Mobile lifestyle

MOBILE LIFESTYLE
Lately I have been doing some business and personal traveling. It takes time to get from A to B, but when you calculate all the preparations you need to do for setting travel plans... well it takes time. Looks like mobile lifestyle is a huge sink for resources, if you do it extensively - yesterday NYC, today London and Moscow tomorrow. Obviously it doesn't work like that, one has to have time to write and that's difficult to do while looking for GATE 48.

MOBILISH LIFESTYLE
Stupid term but more accurate. Half a year here another over there, this has better chances of succeeding as stable and continuous lifestyle. You avoid wasting time on constant search of an internet access, accommodation, like-minded people, stories to write about... stay somewhere a tad longer and you get better grasp of everything local, but still retain that outsider's fresh point of view. You have time to benefit from networking and those contacts help you even further down the road as you move somewhere else. If we merely visit a place, we tend to sightsee instead of see with insight.

Commitment

COMMITMENT FABLES
Remember the race, the one with a hare and a turtle? What about the story of a tiny tree lifting up its roots and changing its place all the time to get every possible benefit, while other trees stood tall and grew on?

Commitment is the keyword here - commitment to continue while keeping eyes in the goal. What happens if you have plenty of commitment but very little time? Yes, you will get there but you will get there later. What if there moves faster than you?

OVERTAKING COMMITMENT
In web new styles of communication are creeping up from cracks of everything. Let's take Mike's meta tagging campaign for example, he started it five years ago, designed it from a scratch and executed it to near perfection, only to notice that as it's finally ready to launch, nobody cares about meta tags anymore.

Poor Mike made it to the goal, but took too long to get there. Had it been carpenter skills that Mike was after, just maybe the goal would have remained where it was all along.

COMMITMENT IS NOT ENOUGH
Let me write it again - commitment is not enough. We all have beautiful and glorious dreams even plans to realize them, commitment to stick with plans but there it ends. How many of us comes across some project while looking for that certain book with that article or what was it... Anyway, there it is, something you have been planning to do and did for a while until something else came along and you had to scale it down, but never gave up. In a matter of a fact, this is the perfect time to do some dusting and get it going again - you know, an hour here and an hour there.

Do you see a pattern of tortoihare (this is not an anime character) - getting there slowly - only, today you have to get there fast.

Comments

Thank you for all the comments you leave on this blog, every single one of them. It always takes some nerves to post ones thoughts for everybody (I just wish my thoughts would reach everybody) to see. I think here is the cause for so many "Hello, world" or "Great post!" comments. We are afraid of controversy and therefore keep our communication within comfort zone.

I don't want to be that person who keeps on commenting the same "Great post, X!" over and over nor I want to find controversial angel to get attention. I plan to donate some content for the blogs I follow by slightly more thought out commenting. I believe this will contribute to the quality of the original post (I don't know whether comments give more value for the post, but I do know that bad comments devalue it).

This whole commenting thingy just recently struck me while running a name search on a competitor (I was doing that benchmark thingy). What I found out was that my benchmark had many well written articles all over net, because he had posted them on one article sharing site. He also had equally many comments if not more in various forums and blogs. While forum comments were often well written, blog comments were total garbage just pure copy-paste flooding. I wouldn't go all over net and leave trails and trails of shoddy comments pointing straight at me. Or maybe I did...

Are blogs so alien a media for established internet marketers that they resort to communication by example or what??? In his case it can't be fear of exposing oneself to the world, he had done it for years. Then it hit me, he didn't stop to read the post, he just used it as a SEO tool, he didn't find the discussed topic especially interesting. What a complete disregard of blog writers' efforts, but he sure did like the link he got.

Do you use your Website as a communication channel or display window?

Do you use your Website as a communication channel or display window?

I think, the majority of you who come by here will say: communication channel. As it is almost self-evident, everybody knows that Web is interactive and full of potential, it cannot just be a display window.

However, are you sure that you really use Web as a communication channel? Sometimes I think Web is too easy, too convenient, so it deceives people.

Have you been typing words diligently onto the screen, imaging yourselves talking to people on the other side of the screen, convincing yourselves that all the points will be well taken and understood, so as your clear, beautiful, well-designed and informative website?

If you have been feeling this way, you might have also treating Web as your display window without noticing it...

Web is such a convenient tool to communicate our thoughts and promote our products, therefore it is easy to forget that there are also others than us, who think and read and use the Web in a different ways.

