It’s been a long time since any real changes have been made at CYT and over the last month or so I have been looking at implementing some changes.

CYT has grown from a subscriber base of 3,000 last August to nearly 13,000 today.  I have focused on getting more subscribers to the blog and it’s worked.  Now it’s time to make the blog a little more interesting for the readers who visit and all the new subscribers, and to add more value.

Here are a few changes which will be more over the next month:

Design

I have hired a great guy to redesign the blog and he is working on it just now and it should be ready in the next few weeks.  It will still be working on the Thesis framework, so it’s just the skin that will change.  I am quite excited about this as I haven’t really done anything with the overall design, I recognised I am not a designer so I have hired one of the best designers to do this.

There’s also some cleaning up to do with redirects for pages that no longer exist and to re-categorise all the articles, this will happen over the next few months.

I like the white colour of the blog, but it’s a bit too cold with the blue colours so am looking to change to brown based colours and make it stand out from the crowd a little more.

Business

Since selling a few of my other websites this year, income from my online activities have dropped to around $350 per month.  So I have been looking at the business side of blogging in a lot more detail and believe my best strategy is to keep writing guides that will provide great value.

CYT Guides

I have a new site coming out at www.cytguides.com (nowhere near finished yet, but will be by the end of September).  This new site will be the site where I am offering all my current guides: ‘Lucid Dreaming: Living in Your Dreams’ and ‘How to Make True Friends’ as well as two new guides: ‘How to reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers’ and a new one coming out ‘How to Become an Advanced Early Riser: Getting 5 Hours Sleep and Feeling Fantastic‘.  The first 3 guides will be a flat $10 and the guide ‘How to Become an Advanced early Riser….’ will be on offer at the end of September priced at $29 and $39 depending on the version you buy.

‘How to Become an Advanced Early Riser: Getting 5 Hours Sleep and Feeling Fantastic’ is something I have been working on over the last month.  If you are interested in looking at the first draft and helping with editing please let me know (it’s only the content you’ll be looking at and giving feedback and editing, as the design has not been completed yet).  I will choose 5 people if there is enough demand to help with this.  Obviously editors will get a copy of the guide when it’s been completed.

I am stepping things up on the business side and want to bring more value, at the same time making the guides accessible to everyone.

As you know the Alter Your Jacket video program didn’t work out too well so I have gone back to basics and concentrated on the writing, instead of doing videos.  The new guide on becoming an advanced early riser was a choice made by over 250 readers who responded to an email I sent about the type of book they would like to see written.  Subscribers to the blog will get a 50% discount, 1 week before the main launch of the guide.

I will also be sending out an email  inviting bloggers to become an affiliate for the launch in the next few weeks.  If you are a blogger interested in becoming an affiliate please contact me.

Coaching

I will continue with the coaching side of things but am looking to get more ‘blog coaching‘ clients and will be promoting this more over the next few months.  When the CYT guides take off I will expand this to ebook Coaching as well.

Advertising

I will continue to promote my own products as well as a few select affiliate products, but want to keep this to a bare minimum as i don’t want it detracting from the main aim of the blog, which is to show readers how to change their lives.

Guest posts

I am looking at changing the guest post scheduling from once per week to twice per week.  Currently I have guest posts lined up until the end of November.

If you would like to contribute an article you can do so by sending in an article, that has not been published elsewhere, and putting it into html format and sending it in a .txt file.

Unfortunately I cannot accept guest posts from everyone.  If you are a personal development blogger or are blogger in a similar field then please send in an article.

Unfortunately due to time constraints I cannot give feedback on your articles, if they are not accepted.

So, from the beginning of October CYT will be publishing 4 articles per week instead of the current 3 articles on a: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday (Guest posts will be on a Wednesday and Saturday)

Forum

I currently have a forum at stevenaitchison.ning.com and I have not had the time to do much with it, but am looking to change that at the end of the year, but this will depend on time.

Your feedback

I am immensely grateful for all the help from readers and friends and value your thoughts more than you know.

If you have anything you’d like to see or have suggestions or feedback please let me know by commenting or writing to me

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to find out what readers of the blog would like more information on.  So I emailed my subscriber list and asked them.  4 titles topped the polls and one of them was ‘How to get more subscribers to your blog’.

This kind of surprised me, but I asked the list what they really wanted to know about this topic and in true ‘let the readers decide’ I have produced a first draft of an ebook entitled: How to Reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers.

I am giving this away for free to all CYT readers.

DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK HERE

Who is it for?

Anybody who has a blog and is looking to increase their exposure in the blogging field.  You can be in any niche and benefit from this ebook.

