Last week I mentioned that Leo Babauta was running another A-List Blogging Bootcamp well just to let you know registration is now open.

I am certain you will love the course and everybody you meet there as well, and as I said I don’t often endorse products and don’t really sell in my posts at all so you know I must really like the course.

The details

It runs between 13-17 February and covers these topics:

The Psychology of Subscribing
How to Use design to Hook Readers
Why Usability is the Key to Keeping Visitors on Your Blog
Crafting a Killer About Page & Prime Posting Rhythm
What Kind of Content Creates Subscribers and How to Write it
How to Craft Headlines that Lure Readers to Your Blog
What Kind of Images Attract Readers
The Art of Guest Posting
How to Promote Your Blog: Strategies that Rock
How to Leverage Social Media for Super Success

Leo’s included a money back guarantee on the training

$50 off the cost of the course

If anybody decides to take the offer up with one of my links I will send you $50  via paypal after you have completed the course which runs from 13th February to 17th February.

Please send me an email once you sign up and I will verify the details and send you over the $50 once the course is completed.

Registration starts today and is only open for a short time.

You Can Sign up for the A-List Blogging Bootcamp Here

I am promoting Leo Babauta’s,  zenhabits.net, A-List Blogging Bootcamp as I truly believe it was a catalyst in my own blog rising from the ashes to where it is now, and where it is heading for the future.

In August 2009 I had 3,200 subscribers (roughly) and I made a promise to myself: that I would go all out to get have 10,000 subscribers by December 2009.  I didn’t reach that target but I increased my subscriber rate by 112% in only 5 months.  Previously I had been gaining 88 subscribers per month.  The last 6 months I have increased my subscriber rate by an average of 679 per month.  Now that figure is impressive in any language.  I’m not blowing my own trumpet here, I want to tell you one of the reasons this has happened.

Two Words:

Leo Babauta

I joined Leo Babauta’s A-List Blogging Bootcamp back in August 2009 and it gave me the impetus, the knowledge and allowed me to network with a special group of people in my field.

The bootcamps were just that, 10 days of amazing information by way of PDF’s, emails, podcasts, a forum where we could chat to other members and get help, and of course a daily visit via U-Stream TV and a chat function with Leo Babauta.  Leo and Mary Jaksch (who handles the running of the course) also gave critiques and showed members how to improve their blog.  This was invaluable and my blog was duly changed in August 2009 and I haven’t looked back since.

The course does not focus on subscribers, I only speak about this because subscriber rate is measurable, the course also looks at:

• Psychology of subscribing
• Anatomy of killer content
• Usability
• How to write your about page
• How to craft great headlines
• The art of guest posting
• How to promote your blog

There is so much more than this planned for the new bootcamp and so much that I have left out here as it wouldn’t be fair to Leo if I told you everything that was going to be in the course.

The reason I tell you this is because Leo is hosting another Bootcamp from February 13-17 2010 and it promises to be bigger and better than the one I was on.

Leo is offering his FREE ebook ‘How I Got 100,000 Subscribers in 2 years’ which is itself a great read.  You will get to read how Leo got started and how he shot up the ladder to blogging fame.

People who know me know I rarely promote anything in my blog posts, but I honestly feel if you are a blogger and are struggling to get to the next level you will gain a hell of a lot from it.

I love to encourage others to start blogging, even if it is just as a means of self-discovery and free therapy. It’s true… blogging is incredibly effective as a method for handling our daily sources of stress and suffering.

Here’s why:

1. You find yourself constantly emptying your brain.

There is nothing worse than getting stuck inside your own head, in endless loops of self-defeating thoughts. When you are blogging, you get in the habit of writing things down in journals, notebooks, in the margins of your books, anywhere really. You observe something that happens in your life (or in your thoughts), you react on an personal level, and you write it down for a release. This is infinitely healthier than holding it all in.

2. It changes the way you view the world.

Once you start blogging, you begin to pay closer attention to the world around you. You notice the details, live in the present moment, and relish the life lessons, because these become the themes you will write about. You stop going through the motions, living your life on auto-pilot, and instead fully engage in everything that happens. This simple shift in your approach improves the quality of your life in unimaginable ways.

