Over the last 5 years of writing this blog there have been exactly 18,925 comments on 695 posts, an average of 27 comments per post. Whilst this is great and we get to see some readers who comment regularly, it occurred to me that I don’t really know the people who comment, except for a few of you.

So I wanted to get to know you better as a reader, a commenter, a friend, and as a product buyer.

In this post I would love it if you could leave a comment below telling me all about yourself. You can promote your products (as long as you’re not a spammer ), promote your blog, or just tell us more about you and what your hopes and aspirations are.

Why am I doing this?

You have been part of the CYT community either for a few days or a few years and I would love it if everybody who stops by here on a regular basis could just promote themselves for a change.  I have been talking through my posts, interacting through comments, and talking via email, but I’ve not had a real chance to listen to you talk about you.

• Introduce Yourself below (even if you are a regular here)
• Tell us about you, your work, your blog or product
• Tell us a little about your hopes and aspirations for yourself
• Promote the hell out of you

Jonathan Talks about his story of quitting his corporate job to do something that he truly loves, which is helping others realise their potential.

However, when he realised there were hundreds of other people who were tired of their jobs and wanted to go it alone, and become an entrepreneur, he was suddenly in hot demand.  Ignoring the signs, at first, Jonathan eventually succumbed and started teaching others how they could go about making a living doing what they loved.

Check out the interview below

You can find out more information about Jonathan’s

TRAILBLAZER Movie here

and watch the great video we were talking about during the interview.

If you have any questions for Jonathan I am sure he would be happy to answer them here.  Just leave a comment below and tell us what you think of the interview.

Click On The Image Below to Visit the CYT Award Sponsors

Okay it’s finally time to reveal the Top 50 Personal Development Blogs of 2011.

This has been a mammoth task for me and has literally taken me over 30 solid hours to complete this one post, you’ll see why as you go through the list.

With over 200 nominations and nearly 700 comments on the original Nominations Post I’ve finally managed to whittle it down to 50 great personal development blogs.

Criteria

I have tried to be as objective as possible when picking the top 50 Blogs, and the following criteria helped me with this:

1. The blog has to have a post at least every 10 days

2. The blog has to be more than two months old

3. The blogger has to show good interaction with their readers via commenting

4. The blog has to have at least 2 comments on each of the 5 latest posts

The above criteria helped me whittle the original 207 blogs to around 120. After that it was purely down to my subjective view of the design, the content, and looking for something unique about the blogger or the blog itself.

The winners

Everyone in the top 50 has a badge they can display on their blog.  You can find these on the last page of this post.

Category winners have their own badge they can display on the blog, again you can find these on the last page of this post.

The overall winner has their own badges they can display, which can be found on the last page of this post.

Okay enough of me going on.  Click on Page 2 below to go to the winners list

Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Please Click on the image to visit our sponsor for the CYT awards

NOMINATIONS AND VOTING NOW CLOSED
RESULTS WILL BE POSTED ON MONDAY 19TH DECEMBER 2011   

I can’t believe 2011 is nearly over, it’s true, the older you get the quicker time seems to pass

I would love your help in nominating your favourite Personal Development blog of 2011.  This will be a CYT annual event.  The aim of this event is to highlight some great Personal Development blogs that readers may not know about and also a chance for you to say thank you for some great writers out there.

Nominations for Best Personal Development Blog of 2011

In this post anyone can nominate their favourite personal development blogs by leaving a comment below.  I will then collate all the nominations and put them in this post.

The top 50 blogs will then be chosen from the final nominations list

The Top 50 Personal Development Blogs of 2011 will then be announced in two weeks time with the following categories:

Best Overall Personal Development Blog of 2011

Best Productivity Blog of 2011

Best Personal Development Newcomer Blog of 2011

Best Simple Living Blog of 2011

Best Finance Blog of 2011

Best Personal Development Product of 2011

To make it easier for you just copy and paste the above categories into the comments field and choose your nominations, or just leave a comment with the blogs of your choice, and I will categorise them.