As I told you before, I have a quite popular Chinese niche blog and I have been happy about its traffic, interaction, and quality readers. However, even in this aspect it keeps surprising me every now and then.

Recently I conduct a survey on my blog, asking readers to vote on the topics they would like to read more. To my surprise, so far the topic that got the highest votes, is the topic that I have never written about!

Is it because I have not written about it, so people vote about it?
Or is it just a hidden demand I never seriously considered, before I asked my readers?

Even among the topics I have often been written about, I never really understood why some articles became huge hit, some not. Popularities of my articles came always as surprising mysteries.

I am already a comparatively experienced blogger, still there are many things I don't know about my readers, and many things I would never know enough. Recently I am also surprised to find out that many people don't even think about their visitors at all. When they put out information on the Web, they just put it there and assume that people will find it and use it just as how they think.

They might claim that they do use Web as a marketing tool, a communication channel, a promotion method, however from the bottom of their heart the Web is just a display window that displays Their logic, Their thoughts, Their wishes, not the Visitors'.

They might be actively updating the latest news to the Website, without even knowing how many people ever visited that site.

They might be buying ads space from everywhere, without evaluating whether their site is optimised to hook the visitors stay longer, come back, or do what hey want the readers to do.

Many of them are very familiar with the Web techniques, are able to design beautiful pages to promote their products, even have web shops operating. They just don't really understand why they do it, never thought about how to evaluate it, just presuming that visitors will have exactly the same logic as they do. So, their Website can grow as beautifully and sophisticatedly as it could be, without knowing if anyone even drop by and use it.

I think we can never be too sure that we don't take website as a display window, no matter how experienced we think we are.

Do you use your Website as a display window or a communication channel?

This would be an important question to ask ourselves again and again.... as long as we are still communicating through the Internet.

My practice of Focus and Make it a number

I just read Jarkko's two articles: "Focus" and "Make it a number".
Here I am going to share with you my own experience from the opposite angle of points above. Because I am exactly the opposite kind of person from Jarkko, maybe that's what made us a couple?:)

While he is so clear about FOCUS and MAKE IT A NUMBER, for me it's always too hard to focus with my overly curious mind, and too difficult to make it a number with my overly conscious thoughts.

An editor once visited my Chinese blog and asked me: "you seem to have really broad interests, huh?"

A colleague also once said to me: "tell me, is there anything you are not interested?"

Well, none of them meant anything harm. It is exactly my broad range of topics that arouse the interests of the editor, and my colleague said it with a big smile on her face with sincere appreciation of my open-minded personality.

Indeed, I am interested in almost anything, everything. However, having interests is good, not knowing how to focus is bad. Whenever I try to pick up some most important ones to "focus", I ended up with a big list. Even when I finally decided to ONLY focus on blogging at my spare time, I ended up having over 5 different blogs occupying my thoughts and within each of them over 10 different plans and topics coming to my mind.

Obviously, I am too good at planning that I just need 120 hours a day to live. Sometimes I am also really amazed what have made of my brain!

Anyway, I have come to realise that, if I can't do anything about my overly curious mind and analytical thoughts, then what I have to do is just to set myself some simple goal and clear actions, even just for one single day.

I started from doing it at my day job: every morning I list some tasks to be accomplished and make sure they are done. I just break them into small concrete items without being too ambitious. Every week I make a to-do-list on an A4 paper, first of all dumping all the thoughts from my brain to the paper, then do it one by one starting from the most urgent or most important, think no further but finish it soonest possible so I could cross a line on the item and feel accomplished. It has been working greatly for the past few weeks!

Just today I am thinking: I should also use the same method in my important blogging activity and goal. Only make small plans, but make sure I complete them.

With day job it is easier but with blogging it is much more difficult. Because with things we really love to do, we have the tendency to be greedy (which makes people difficult to focus!)

Anyway I decided to try my best, I sat down, started to plan, suddenly Jarkko came to me: "what have you been doing lately at OURDREAMPLAN?"
"I....I am just starting to plan it right now." I said.
He asked gently, but "powerful" enough to make me feel guilty. Point taken.

Thus this article came up. I decided not to write down "next week plan: write an article at OURDRESMPLAN", instead I just write it right away. Stop planning, just doing, and see how it goes?

Now I can cross a line on my not yet finished to-do-list: one thing is already done. Too important to be waited on the to-do-list.