3. Blogging reminds you that you are not alone.

If you isolate yourself when you’re feeling down, you might find yourself thinking no one else out there could be as unfortunate as you are. By comparing yourself to all sorts of unrealistic standards and fantasies, you could easily become convinced that your life is hardly worth living.

But once you start writing about your issues, values, and concerns, and sharing them with the world, you’ll soon meet all sorts of people who “get” who you are, and where you’ve been. Communities form, friendships blossom, and as you start to feel understood, you cannot help but feel better about yourself.

4. Readers hold you accountable.

If you announce to your readers that you are going to lose 50 pounds, or quit smoking, or give up drinking, or donate $100 per day for the next 30 days, you are far more likely to do it than if you just think about these goals. You don’t want to have to report back to your readers that you failed, or gave up, or just got lazy.

Your readers become your cheerleaders and primary supporters, so you find yourself following through on your promises, dreams and goals (for a change). You stop feeling like a quitter, or a failure, and start enjoying your small victories. This gets you well on your way to greater victories down the road.

5. Helping others distracts you from your own issues.

Soon enough you will find yourself in the position of being a role model, friend, or therapist. The bonds you form through blogging run deep, and you end up helping your readers as much as they help you. As you become involved in their issues and challenges, you think less and less of your own. Once again, getting out of your own head minimizes the power of self-defeating thoughts. By helping others you allow new thoughts, positive thoughts, to take the place of the old, unhelpful ones. Optimism becomes your new, every day way of thinking.

So, even if you aren’t looking to become a career blogger, if you are struggling through personal challenges, or stressful situations, consider starting a free hobby blog as one of many possible techniques to help you get back on track.

What do you think? Is it worth a shot?

If you are a blogger, have you found this to be true?

I sincerely hope everyone had a great Christmas and Santa brought you everything you wanted.

We had a great family Christmas and my wife and I cooked for 10 of the family , we watched Jamie Oliver’s ‘Christmas with the family’ series and took inspiration from that. I made the stuffing, the gravy and the Christmas strudel pudding. My wife, who done the majority, was in charge of the tables, which were beautiful, the starters and the main meal. After dinner and a bit of relaxation we played games including ‘Articulate’, which got a bit heated but was great fun.

Boxing day was spent with my side of the family on the other side of the country. It is now a tradition. that we go over to Fife.  It was another successful day, but it’s good to be be back home, so yesterday we vegged out and watched movies all day, couldn’t do that everyday: I need to be busy.

So back to normal today and I have some great news.

My New Book On Amazon

I am really excited to say that I have recently published a book and it is now available on Amazon. I have always had a dream to write a book and it started from the age of 14 after reading some Harold Robbins books. The book ‘100 Ways To Develop Your mind‘ is a little different from Harold Robbins
and is an expanded version of the post of the same title.

After all the free stuff I have been publishing on the blog for 3 years and the great feedback I have had I wanted to finally publish a physical book that people could buy and keep. eBooks are great and I love writing them but there’s nothing like a book to hold in your hands.

I published this through Createspace. It was a steep learning curve and has taken me about 3 weeks from beginning to end after I had completed the book.

This was part of my 2009 goals which I set for myself and I wanted to write about it before the end of 2009 as I took Jonathan Well’s Make It Happen challenge in September.

If you buy the book I would love it if you could review it on Amazon and let me know what you think.

Click on the image to purchase 100 Ways To Develop Your Mind

This is the follow up to ‘The Art of Writing Great Blog Posts’ series

Not all great blog posts get the recognition they deserve. There are literally thousands of blog posts out there swimming in a sea of social media that haven’t gained their owners the credit they deserve. However, 1 great blog post does not make a great blogger, you have to consistently write great posts and eventually you will be recognized for your craft. I will give you some great bloggers to follow and emulate their style until you find your own blogging voice.

The second in this series concentrates on the headline of your blog post.

