Discipline is a skill

Willpower is a state of mind

Dedication is unrelenting motivation

Together they can be your greatest ally or your worst enemy. It’s how they are balanced that creates the harmony required for success

Have you ever been told that you can do anything if you only try hard enough? While I love this statement I find it’s greatly lacking in its completeness. I can do anything??? I’d love to be able to shoot webbing from my wrists only I seem to be having trouble finding a genetically altered, radioactive spider to bite me. It’s a great concept but I think the statement should be something like this. To obtain your goal a perfect balance between discipline, willpower, and dedication must be obtained. Not enough, and your failure is inevitable, too much and your goals will be lost. Being captain of the procrastinators all star team I often find myself distracted with so many other things that it starts to become difficult to keep on track. This starts from a lack of discipline and the thought that I’ll do it later. However as I’ve often found out, when later starts knocking on the door I rarely answer it. I know that I lack discipline but I’m the only one to blame. When you take responsibility for your own self, your own being you are able to make a change. It’s not easy to admit defeat but starting from the bottom is better than ending at the top.

The next part is willpower. As I’ve found out from numerous failed diets, burned out exercise routines, and eating more garbage than Oscar the Grouch I can honestly say that I have the willpower of a goldfish. Not the swimming kind, but the cheesy bite size cracker ones. However with a little mental fortitude and some dedication to the goal this can be changed. Willpower can be strengthened a lot like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. This strength comes from knowing that the goal is not the end, but one step closer to where you want to be. If you knew you had 2 more miles to run to the finish line would it be easier than not knowing how many were left? The concept of “One at a time” really holds true in this form. You can always push yourself for one more, but you can’t always push yourself for two more; do it once then do it again. This is what I love about willpower, the second instrument that only fails when you do.

Getting yourself motivated to do something is very commendable. Continuing to stay motivated even after the initial feeling has worn off is dedication. Everyone has started a project only to fall short towards the end. For some reason or another things start to go wrong, the project falls apart and they give up. Sound familiar? Failing is a part of learning, you can’t be expected to do everything right every time. The tricky thing about dedication is that when you get to that failing point, a dedicated individual would keep running with it until the project completely collapsed and a priest read it the last rights. This is where the balance becomes crucial. You must know when to say stop, and when to say go, and only you know truly when that point is. Stay dedicated to the overall path you are on, but know when to get off. You think every invention Thomas Edison came up with was a winner? You think Thomas Jefferson became president without sincere dedication? And George Jefferson would have never moved on up to the East Side without Weezie! It just goes to show that being dedicated can help accomplish your goals but too much can drive you to the ground.

The balance between these things isn’t easy. Since starting my blog this month I’ve been trying to balance them out to find the perfect combination. Everyone is different though, what works for me may not work for you. All you can do is try, and if you fail try again. You have the power. You are responsible. You create your own destiny. Now get out there and show them who’s boss!

With a brand spanking new contest that’s how!!

One of the things I’ve been pondering over the past few days is how to attract as many visitors as I can to my site. I’m pretty sure I can produce decent content after all I’ve been using the King’s English since I was a wittle kid. I have a very active over imagination and a devotion to sharing those thoughts with others. These are just a few of the reasons I think this thing called blog could be such a fun thing to do but as we all know business is still business. Starting a blog as a business means you need to know what you are talking about, as well as making it fun for both you and your readers. I like to refer to this as the mullet experience. Yes, much like the haircut of many in my neighborhood its business up front, party in the back. So on to business. As I said in a previous rather generic post at the time contests are one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. Being new what could I possibly give away that would make my readers want to keep coming back? A meticulously worded review of your site? A brand new shiny gadget? Advertising for 6 months? Well all these would be great to have but last time I tried to pay my utilities bill with a free review my water got shut off. So get ready to pass go and collect a bunch of dollars.

50% off all blog profits will go to one winner a month for a minimum of 6 months. That’s right ladies and gentlemen every penny every month will be split fity-fity with one lucky winner picked at random every month! All you have to do is write a small post telling what you would do with the money won and link it to the contest page. Simple, sweet, and hands down the easiest money you ever made.

