Tag: plan

Blueprint To Deal With Your Blog Design

Its often tempting to make things perfect. In making things perfect, we start the lazy habit of procrastination.

In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high priority work or actions or tasks with low-priority actions, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time.

Small Case Study!
I had a client who was so tied up in making her blog look exactly the way she wanted it to look, that she didn’t have 3 articles up on her blog for a month or two. And after having 8 articles and spending day and night(with lot of excitement) tweaking the theme she felt like, blogging isn’t for her! She had great expectations. She had read a lot of success stories for years. After a long procrastination she had finally taken action and had registered a domain and bought a hosting account, and had published 8 articles on her blog. Owff…that’s a lot of work, isn’t it 🙂

It can happen to anyone
Procrastination isn’t anyones asset. It can happen to anyone. Many times we advice a lot, and we ourselves procrastinate. The best way to deal with all these is to plan before hand. Now planning and procrastinating doesn’t help!

Plan And Take Action
Make design changes along the way..along with blogging. Don’t think you will finish the design aspects of the blog once for all and after that start with blogging. If you think so, then you may never start blogging; the actual content generation process. Because, no design can be perfect. You will comeup with some design changes once in a while, more often in the beginning days of your blog. Its so overwhelming and distractive to keep making the changes, tweaks, optimization.

design-blog-mess

After a long period of procrastination, we somehow manage to sit down and start writing something for the blog. Suddenly a design issue starts interrupting our mind. Immediately we leave writing and start to fix the design issue. After we finish with that, we start browsing some blogs and immediately fall in love with some design elements – like a social media button. Now we want it on our blog too. Start with figuring that out. At the end of the day, you will still be procrastinating!

It seems like you have been working all day long, but at the end of the day it’s about results or the outcomes of your action that matters. My advice would be to reserve certain period of time for the most important activity for your blog or business. Do it with full focus. If you choose to work 3hrs or 2hrs a day? Make sure you only work on one big thing, the most important thing, with full attention.

“Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.” —- Tony Robbins

So, am I suggesting to forget all other things and only concentrate on content generation? No, not exactly!

First of all, people subscribe/read your blog and they are here for content. If the content is good enough, they will stick around. But what if the design is too good, but there is no content for a long time.

So my advice would be to, start blogging immediately and make design changes once in a while.

Here is my blueprint:
You can’t fix a day in the week or month to think of design changes, tweaks, optimization etc. Because, on that day you may not be able to come up with creative design ideas.

So, what I do is, keep a note book or a file on my computer wherein I write down the design changes, tweaks, optimization ideas that strikes my mind every now and then. I also make sure to prioritize the listed items. I put the most important and urgent task at the top of the list. This file is dedicated to the look and feel of the blog. For new blogs, you can choose a day in 2 weeks or a day in a month and start working on the design, tweak/optimization works one at a time from the list. Make sure to implement as many changes as you can from the list.
If you could do only 10 out of 25 items that day, then postpone the other works for the next schedule. This way, you will make sure that the most important changes has been accomplished.

If some design tweak requires help from others, then mail them or post on any online forum and keep it pending and carry on with the rest of the things in the list according to the priority.

This way, you will be spending most of your time on the major aspect of your blog, that is “CONTENT” and you will not be neglecting the rest of the things that make up a good user experience on your blog.

Even if your blog is established and has a good looking design and usability factor, make sure to take a day in a month and do some improvements on it. Often times we get lazy to edit the theme and put on some code, affiliate link or help link etc. Make sure you don’t procrastinate any more with your blog/business. Don’t take it granted, make sure you work for it. Don’t forget, the subscriber count you see in your feedburner account are real people watching/reading your blog!

PS: So, should I say this: “Content Is STILL King!“

Setting The Goals Is The First Step, In Reaching The Goal!

Its almost the end of year 2008. 2008 has been so great for us – We started this blog, we learnt a lot of basics in blogging and internet as a whole. We are really grateful to all the things which 2008 has bought on our way.

Now we would like to welcome 2009 in well equipped manner. So we have compiled some goals for the year 2009, which is mainly concerned with the internet goals.

By having these goals(written goals), will surly motivate us to work for it. And sharing these goals like this will make us accountable and it outweigh the risk that someone steals your future plans! Many productive creative professionals and entrepreneurs claim that they become more committed to their goals after telling people about them! The fact is that, goals are plentiful and very few people have the discipline and resources to make them happen. When you feel accountable to others, you are more likely to stay focused.

Here are some of our goals for the coming year, 2009:-

1. Stay focused and consistent.

2. To finish one of my project – Creation of a spirituality based website(will post about it soon).

3. Never to stop thinking of new ways to be online and to make a decent living out of it!

4. To have alteast 2000 subscribers to our blog updates by the end of 2009.

5. To build a community around Technotip.org

6. I would like to learn managing the time, to be active both on my blog as well as in my college!

7. Learn to make proper use of online services to carryout some of the tasks more efficiently and quickly.

8. Network with similar interest people(Online).

9. Learn PHP, CSS, JS, AJAX etc programming and start some open source projects.

Setting these goals helps us know what actually we want. Having clear idea about where our blog or business should be in coming years, will make us work for it, in that direction.

So we encourage everyone to set some goals(preferably written goals) in their life(short and long term goals) and observe the improvements in you.

Now if you have set some goals for the year 2009, then please share it with us in the comment section. We would really be very curious/interested to know about it.