How To Write Great Headlines For Your Blog Posts

Imagine you are driving a car on an empty motorway at 70 miles per hour and there are hundreds of billboards lining the motorway, all with various types of headlines on them. You are not really reading, you are skimming them as you concentrate on the road. There are headlines like:

• Here is a picture of my cute little cat making a funny face looking like Robert De Niro
• If you try and know everything in the world here is what will happen
• Books
• How to write like Seth Godin
• Great films to see by the time you reach the age of fifty

If you are on a motorway driving at 70 miles per hour, which one of the headlines will stand out the most? I would say that most people would say 3 and 4, the others are too long. Out of 3 and 4 the one that gives us the most information is 4, it tells us exactly what the post is going to be about. Number 3 could be about anything to do with books and has too little information so titles like this, unless we know the blogger well, will be bypassed.

There are millions of blog posts out there and readers are skimming their RSS readers to look for great posts. Nobody has the time to read a long headline, click on it, wait for the page loading and then find out that the post is not what they wanted to read.

Your headline must grab the readers attentions from the very first word.

Chunking and Highlighting

Chunking

When we are reading at high speeds we are either chunking or highlighting the words. Chunking means that we are grouping the words together in blocks of 3-5. When people are doing this it would make sense to only have one or two chunks to read. As I look at my Google reader just now and look under the folder ‘Personal Development’ I see 4 posts that immediately stand out:

• Value Your Self Worth
• The Short But Powerful Guide To Finding Your Passion
• How to Kill Your Disappointment
• The Keys to Great Digestive Health

When we chunk the headlines above we see that most of them have two chunks with the exception of headline 2, which is a 3-4 chunker.

Ideally 2-3 chunks would be best, so here we look at how to make the most of the two chunks:

1st chunk – Introduce your article to the reader but make them want more:

How To, 10 Ways To, The Keys, The Top 10 Ways, The Secret To, The Real Truth, Shortcuts to

So you are piquing the readers interest with your first 3-4 words. Look at the headlines above and look at the first 3-4 words, if you are chunking your brain will naturally ask the questions:

Value your self what?

The Short But Powerful Guide to what?

How to Kill What?

The keys To Great what?

The skimmer and reader wants to know more and keep reading the headline.

2nd chunk – Tell your reader or skimmer exactly what you are going to talk about. and leave out no room for guessing.

The headline ‘How To Make Sunshine’ does not tell the reader anything on the second chunk and leaves them asking another question.

The headline, ‘How To Make Colored Candles’, tells the reader exactly what the post is about and leaves no room for questions.

Highlighting

The other type of reader and skimmer will highlight certain words rather than chunking them. For example in the headline:

‘Markets Plunge As Shares Go Into Freefall’

The words that stand out are ‘Plunge’ and ‘Freefall’

So with the reader who highlights it best to use strong verbs and nouns which appeal to their emotions and curiosity. This happens when we read in general, when we read newspapers, we skim the headlines, when we look at books in a bookshop we skim the title. You can see how important it is to get a great headline that will appeal to as many people as possible.

Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives

Verbs

If you are going to use longer headlines make sure you have a few strong verbs in there. The verbs will help the headline stand out from the crowd. Strong verbs help create a visual image in the readers mind and therefore grabs their attention and makes them stop, very briefly. In that moment of stopping, the decision is made whether or not to continue reading the article or not.

As in the example above:

‘Markets Plunge As Shares Go Into Freefall’

The verbs; ‘Plunge’ and ‘Freefall’, make the headline stand out and convey a sense of urgency and pique the readers interest.

Nouns

Nouns are a way to convey to a reader the importance of something and readers who highlight when reading headlines, will also be attracted to nouns that announce something important like:

‘Disaster Causes Global Economy To Crumble’

The word disaster conveys something important has happened and makes the reader want to know more.

Adjectives

Verbs are as great way of catching a readers attention, however they might not catch the readers emotion, which can be another motivating factor for a reader wanting to read past a headline when they are highlighting words.

Look at these headlines:

• How To Keep Your Children Safe At Night
• How To Feel Energized Every Morning

They play to our emotions by using adjectives such as ‘Safe’ and ‘Energized’

Conclusion

Headlines are a major part of your blog post and it will determine if a reader will go on to look at the rest of the article or not so it is best to take some time over your headlines. When you have a few hundred articles under your belt you will instinctively know what will work and what won’t and you won’t have to go through this process every single time.

Next week we will look at using images in your blog post. You might not think there’s a lot to say about this however you will be surprised.

This is the first in a two part series looking at how to write for your blog and share what I have learned over the last 3 years.