Now even though I will run the contest monthly you only have to enter once because that’s how we roll at The Running Total dot com. I’ll be announcing the winner via me feed so make sure to sign up. The winner will have 48 hours to claim their prize once announced. In the event that the winner doesn’t contact me another name will be randomly drawn until a winner is picked. To make it easy to track all the entries either email me at contest@therunningtotal.com or just leave a comment in this post. I’ll post a video of the drawing to show everything is fair.

Now get out there and get your contest on. I’m looking forward to seeing how this little experiment turns out.

So you have your blog up and running. You have some great content that even your mom loves. Now what? You need some readers. His process is one of the hardest and longest processes you will find. There are literally millions of posts on how to get people to come to your site. How do you know which ones work? Start with the big guys. The coveted “A-list” bloggers know what they are doing. They are experts in the field of making money online, having successful businesses, and driving nice cars. Now my MINI Cooper is pretty nice, but I don’t have the other qualifications they have. Everything I learned came from their advice, their posts, and their guest posts (this one is the key).

Guest Posting for Guest Posters

This is a phenomenon when performed correctly can draw large numbers to your site. It’s like opening for Hannah Montana, you know who they are really there to see but if you can get the crowd going before the show they will remember you. When it comes to writing a guest post you have to give it your all. You have to submit your absolute best work. You also need to be relevant to their blog. Submitting a post about how to make the worlds best Jello pudding wouldn’t be a great idea if your sending it to a weight-loss blog. It would be a great post to send to Bill Cosby. Just remember make it great, make it relevant, and just ask. I even recommend just sending it in. It’s easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

And The Next Contestant Is

Contests! Another great way to get your blog started. People love stuff. People love free. Put them together and what do you get? That’s right folks…free stuff! Free stuff can come in the forms of many things. It could be a monetary prize, it could be a free gift, it could be services or even in the form or reviews. Whatever it is your giving away make sure it’s something of value. Value has many different meanings to many different people. Reality is based on your perception. My reality is based on my perception. I see value in spending time with my wife, taking the time to complete a project, or helping other people. Chances are your values are different than mine (especially the first one, I better not catch you spending more time with her than I do). Based on this it’s reasonable to say that not everyone will find your giveaway as something they’d want. Try to be as broad as possible when coming up with your idea, and if all else fails “Cash is King”.

 Now in order to win a contest you will obviously need your readers to do something for you. It could be writing about it in their blog and linking to you, subscribing to their feeds, or something even more mischievous. Whatever it is you require I do have one suggestion. Announce the winner of the contest to subscribers and only on dates specified in the contest. This gives your readers another great reason to subscribe to your threads and to check it regularly.

Comments

What better way to show that you love or hate an article than writing about it in the comments. Not only does this show your interest in a topic, but it also puts your name out in front of everyone else that reads those comments. With this technique shameless plugs do nothing for you. People aren’t going to go to your website just because you spam it in somewhere. You have to be witty, straight to the point, open-minded, or possibly quirky. Just make sure that the comment is relevant to the subject and shows a little of your personality. This way people somewhat know what to expect from you. The second part to this is to make sure you are an active commenter on your blog.  People love to be acknowledged and to know they are heard. I often hear from the “big guys” that there is a tremendous amount of comments left on their blogs and that it’s a nightmare to go through them all. I would love to have that problem. I would love to have so much traffic to my blog that I couldn’t handle it all myself. So bring it on!

The Wrap-Up Show

Seems fairly simple right? It should be, there isn’t a lot to getting yourself out there. What you have to remember however is that it’s a constant battle. You have to constantly be pushing your name, pushing your style, and pushing yourself. It’s easy to give up because you can’t build traffic to your site. You think I’ve never thought about giving up or moving on to something else? Once you start building up steam the momentum will carry you and your site to the next level. I haven’t given away any brilliant revelations (I barely scratched the surface on the topic) and I definitely haven’t told you anything you don’t already know but one thing I will promise to you…I will let you know every technique I use, and how I implemented it in order to build a reader base. Generating traffic is one constantly evolving dynamic that will take a long time to learn, and longer to master. Nice thing is you’ll get every mistake I make, and can use it to learn from.