What you will learn

• Why your subscriber count is important.
• The four aspects of your blog you must focus on to capture readers attention
• 7 ways to dramatically increase your subscriber count

Do you like it? was it helpful? If so, I have two simple requests

1) Let me know. Share your feedback in the comments section or write to me directly.

2) Help spread the word. Pass this along to the everyone you know, maybe no everyone, I don’t think your Gran would like a copy, but you know what I mean.  Would be great to Tweet this as well.

I hope you enjoy ‘How to reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers’  it and look forward to hearing your thoughts about it.

I know you’ve heard about the Alter Your Jacket program and you know that I gave away lots of great free content with videos, pdf downlaods and Mp3 downloads etc.  The pre-launch is now over and the first ever Alter Your Jacket Life Change program has been opened.

As I promised I am offering all CYT readers a huge discount.  Tomorrow evening the price of the program will go up to it’s original price of $97 and you can get it, for the next 24 hours for $67.

What is Alter Your Jacket

The program itself has been built around an Internal Life Change framework looking at the four pillars of mental life: Beliefs, Emotions, Thoughts and Perceptions.  I will also introduce you to new concepts such as the Kairu/Kensho Mind, The 4 Ds of emotional mastery, a technique to eliminate limiting beliefs, using the rule of 3 to turn your life around, using REBT to take control of your irrational thoughts and so much more, here’s some more benefits

• Over 4 hours of online video, which you will be able to access immediately.  The course runs over 7 modules

• 7 PDF files so you can print out and read all the video material at your leisure

• 7 MP3 files.  You can download and listen to the recordings at any time on your mp3 player

• Workbooks to help you complete some of the exercises.

• Special Surprise bonuses which will be sent out to you as when they are created.

• Access to an exclusive Alter Your Jacket member area, where you can meet others who are on the journey of change

You can check out the benefits page here Alter Your Jacket Life Change Course

Thank you

I would like to thank my 3 partners who have helped me promote this initial mini launch, in alphabetical order

Dragos Roua: www.dragosroua.com

Sid Sivara: http://sidsavara.com/

Jonathan Wells : www.advancedlifeskills.com

I would also like to thank all the readers of CYT who have visited the site and left comments and emailed me their questions and support.

If you have any questions about the program just leave a comment below and I’ll answer them as quickly as possible.

Click This Link For The  Alter Your Jacket Program

I have been working extremely hard over the last few months putting a few things together to enhance this blog and to enhance my reputation as a personal development blogger and speaker.

Current projects

Alter Your Jacket

Alter Your Jacket which will be opening it’s doors on the 28th May (soft launch date).  This is going to be my flagship product for the next year and I am nearing the completion of it just now.  This has possibly been the hardest project I have ever undertaken and the emotions of just creating a project is overwhelming.

It’s a video product consisting of 8 videos between 20 – 40 minutes long with pdf transcripts and mp3 downloads and it’s about changing your life and giving you the tools and showing you new concepts to be able to do this.  It looks at overcoming fear, the belief formula, 5 rituals you need to create for successful living, finding your lifes’ purpose, Kairu/Kensho mind and so much more.

There will be free training to start the product launch off on the 28th May which consists of 4 videos spaced out over 12 days.  I have listened to the readers of CYT and decided to launch it this way:

Day 1 – Video 1

Day 2 – Transcript of video (ebook)

Day 3 – MP3 of video

Day 4 – Video 2

Day 5 – Transcript of video (ebook)

Day 6 – MP3 of video

Day 7 – Video 3

Day 8 – Transcript of video (ebook)

Day 9 – MP3 of video

Day 10 – Video 4

Day 11 – Transcript of video (ebook)

Day 12 – MP3 of video

Day 13 – Bonus

Day 14 – Bonus

DAY 15 – Launch of:  Alter Your Jacket – Crashing Through the 7 Barriers to Changing Your Life (soft subtitle)

The program will also consist of entry to a community of readers who have bought the program and want to interact with each other and discuss what they have learned from the program.  It’s also a place where I will be offering more videos for the members.  It’s only for readers who have bought the program so you will be joining a group of like minded readers who are looking to develop themselves.

I have gone from extreme self doubt to self confidence in a roller coaster type of way with this program and I didn’t realise how much work would be involved in getting a program like this together.  It takes about 2 days just to shoot a 30 minute video with the writing of it, the shooting, the editing, the converting, the hosting it’s all just crazy stuff.  However, I believe in it and hope it will offer a lot of value to everyone who buys it.

I am pricing it at $97 and will be hosting it on Clickbank

I will be starting the search for partners to help me promote this and hopefully by partnering up together we can make some money together as well as give buyers a life changing product.  If you are interested in partnering up please email me using the contact form and I will send details as soon as possible.