Writing is either something you love doing or hate doing. I think I fall into the latter category, I hate it but I love the creative process of writing and I love it when the words just quickly spill out onto the page.

Sometimes it’s like I’ve connected my mind Via USB cable to the computer and my thoughts just write themselves. Other times the USB has definitely been disconnected and there is an error in the system and it takes me a while to reconnect.

This post will show how I cope with the ups and downs of writing articles for blogs and hopefully give you some advice of how you can cope with writing and become better at it.

Know The Demographics

This may sound a little strange but you have to know the audience you are writing for. You wouldn’t get the comedian Billy Connelly playing to an audience of the women’s guild club. So it is with your blog, you have to know the people you are writing for.

The best way to do this, for me, is to think of a man and the woman who is going to read your blog. Now, describe them and ask the following questions:

What age are they?

What type of job do they have?

What is their income?

Do they have children?

What type of house do they have?

The reason why we do this is to get a picture in our head of the type of articles we should be writing, and we should always keep this in mind with every article we write. I wouldn’t write an article ‘Wordpress For The Advanced User’ if the demographics of my audience were aged 85, retired,and have little or no computer knowledge.

Similarly I wouldn’t write an article ‘Wordpress for beginners’ to an audience of computer geeks.

The reason I imagine a man and a woman, rather than just one person, is that men and women obviously think differently particularly with styles of humour. It is predominantly men who find jokes about farting funny whereas women, generally, don’t. So, we have to look at two sides when we are writing.

This might sound like hard work but believe me when you are practiced you will do these things automatically and it will become second nature to you.

Don’t Be Afraid To Drop Some Readers

You cannot please every reader who comes to your blog so there’s no point in trying. If you want to be contrarian and go against the crowd then do it. You might lose a few readers on the way however the people that do follow you will be loyal.

I made this mistake early on and am only now beginning to write the articles I really want to write and am prepared to lose a few readers who don’t like what I have to say. However, If I had started out this way I believe I would have built a better blog in a lot quicker time and honed the writing to a smaller smaller group of people who were more loyal.

I love reading Naomi Dunford’s Ittybiz because she writes the way she speaks. She curses and swears but does not care, her motto is if you don’t like it don’t read it. She has a great following who are very loyal and she has a great blog and business because of this.

This is true of life. We cannot please everybody, it’s absolutely impossible, so why bother trying. Develop the role of the type of person you want to be and be comfortable in that role. If you are not comfortable then change it. Who says our personalities have to be sticky, they don’t. If you don’t like something about yourself then change it and adapt to your new role.

Write Authentically

Writing authentically should always be your main goal when trying to connect with your readers. If you are not authentic it will definitely show in your writing. This Cannot really be said if you write articles for magazines as there is a certain style you have tow write in, however, if it’s your own blog you want your personality to shine through in your writing.

Using some slang is also not a bad thing to get your point across, but using it all the time would put a lot of readers off unless all your audience is from the same area as yourself and using local slang is permissible. Generally if you are trying to build a large audience you will have a lot of readers from outside your local area.

Be Different

Your posts are not going to stand out if you write another ‘Here is my cute little dog’ post, although that type of post gets a lot of hits for some reason

Being different doesn’t mean to say you have to be totally original, if that were the case there would only be a handful of blogs on the internet.

Blog posts will generally fall into 5 categories:

5 Common Types of Blog Post

I have finished the first draft of ‘The Best of CYT 2009′ and would like to make it available to readers of Change Your Thoughts.

You can sign up to the newsletter to get the ebook which features 96 pages of great self help work from myself and several other great writers such as Ayo Olaniyan, Mr Self Development, Celestine Chua, Francesca Kotomski, Armen Shirvanian, and Douglas Cartwright.

I know you might have signed up already, if you have please sign up again and it will give you a message to advise you have already signed up.  I will send out the second volume to exisiting subscribers.

It would be good to hear your thoughts on the book.

Exciting new project

I believe I have a project which will create a lot of buzz at the beginning of next year and will see me giving up my day job around February/March time and see a lot of publicity for those who help out. I have 100 spots available for this project which will hopefully create a lot of net publicity for the 100 people involved so it will be a definite win/win situation.  More details to come soon.