You’ve got your brilliant idea now what do you do? Glad you asked. A great man once said if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Success doesn’t happen by accident. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of generating a plan and executing it. You think the military is successful because they wing it? Of course not. They follow strict guidelines and procedures they set out for themselves, take their time and execute their plan flawlessly. It’s not willpower, it’s structure, they just don’t know how to do it any other way. It’s that kind of dedication to your plan that will make you successful.

Formulating the plan of attack

As I’ve found out though not every plan is a good one. In fact I’ve worked on plans that were so flawed in the beginning that I don’t know how they even worked. The thing that I find helps me is to know which direction I’m heading in and where I want to end up. Try to be specific as possible. When you know where you’re going, it’s easier to figure out how to get there. Take my plan for example, while it’s relatively simple (Start: Create Blog - End: Make Money) I didn’t realize how many points in between there would be. I had to first figure out how to get my blog designed, online, and active. Enter Wordpress.

Wordpress and your baby

Soapbox time! I love Wordpress. I used to do some web design back in the late 90’s which of course hasn’t changed a bit since then. SQL, php…OMG WTH! Wordpress single handedly saved me hours of frustration and research into building my very own blog. It’s all done for you, fully automated and simple to work with. It has custom themes, indispensable plugins, and functional widgets it’s the best thing that happened to blogging since Al Gore invented the interweb. Regarding themes your advertising space is your blogs real estate. You can make a tremendous income off of it. Try to stick with a theme that can do that for you. Once you have your baby all set up it’s time to take it live.

Waking up Frankenblog

At this point your blog should be mostly ready. Now is the time to make sure everything is working for your rabid readers. Test out your plugins, widgets, links, correct spelling mistakes, and most importantly set up an RSS feed and email list. This will allow you to prove your worth to your advertisers which in turn allows you to eventually charge more for your advertising real estate. Once all is complete you are finally ready to blog on your blog about blogging.

The Running Total Recap

While there isn’t much here that will give you an epiphany it should help you get started down the road to success. As my blog continues to grow I’ll be posting more articles on how I did it, and give you all the planning tips I can. So to recap:

•  Plan
•  Get Wordpress
•  Set Up Your Blog
•  Test Your Features
•  Start Blogging

And you thought it would be hard.

Next step “Affiliate Advertising”.

Welcome to The Running Total dot com and thanks for coming. This post is our first official post and will be forever archived as the one post that either made us or broke us. So help us out, read on…you might actually enjoy it.In a world of overproduced, mass marketed, heavily duplicated blogs only the few sparkle like diamonds. What makes one blog better than another? Exactly the question you should be asking. (Thanks for the narrative Don Lafontaine)

There are literally millions of blogs out in the blogosphere and more created every day. As of December 2007 Technorati was tracking over 112 million blogs. In case that number doesn’t sink in here it is again 112,000,000. Here’s you: 1. As you can see there is a vast difference between those two numbers. You can see how easily this could overwhelm and discourage many ambitious bloggers, personally I just see it as a number. In my mind, which at times can be very distorted, 1 in 112,000,000 doesn’t carry any weight on my success. This can either make me a little crazy, or at the very least a little crazy but who cares about numbers? Blog about what you love, blog about what you know and success will find you. At the very least I want to motivate every one of my readers to do what they love. I can’t tell you how much I love breeding success. I find successful people are much happier and when your happy and you know it you clap your hands.

Now, what’s your Catchy, Brilliant and Unforgettable idea?