This is going to take a lot of work as there will be hundreds of nominations for this award and I will be busy promoting this so as many people as possible can vote for their favourite.  There will also be a press release and hundreds of emails to individual bloggers to notify them of their nomination short list.

If you do get nominated you can use these badges on your site, and use the html code to put into your sidebar or post.

<a href=”http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/nominations-for-top-50-personal-development-blogs-of-2011/”><img src=”http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/I-have-been-nominated2.jpg”></a>
<a href=”http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/nominations-for-top-50-personal-development-blogs-of-2011/”><img src=”http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/I-have-been-nominated.jpg”></a>

What the winners receive

Besides the kudos, and the traffic, each top 50 blogger will be able to display this badge on their site:

The overall winner will receive a winners badge, which is being designed as I write.

The category winners will be able to display a category winners badge, which is being designed.

Some nominations so far

Here is a list of the nominations so far.  This will be updated on a daily basis

When the winners list is announced, each of the top 50 bloggers will have a bio, with a picture of the blog owner and link to their site. So it will not just be a list like this.  This list is to gather all the nominations.

Nominations for Best Productivity Blog of 2011

1. http://zenhabits.net/

2. http://www.dumblittleman.com/

3. http://www.gtdtimes.com/

4. http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/

5. http://litemind.com/

6. http://www.marcandangel.com/

7. http://www.productiveflourishing.com/blog/

8. http://www.lifehack.org/

9. http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

10. http://www.43folders.com/

Nominations for Best Personal Development Newcomer Blog of 2011

1. http://www.mazzastick.com/
2. http://lifeislimitless.com/

Nominations for Best Simple Living Blog of 2011

1. http://rowdykittens.com/

2. http://zenhabits.net

3. http://www.mysimplerlife.com/blog/

4. http://www.missminimalist.com/

5. http://guynameddave.com/

6. http://www.modern-simplicity.com/

7. http://www.theminimalistmom.com/

8. http://artofminimalism.com/

9. http://jill-foleyjourney.blogspot.com/

10. http://www.ridiculouslyextraordinary.com/

Nominations for Best Finance Blog of 2011

1. Get Rich Slowly

2. The Income Team Blog

3. We make money not art

4. Stockpiling Moms

5. Online Success

6. Business Success Tips 2.0

7. Niche Marketing – Andy Beard

Nominations for Best Personal Development Product of 2011

Nominate a personal development product that you have liked this year.

Please cast your vote using the comment box below, copy and paste this into your comment:

Best Overall Personal Development Blog of 2011

Best Productivity Blog of 2011

Best Work/Life Balance Blog of 2011

Best Simplify Your Life Blog of 2011

Best Finance Blog of 2011

Best Personal Development Product of 2011

Underneath each category just add your nomination, or just leave a comment with your nominations and we’ll collate all the information and keep the list updated on a daily basis.

Please tweet, facebook, Google +, LinkedIn this so we can get this out to as many readers as possible and make it a readers vote.

Please Click on the image to visit our sponsor for the CYT awards

She advised that I should make a short video letting readers know some facts about me.  This was a few months ago, and I resisted making the video thinking it was a bit like ‘hey look at me’.

The more I have got into email marketing, I have revealed a lot more of myself to my subscribers: sharing stories from my life, letting them know the things I get up to and they have gotten to know me a lot better through my emails.  It’s great, I have never had such a good relationship with my email subscribers. But, not everyone opens the emails, so not everyone knows a lot about me.

So, here it is, a video of some of the things you might not know about me.

Hope you like it.  As ever please leave a comment below.

As you can probably tell there has been a few changes around here.  So I just wanted to give you a few updates on what is happening and what’s coming up.

First of all – What do you think of the new site design? My man Charlie Pabst has done a brilliant job of the design.  I’ve worked with Charlie for the last year and he is the one who has designed all my ebooks over at CYTGuides.com I have been wanting him to design a new look for CYT for a while, but other things always seemed to get in the way.