Last month I wrote an article on focus and how I intended to reach 10,000 subscribers by December 31st 2009. That was when I had around 3480 subscribers. As you can see the subscriber numbers have gone up to around 4200 which is an increase of around 700 in a little over 1 month. This is terrific considering I was previously adding 100 subscribers per month. However I need to get around 1500 subscribers per month from now until the end of the year to reach that goal.

Why focus on subscriber count?

It’s not really the subscriber count per se, it the fact that the subscriber count is measurable and it adds an element of social proof. At the moment I am converting at around 1 – 1.5%, so for every 100 visitors I am getting between 1-1.5 subscribers, which is around 15-25 subscribers per day as I receive on average 2000 visitors per day. The key is not on the visitor numbers the key is to get new visitors to the site, people who have never read Change Your thoughts before. A lot of subscribers come back and read Change your Thoughts but the more new people that come the more subscribers there should be.

The key to winning new readers

I attended a blogging bootcamp run by Leo Babauta of zenhabits.net which gave me a lot of ideas to make the site a better place for readers to visit. One of the key things was to write guest posts for blogs in the same niche as me.

I have now written and published 6 guest and freelance posts at

Zenhabits

Lifesnips

Dumblittleman

Lifehack.org

The post from zenhabits brought in an extra 6000 visitors and an extra 270-350 subscribers which was fantastic. The other sites have not brought much traffic however has got my face and name out there in my field. So I will be popping up all over the place and hopefully this will help to reach my goal.

The key to get readers to return

The design

Making the design as reader friendly as possible was one of the keys at Change Your Thoughts and I duly changed it a few weeks ago and received a lot of positive comments about it. I am still tweaking and when I see something I think is useful from another blog I will add it to the CYT blog.

Making the content as useful as possible.

I have always tried to do this and I think the content has always been of a high standard by myself and all my guest authors who have done great with helping CYT and obviously helping themselves in the process.

I have added Ask The Coach which myself and Ayo Olaniyan run, I am still not sure about this but will keep it for now.

Videos – I tried this and then abandoned it as I didn’t feel it was working, I may revisit this if I work on my presentation skills.

Sunday Siesta – Will be kept for the moment as I feel it is good practice to read and learn from other blogs.

Book reviews - I have not done many of these yet but will look at this and see if i can use it.

Writing every day – My original strategy was to publish one post every day. Although I write every day I have decided against publishing every day as I feel it can be overwhelming for readers and subscribers and can actually harm the subscriber numbers. In light of this I will be publishing once every two days.

Advertising

The advertising I had on the other theme was overkill and I have now cut back on them drastically. I have also removed Google ads to give the reader a better experience. I will still advertise text links and one image ad for $350 per month which works out at $5.83 per thousand views, the click through rate on the ad I have just now is around 0.6 – 0.8%, which is good since the ad is well below the fold. The new ad will be placed higher up the fold and hopefully command a better click through rate. So in all I will be earning around $500 – $700 per month from advertising on CYT.

Keeping in touch with the readers

One of my goals is to reply to every reader who leaves a comment on CYT. This is something I didn’t make a habit of before and will concentrate on this for the future.

I will also be offering more to the readers who sign up via email. This was one of my goals in the past but I didn’t do anything with it, now I see it as a way of giving readers a better experience.

You will have seen a lot of guest bloggers at CYT recently but to keep readers of CYT, I have decided to offer 1 guest post slot per week.

New writing

I currently have penned two ebooks as part of the CYT guide series: CYT Guide to Lucid Dreaming and CYT Guide to making true friends. I will be writing more ebooks in the future as a way of boosting my income and hopefully become a professional blogger (How long have I been saying that ).

Your ideas

I am always open to new ideas and it was reader feedback that prompted me to give CYT a facelift. What do you do in your blogging practice that, you feel, gives your readers a better experience.

For the last few years I have been writing for CYT and building a small business creating binaural beats and working on lots of other little projects. I have come to realize, only recently, that I am still un-focused when it comes to my internet life.