So, what do you say? I feel good. :)

Make it a number

INTRO
This post is a direct offspring of my post titled "focus". In the focus-post I noticed that just preparing on something doesn't bring results. What preparation brings in reality is readiness for action, but if action never comes all we have is an ongoing preparation cycle. Wanna prepare to live your life or just live your life? Ain't much of a brainer, eh?

BREATH, PUSH, PUSH, PUSH...
So you chose life, but what then? All work and no play makes you a dull entity (really!)... What you don't need is another plan, because you already formulated a loose plan in the focus episode, right? You need constant execution and with constant I mean daily posts. Look at the time stamp of this post for example. This post came week later than focus (this post gets referred a lot, eh?) and what a perfect example it makes. Don't be fooled to think that you can get the ball rolling with this little posting. Train Google to visit you daily and then it is time to give more time for post quality. Anyway it is always easier to edit and improve something that you already have than something out of thin air.

QUALITATIVE
This shouldn't be your first objective at first. It is very easy to set a goal "I'll post quality articles every week!", and end up with two articleS and nothing else. Try this goal instead "I'll post quality stuff.", and you end up posting nothing this week, because nothing just came up. This is mentality of a sloth.

One exception is allowed. Experienced bloggers know their limits and can grasp the ambiguous quality boundaries at ease. Ah, let's give another exception, who are we to push you around. Time - in time you should bring more quality into your posts to make it big or at least bigger, but you can't get there without first working a lot, hence the next paragraph.

QUANTITY
Now this is what I'm writing about, greasy fries, juicy steaks, lakes of dressing and super-sized colas. Make the amount matter and set concrete goals as your weekly tasks - 5 articles (over 400 words), 1 blog carnival, 10 blog comments, 10 forum comments and some digging and stumbling and whatever. This kind of goals keep you on right track, because they don't allow backboneless behavior as they are so transparent and concise. If these small goals are too big for you to reach, you will not reach success with your website either - end of story, and you can move on to the next movie.

Now the clever part. Keep a record of all your to-do items and by the end of the week your goal must be met. What this means is that occasionally you can take a day off, but only if you pull extra shifts every now and then. Weekly deadlines allow you some flexibility but keep you busy writing almost daily. You learn by working and quality of your work steadily improves over time. In the end, you will reach quantity and quality all in the same package. Success - make it a number.

RESOURCES
This post is part of Blogging blog carnival

Mobile lifestyle

TO NAME OR NOT TO NAME
I wanted to name this article as "take-away life" at first but after some thought... it made me feel like I was endorsing serial murdering lifestyle. Wouldn't it be difficult to build long-term success with such a concept? Yes, I think so too, therefore back to the drawing board, and BEHOLD! I jotted down two words - MOBILE and LIFESTYLE. MOBILE as in mobile phones, which are easy to transport and always available. LIFESTYLE as in life that we are leading with style. Now here is a term I am happy with... take-away life, really what was I...

TWO PLACES AT THE SAME TIME?
One of the corner stones (currently this site is so NEW that actually we are making new corner stones on the fly, but don't tell anyone) of this website is the idea of leading ones life so that you are not place fixed. As a couple, we come from different cultures and different countries. Both countries have something we love deeply and would we'd like to live in both countries. Obviously it is impossible to be at two places simultaneously, but it would be possible to be in Finland for half a year and the other half in Taiwan.

Alas, our jobs won't allow us moving repeatedly back and fort between these two countries. Until now we have solved this issue by having these few years of stints in other country and then the other, but still it cuts into your resume like a dull saw. So, the first thing to solve this problem is to find or create a job (honestly I think it must be created, since even there are some good companies, none are THAT good), which moves when we move.

INTERNET - THE DREAM SOLUTION
We have created few relatively successful websites from hobby point of view. My dear wife has even supported herself as full-time author and writer. Our topics happen to belong into niches with little monetization potential, but we have noticed the general income generating potential that web has. Therefore we have slid ourselves into water and we now have clear strategy for our online business. We have to widen the reach of our current websites to create stronger foundation for generating income. Furthermore we have to create other supporting niches with in-built monetization possibilities.

CREATING WEB PRESENCE
All that site development, huge task! Can't be done without proper planning. That's why we made general plans well into the future, but started the execution as quickly as possible. It is easier to modify plans when there are some concrete results to work with. Always stay away from that paralysis by analysis condition, which produces nothing but ever-changing plans and unrealized dreams. Article by article we will all get there. Then we can go where we want and business will follow.