What Should I Call My Blog dot com

Hopefully the title explains it all. Now you’ve found your idea you must find a home for it. This home has to be somewhere your idea can relax, spread out and grow. Your domain name can make or break you. The best domain names are short and memorable kinda like Danny DeVito. Once you have an idea of the name you’d like to use see if it’s available at somewhere like GoDaddy dot com. If not try to use a similar name or something completely different just make sure it doesn’t end up being http://www.ivefinallyfiguredoutwhatiwanttocallmyblog.com because seriously who’s going to remember that. The other recommendation I have is to try refrain from using a number in place of to, two, too, or for. It makes too many variations and it also means your site will be less memorable.

The Knights Who Say Niche

Finding your voice will be a hugely important part of your idea. This is YOUR blog, write how you would. I try to do everything I can to be unique in a lot of my life but that’s how I am and that’s how I write. Some people are going to absolutely love your blog and hang onto every word, others won’t find it interesting at all. Lucky for you there are over 6 billion people in the world. If you figure at least .001% can access your blog and love it you’ll have 1,000,000 readers! How’s that for a reader base? Again it’s just a number and not very realistic but my point is you’ll find your readers. Your niche is out there but it will take time to pinpoint it, perfect it, and bring it on home.

Will you keep reading?

So what did you learn so far?

The identity of the movie trailer voice guy?
That I might just have an idea or two that can help you?
That success will come to you if you do what you love?

Whatever you learned I hope that you learned that I am here blogging for your success. I love helping people, I love positive energy and enthusiasm, and most of all I love my wife. If you enjoyed reading my ramblings, ideas, and corny jokes don’t forget to join my RSS. Thank you again for reading…Happy people take it away!!

Welcome to the Main Event!

The Running Total so far = $0

Wow how anti-climactic…and to think I almost put in a drumroll for that. Today is February 8th, 2008. This is my first post on this page so there isn’t much to talk about yet. However starting off at $0 isn’t a bad thing, it means I haven’t lost a penny! Problem is I still have some work to do to get to $0. The expenses on setting up this site weren’t a whole lot but I’m not going to be able to inspire many people with my huge bankroll. Oh well, I promised the nitty-gritty so here it goes.

Setting up the site

What’s a website without a catchy domain name and a gimmick? Well it’s just another face in the ever growing crowd. For many this is the hardest part of all. I have the uncanny ability of generating an idea and holding onto it for those few precious seconds before having it fizzle out. As a side note a big thanks go out to the inventor of the pen and paper. If it wasn’t for those babies this might have just been another fluttering thought lost in the random misfiring of my neurons.

Domain registraion through GoDaddy = $9.95

I initially also set up my hosting on GoDaddy but then realized that there are better sites for hosting a WordPress Blog. After doing some research and comparisons on webhosting I found that multi-award winning AN Hosting has extremely competitive prices, video tutorials, 24-hour assistance, and best of all automatic WordPress setup. What else could you ask for?

1 year of AN Hosting at $6.95 per month = $83.40

The last and the hardest part now belonged to creating my blog. After several frustrating nights working on making my own theme, I realized something. There is a reason that very few people can read or write Latin. Certain words or parts of words can be extracted and the meaning can be figured out however it’s usually best to leave it to the experts. This is also the case with designing a custom WordPress Theme. My certificate in web design from 8 years ago doesn’t mean squat in today’s web languages but at least I can still make the pictures pretty. As luck would have it I ran across a design I really liked that wasn’t too hard to edit. Another big thanks to Ben Cook at bloggingexperiment.com. I bought their basic theme which was a huge timesaver. You can get the theme right here.

WordPress Theme = $75

Thoughts

You probably noticed that my current running total is $0 but my overall expenses this month were $168.35! I know, I know The Running Total should be less than $0 but how can I let myself start behind the 8 ball? As soon as the first full month is over I’ll post the real total minus expenses. Overall $168.35 is not bad considering the site is now up and running and all of my operating expenses are covered for the rest of the year. So with this in mind my goal this month is to generate enough income to cover my years operating expenses. While it’s not a lofty goal it’s still a goal. I better get cracking! If you have any comments please leave them. I’m looking forward to meeting my future readers.