Like many, I have this romantic Hemingway-esque idea of being a writer–up early in the morning when all is still and quiet, grab a coffee, and then write world-changing thoughts into a Google doc.
When I hit word capacity, I’ll maybe go for a swim in the ocean because, of course, I’ll be living on a tropical island; unless it’s summertime, in which case I’ll be on the outskirts of Juneau, AK and will hike mountain trails.
Afterward, I’ll check how much money my writing made me and it will be a ton and I’ll know that I am free through the power of writing words.
That’s the thought, anyway. What does it look like for you? Similar, right?
Most importantly–how do we get to this point of freedom through writing words?
I’m sure you’ve heard all the crying about AI and Google and how life is just not fair. “Blogging is dead!” they say. Yet, people out there are killing the blogging game–not legacy bloggers from 2008 (most of whom are struggling), but new bloggers with sites a couple years old.
In fact, I have a theory–it has never been easier than it is now to make it as a blogger, you just have to recognize that the game has changed.
While there are more blogs than ever, most of them suck; easy to build but quickly abandoned when the owner doesn’t get rich quick. Readers are tiring of social media and are craving good blogs–so why don’t we deliver? Why don’t we figure it out?
I believe that we can. I have ideas to test.
I’ve never had a successful blog. That means I know a lot about what not to do and I’m already ahead.
I’m setting a goal of achieving the elusive $10,000 per month and I will write about what I learn here so when I achieve success ~2 years from now there will be a step-by-step path.
I will give you some of my ideas that I will test. I don’t know if they will work.
- Build the primary blog (austinjames.blog) with 100 articles
- Guest post as much as I can on anything I can and link back here
- Find paid writing gigs (for money and learning)
- Finish my public domain Kindle book idea
- Update a guidebook I wrote years ago
- Finish another eBook I’ve been fiddling with for years
- Learn Pinterest (the more I listen, the more I hear this is huge for driving traffic to blogs)
- Revive my old, dead blog and slap some AdSense on it
- Learn Reddit (google is basically putting Reddit at the top of all search results)
- Learn copywriting / internet marketing
Nothing groundbreaking here, but it is good to have a to-do list of writing projects and then get through the list as fast as possible. Success loves speed, they say.
They also say, “Believe it and you can achieve it!”