It’s been a long time coming and I think it captures what we’re trying to do at CYT.  I have begun looking more at the branding of the site and the offshoot products over at CYTGuides.com:

How to Become an Advanced Early Riser

How to Make True Friends

How to Reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers

Ditch the Alarm Clock and Wake up Naturally

Lucid Dreaming: Living in Your Dreams

The lightbulb with the brain in it has been the logo for a while now, and I think it captures everything I am trying to say at CYT.  So now the site re-design has been completed it’s onwards and upwards.

Other projects

I am still working on the release Mind Alchemy, which I am hoping to pre-launch on the 25th April with 3 videos.  I am doing something totally different with the videos and it might go down a storm or it might totally fall on it’s backside, but you’ve got to try these things

I am also working on something called ‘Interviewing The Coaches’ (ITC).  It’s all about getting the top coaches around the world together and asking them questions about personal development.  There is also a readers section where readers of CYT have sent in questions to ask the coaches.  This section of the interview will be posted here each week, the first of which you have already seen Interview With Jonathan Wells

I have interviewed five coaches so far: Jonathan Wells Curly Martin Barrie Davenport Tim Brownson and Morty Lefkoe and they have all been brilliant.  I have a call, later this week,  with David Riklan who is the founder of the biggest personal site in the world Selfgrowth.com which he has managed to turn into a huge personal development empire.

So I have been pretty busy and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for a few months.

Let me know what you think of the changes around here, and let me know what projects you are working on.  Be good to know what everyone is up to.

Well, back in June 2010 Abubakar Jamil had an idea to help share these life lessons and with his readers writing 22 Things I wished I Had Known Earlier in my Life This sparked interest around the blogosphere as Abubakar and Farnoosh Brock asked other bloggers to share the lessons they had learned over the course of their life.  Together they started the The Life Lessons Series and  managed to get 108 bloggers to write posts on lessons they had learned over the years.

My own contribution 56 Things I wished I had Known When I was Younger is still one of my most popular posts.

Now, Farnoosh and Abubakar have brought out a free ebook, which is a beautiful short read for everyone to enjoy.

You can download the book for free at Life Lessons Free eBook I think you will love this book.

Let us know what you think of it once you’ve read it.

Focus

2010 was a year of focus for me with regards to the blog.  I was running a lot of micro businesses and making a decent income for a part timer, but I felt my mind was all over the place trying to manage these streams of income, despite believing that it was all passive income; I don’t think there’s such a thing as passive income.

I decided that 2010 was going to be the year I focussed on one thing and that one thing was the blog.  I have always loved the writing and interaction with all the readers of the blog so it seemed natural that I would choose to focus on blogging, and writing.  I sold all the micro businesses I had and went all out to develop my passion for writing, blogging, creating and interacting with like minded people.

Despite the loss of income from the micro businesses I am extremely happy with my decision to focus solely on the blog and the writing..

Lowlights

There has only been one lowlight for me this year which was the launch of AlterYourJacket.com – A video based training course.  I have written about it here.

It turns out that I learned a great deal from the launch of AYJ and have used this knowledge to go on and launch new products and use the material that I had developed over 6 months.

Highlights

Books

This year I have written and published 4 books

100 ways to Develop your mind

100 ways to find ideas for Your Blog Posts

How to Make True Friends

101 Ways to Boost Your Energy

I had help in the form of a motivational partner called Dragos Roua.  Dragos and I competed with each other to write and publish these books and between I think we wrote 9 books (Dragos came out on top)

I took me about 6 weeks to finish these books.  I published them and left them and haven’t really done any marketing and they have brought in around $1200, and I expect this will be a regular income for life.

CYTGuides.com

October saw the launch of CYTGuides.com and a new guide called How to Become an Advanced Early Riser.  Without the help of Sid Savara, Jonathan Wells, Arvind Devalia and Dragos Roua I wouldn’t have got this off the ground, so I am eternally grateful.

CYTGuides.com has managed to bring in an extra $3,500 since it launched, and more guides are planned for 2011.

Guest posters

2010 was a year for guest posts at CYT and there have been some fantastic writers who have joined the CYT authors club J

List of all the writers this year

It’s been amazing to see the response to guest post for CYT and I have now changed my posting schedule for 1 article every two days with a guest post every 4 days, such is the demand.