Once I get an idea in my head I chase it, implement the idea and then work on it now and again. I realize I have been doing this with my blog. I have been writing for 3 years in August and have managed to get 3500 subscribers to CYT, roughly 100 subscribers per month. Now, some people might think that is good but it’s really quite bad. I look at my contemporaries like Leo Babauta, he started blogging in 2007 and now has 120,000 subscribers 2 successful ebooks, a publishing deal and writes for numerous blogs and I ask myself what’s the difference between me and Leo?; FOCUS. I remember a conversation Leo and I had a few years ago whilst part of a personal development network. I asked how I could improve my blog and make it better. I received numerous replies but Leo wrote back with a few home truths and basically said I need to write more guest posts, write more for the blog and a few other things. At the time ZenHabits has a few hundred subscribers and I had about 1200, boy I wished I had listened.

Focus on your main tasks

It all comes down to focusing on the things we really want. I want to give up my full time job to do my internet work at home, but I have been saying this for 2 years now and bringing in an extra $1500 per month is not enough for me to give up my full time job. Admittedly when I first started I wasn’t bringing in anything and an extra $1500 per month is great but it’s not enough.

I have a plethora of ideas buzzing around my head at any one time and all of them would help me reach my goal of working full time from home, however I have not focused long enough on any of the ideas to reach my goal.

Decision time

For the past few weeks I have been looking at my internet life and getting rid of all the projects I have started and cut them down to three main projects. They are; My Blog, Binaural-Mind site and my Lucid Dreaming project. I actually had 17 small projects on the go (and I wonder why I was buzzing all the time).

This is a great achievement for me. A few years ago I would have all these ideas and do nothing about them except for analyse them and give reasons why it wouldn’t work. A few months ago I implemented the ideas and just did it. Now, I have cut all the ideas down to 3 projects and focus solely on them. So, you can sort of see the evolution of my focus here and now it’s getting down to the nitty gritty of focusing.

A bold statement

By December 31st 2009 I will have 10,000 subscribers

That’s not a pie in the sky statement and dream I have this is a goal I will achieve by the end of the year. And I know I will do this by focusing my attention more on the blog. That’s 6,500 subscribers in 5 months, so instead of getting 100 subscribers per month I need to get 1300 subscribers per month, a 1200% increase on my current monthly subscriber rate.

How will I achieve this? By writing quality content every day for the blog, a new post will be posted every single day by either myself or a guest poster and new features will be added to the blog such as;

• ‘Ask the coach’ – A joint project with Ayo Olaniyan
• ‘5 minute fix’ – A video section of the blog offering 5 minute personal development tips.
• Book review section – This will review books by personal development bloggers out there and there are some great ones on the way
• ‘Sunday Siesta’ – This has already started and is a great feature on this blog.

I have also started using a tool called DarkRoom. This is a tool for writers is basically it’s a black screen and all you can do is write as there are no distractions, no icons at the bottom of the screen it’s just you, a black screen and green text and I have to say it’s amazing for keeping my concentration focused on my writing.

I will also start guest posting for other bigger blogs out there to get my name known again.

How you can help me out

Well, I’m always looking for guest authors and I have a few lined up already which is great.

You could tweet, stumble and delicious my posts.

In return I will always give you quality advice and help when I can.

Look out 10k here I come

Michael Sliwinski founder of Nozbe and editor of Productive Magazine has just released the first issue of Productive magazine and I have to say it looks fantastic.   There are 17 articles in the first issue and the one headlining the magazine is an Interview with David Allen by Oliver Starr.  The great thing about this professionally produced magazine is that it’s absolutely free to download.

The magazine is in PDF format but looks like a professional magazine and it’s obvious that Michael and his team has put in a lot of time and effort into producing this.  It’s not your normal PDF download.

As I said there are 17 articles on productivity and how you can get more done in your life and the list of blog authors is impressive.

• Alex Shalman Blog
• Black Belt Productivity
• Change your thoughts
• Cranking Widgets
• David Allen Company
• GTD Times
• LifeClever
• Marc and Angel Hack a Life
• Michael Sliwinski on Productivity
• Organize IT
• Positive Sharing
• Productivity 501
• Productivity in Context
• Put Things off
• Simply Get Things Done with Nozbe
• The Happiness Project
• Unclutterer
• Zen Habits

You can head over just now and check it out by clicking this link Productive Magazine by Michael Sliwinski