.

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The Challenge of Daily Blogging and the Need for Improved Personal Productivity

3Cs of blogging

There are many things that work against you when you attempt to achieve daily blogging. 

However, the effort to maintain a daily blogging schedule is well worth it.  I noticed that since I have missed a few days of publishing Small Business Odyssey, the Alexa ranking has changed from 860,000 to 1,100,000 – in other words, my web traffic has dropped.

 Daily blogging enables you to build momentum both with your writing and your blog traffic. 

 Photo Credit: cambodia4kidsorg

Creating a related blog – How to be productive

Sometimes you may need an infusion of new ideas or a new perspective on your blogging.  This can come through creating a related blog and using a drip-feed automated process.

Over the past week I’ve been building another WordPress blog, a productivity membership site:

http://www.how-to-be-productive.com

 Whilst the membership site was pre-built in terms of its drip-feed content, I decided to develop audio content for the first 9 lessons via Audacity.  Again, once I gained momentum in creating these recordings, I found the task easy and enjoyable.  I was able to produce the audios (MP3’s) for the membership site on personal productivity  in two sittings – one involving three recordings, the other six.

The associated task of inserting the audios into blog posts was made so easy by the very clever, free software, podPress, discussed in an earlier post.

So while I was not writing and publishing on my Small Business Odyssey blog, I was developing and refining my productivity membership site hosted on a WordPress blog. 

Personal productivity and daily blogging

 While the creation of the new productivity site may seem like a diversion from this blog, I believe that it actually reinforces the Small Business Odyssey blog.  Personal productivity underpins much of what I am writing about on Small Business Odyssey.  Fundamentally, if you can’t improve your personal productivity as a small business owner, you will have real difficulty engaging in any form of small business marketing.  Worse still, you may end up doing the wrong kind of work (e.g. wasting hours on Twitter, reading and writing Tweets).

One of the core challenges involved in daily blogging is, in fact, finding ways to improve your productivity. To make the time to achieve a daily, published blog post (a minimum of two hours taking into account locating images and editing), you need to find ways to improve your use of time. 

There are numerous things that can distract you or consume your time as a small business owner and it is easy to fall into old habits ( e.g. reading emails for hours) – with the net result that you do not make time for blogging.

Over the past three weeks, for example, I have been engaged with others in creating four tender submissions for our human resource consulting business. a mind-numbing task but essential for business survival and growth in the current economic and political climate.

It would have been very easy to give up daily blogging but I had to find a way to schedule my blog writing at a time when my productivity and creativity were at their best – early in the morning. 

To engage in daily blogging, takes a huge commitment but it is rewarding both intrinsically (personal satisfaction and sense of achievement) and extrinsically (increased web traffic and income).