Being associated with TheDailyBrainstorm.com

I met a few great people over at TheDailyBrainstorm whilst I volunteered to become their guest post editor.  Of the people I got to know better four stand out: Barrie Davenport, Geri Langlois, Mary Jaksch and Angela Artemis.

Whilst I am not as involved as I was at the beginning I think TheDailybrainstorm.com I am still proud to be associated with everyone and the well run team over there.

Statistics for 2010

2010 has been a great year for CYT in terms of change and growth.  Here are some figures:

Subscribers grew from 6,300, at the start of the year to 15,200 to date (141% growth)

Page Views: 1,204,645 up from 663,978 last year (81% growth)

Unique Visits: 767,994 up from 442,496 last year (73% growth)

Clicks out: 177,991 up from 109,184 last year (63% growth)

Top 10 Articles by view count

Social Media

Twitter followers for @StevenAitchison – 3,565

Facebook Fans at Facebook.com/StevenPAitchison – 1089

Online Earnings For 2010

Sale of micro businesses – $5,500

Affiliate sales -                   $3,100

CytGuides.com –                $2,793 (after paying affiliates)

Coaching -                          $1,100

Writing –                             $600

Book Sales –                       $1,200

Advertising on CYT -        $670

Total online earnings – $14,963 down from $19,348 in 2009

Although earnings are down due to not having as many micro businesses the stress related to running websites and everything that goes with it is much lower and I am much happier focusing on one thing, so this does not worry me at all.

Looking ahead to 2011

I have already made plans to release a new 28 day, blog based, course called

Mind Alchemy: Change Your Life in 28 Days

This will kick off in February 2011 and it’s something I am really excited about.  The initial course will be free for everyone to join and I am hoping to get a lot of readers participating in this.

The course will be based online but it is my hope that this is the course that I will start doing seminars with, so I am eager to see how it works out.

I plan to release another 4 books to sell on Amazon.com over the coming year to add to the 4 I already have. I already have books lined up and know what I am going to write about, it’s now just a matter of knuckling down.

New blog design for CYT.  This has been on the cards for a while

Another 4 guides to add to CYTGuides.com

Grow the CYT forum and promote it more.  I am aware that a forum is needed for the blog and I already have one up, but I would like to get more readers participating on the forum.  I have not done much about the forum since I put it up so this is a big goal of mine.

Thank you

Robin Easton - Robin has been a great support this year and our friendship has grown stronger over the last year.

Jonathan Wells – Another friendship that has grown stronger despite both of us being really busy.  I value Jonathan’s sage advice on everything and he has helped me a lot in 2010.

Dragos Roua - Dragos was an amazing partner for the Amazon book challenge and I deeply value his friendship and advice

Ayo Olaniyan – Has been tremendously supportive of my work and has regularly featured me in his online magazine at http://discoveringpurpose.co.uk/

Sid Savara – One of the nicest guys online.  Sid was a great support throughout the AYJ launch and the How to Become an Advanced Early Riser launch and just a good friend.

Charles Pabst – Another great guy to work with.  he is the designer for all the beautiful CYT guides

Barrie Davenport – I’ve got to know Barrie over the last few months and her work ethic, and commitment to her cause amazes me.  A true inspiration

Zeenat Syal – Another angel.

Farnoosh Brock – For all her support over the last year.

There are so many more people to thank and I have thanked them all in my own way over the course of the year.

What are your highlights of 2010?

would love to know how you got on in 2010, why not share it here.

Carrying a notebook everywhere with me – usually in my back pants pocket – has helped me immensely over the years. Getting in the habit of carrying it with you and being willing to use it whenever you have anything particularly noteworthy (no pun intended) to jot down will positively impact your life in so many ways – and that’s not hyperbole. Just carrying the notebook is such a small act, since it only takes about 5 seconds for you to grab it and stuff it your your pocket, but its effects are enormous. I’ve been doing it religiously for the better part of two years and my notebooks are my prized possessions. I wouldn’t have even remembered to write this post had it not been for my notebooks!