CYT Community

I started another project a few weeks ago trying to get the readers of CYT together in some way.  I have tried a forum in the past and whilst working on it I was besieged by spammers which have actually hurt my rankings and PR in Google and I hadn’t even launched it.  I worked hard on the forum getting it ready to be opened but the spammers won and it was never opened.

Now I believe I have come up with a good plan whereby I will host the community at another site at www.stevenaitchison.ning.com and it’s a social community site rather than a forum and I believe is much better than a forum.

the site will be free to join for 7 days and there will be a charge of $1.99 per month after that which will help toward cost and time of running the community.

This community is like a social gathering spot and will be a place to get to know everyone a lot better than you can in a forum by sharing photos, videos, links, stories and still be able to discuss, in a forum sort of way, personal development issues.

You can check it out here

CYT Community

What’s happening with the blog?

The blog is still my main priority and I am still striving to write the best articles possible to help us change our lives together, so there will be no change there.  There is a great line up of guest authors on Tuesdays for the next few months so please check out the blog every Tuesday for a new guest author.  I think you’ll agree that the guest authors over the last few months have been fantastic.

Here’s to you and your success

Over the last few weeks there have been a few releases of some great ebooks by some great bloggers and I wanted to share some here with you as I think you will gain a lot from them.  The three bloggers are friends who I have got to know over the last year or so.  I think the blogs are great and are worth subscribing to.

Anastasiya Goers

Anastasiya Goers writes for BalanceInMe and is a relatively new blogger on the personal development scene.  She was one of the bloggers on the course I was on about blogging with Leo Babauta.  She has a great writing style.  Her ebook is a collection of articles from bloggers .  You can download it now for free at The Book Of Wisdom – 50 Ideas For The All Around Balanced Life

Zeenat Merchant Syal

Zeenat Merchant Syal writes for Positive Provacations and is a shining light in the personal development writing circle.  Her posts are always full of wisdom, warmth, compassion and reading her blog you can tell immediately the energy and passion she has for the world.  She has also written for Change Your Thoughts with a great guest post ‘Conquering Fear’ Her new ebook ‘The Best of Positive Provacation’ is a collection of her best work.

Ayo Olaniyan

Ayo Olaniyan is another great young blogger and is making all the right moves in the personal development blogger circle.  You might remember Ayo as the regular contributor to Change your Thoughts as the other half of ‘Ask The coach’ with some great articles Overcoming Inferiority Complex and 50 Ways To Spend Your Time Productively he has come out with a fantastic magazine which he has worked hard on every month.  You can download the latest edition of Life Skills Magazine here

I have had a lot of email about the video production for CYT and if you look at my videos you will see the difference from the first video to the last video and how far I have come in a short space of time.

So, today I wanted to give you a behind the scenes tour of the videos I have been making for CYT.  As you will know I have been learning as I have been going along and I have now come to a point where I am happy with the videos I am producing.  There is still a bit of learning to go but I feel I am 80% there.

So here is the video of a behind the scenes look at the video production set for CYT.

Equipment

What I have in terms of equipment is:

• 1 Camcorder – Sony HDR XR520
• 1 Tripod stand which I borrowed from work
• 1 Shelving unit which acts as a table desktop
• 3 point lighting kit consisting of 3 Soft boxes (from eBay)
• 1 Seemless paper roll (11m x 3m from Ebay)
• Camtasia software to edit the videos
• Software to convert the camcorder files to MP4 (Aiseesoft, which converts MTS files to MP4 files)

The softboxes can be bought on ebay for around £190 ($300).  Make sure they have fluorescent lighting with 5400k light intensity which is the same is the brightness of natural light, so you can still have the lighting set up in a well lit room.  My softboxes have 5 x 45watt bulbs in each.

I hope this helps a lot of people who are thinking about getting into video.  It’s not as hard as some people think, and I have still got a lot to learn and I am sure there will be some readers pointing me in the right direction to make my videos better so we can all learn from each other.

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

How to Make Your Blog Pay The Bills

This is the new bootcamp that Leo and Mary are hosting and it promises to be a great one and looks at how you can make money from your blog.  In the upcoming Bootcamp they’ll look at how to create a career on the back of your blog. They’ll examine in detail how to create a decent -or even outstanding – income, as well as how to lift your profile so that you become an expert in your readers’ minds.

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:  How to Make Your Blog Pay The Bills from May 16 – 20 2010 and it promises to be bigger and better than the one I was on.

Leo is offering his FREE ebook ‘How I Got 150,000 Subscribers’ 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