The Top Reasons To Start Carrying a Notebook

1. Outsource your memory. With a simple notebook, you don’t have to remember everything anymore. If you have to do something, you can add it to your running to-do list for the day and not forget it. The notebook will allow you to stay organized and on top of your obligations. If you have less things to remember, your mind will be less cluttered, to boot. Less mental clutter means you’ll be able to think and act with much more clarity than normal.

2. Keep all of your ideas, bad and good. If you’re anything like me, your best ideas come to you when you’re out doing something completely unrelated to the problem that needs solving or the project you’re working on. Instead, your best ideas and your glorious epiphanies come to you while you’re out shopping for groceries, taking a run, or while you’re taking your kids to football practice. With the notebook, you can capture all of your best ideas without having to forget them and agaonize over trying to make them ‘come back’ to you. That translates to better performance at work, since you’ll retain all of your best ideas.

3. Use it as a time machine. Your notebook, if you record more than just your ideas and things to do, can become very powerful. One thing I like to do, considering I’m a personal development blogger, is to record my moods and my reflections on my days. I’ll record my ideas on how I can make my life better, and little tips and tricks I can do to improve myself – which are often in response to events or projects that are going on in my life. I count these as “micro-journal” entries (I like to say that a notebook is to a journal as Twitter is to blogging), and I date them. When I flip through my notebooks at the end of the month (and a year later), it’s like going back and time as I relive the memories of where I was and what I was going through when I was writing my notes. Also, the ideas I neglect at one time often come up much later and become rather useful. If you document things well enough, you might see a correlation between your activities and your best!
ideas. It’s all in how many notes you take and how you choose to use your notebook!

4. Create gratitude. I don’t recommend doing this with your physical pocket notebook, but instead do it with an online note client like Evernote. What you want to do is create a “positivity list”, a list where you jot down everything that was remotely positive about your day. As things happen, you can jot it down in your pocket notebook (so you don’t forget to include it later!), and then write the full list later on your digital notebook. (I also recommend exporting all your notes to a digital notebook so you can access them all at once rather than having to flip through your notebook)

The result of making your positivity list will be a heightened attention to the positives in life – which will make you feel much lighter and be more grateful for the things we have in life. More gratitude is always a good thing, right? I’ve found that keeping a positivity list has made me feel much better, day-in, day-out, as I’ve used it.

What Are You Waiting For?

For such a small investment, carrying a notebook brings great rewards. If you’re adamant about taking notes, you’ll forget much less, you’ll be able to keep track of all your best ideas, you’ll be able to go back in time and revisit your old ideas, and you can create much more positivity.

Notebooks are extremely cheap – you can get a 5-pack of reporter’s notebooks for $3 here in the USA, and pens shouldn’t be hard to find.

The time investment for taking notes is very small as well. You’ll spend a grand total of 5 minutes on your notebook on a given day, if that, and the rewards will bring you much more peace of mind and will make you a more effective worker.

Sometimes, the smallest of changes and habits can bring the greatest results. For me, carrying a notebook around has been one of those.

I did start a forum earlier this year, which attracted over 250 members, however it was on a different platform, the Ning platform, and I felt it didn’t really work for what I was looking to achieve.  The new forum is a more traditional forum and everyone will recognise the format and it will be much easier to join.

Sid Savara gave me the inspiration to use the Simple:Press plugin for the forum as he and Srini Rao have used it for the BlogCastFM forum.  Once I had seen how good it looked at BlogCastFM, I decided it was time to get my own forum, which was one of my goals before the year end.

Growing the brand

The brand of CYT has been steadily growing over the last year with the addition of new books on Amazon, a new website at CYTGuides.com, a new podcast at CYT Podcast, and now a new forum.

Unfortunately concentrating on growing the brand has meant a little less time for writing articles, which I love doing.  However, I now have the core of the CYT brand and know where I am heading so can get back to writing more articles, guides and guest posting.

I would love to see you at the forum and hope you can use it to help others as well as getting help yourself to help you with life’s big questions.

Click Here to Join the CYT Personal Development Forum