Doing your time

Regardless of having one writer or multiple writers for a blog, it’s going to take a hefty amount of effort and time to build up your blogs content and traffic. One of the areas I attribute a lot of the success of this blog to is the time dedication I’ve had. I dropped other hobbies like playing guitar and watching TV to start blogging and reading more. This has been the key to my growth as a person and having one leg of my stool strong as steel. To make sure you put in the right amount of time, trying pacing yourself, or joining in a group like project 52, where you dedicate to writing one post per week. Just remember one important rule.. too much will cause readers to flee and too little will fail to attract them. I think once a week is a good frequency for a new blog.

Putting in the effort

You may be thinking, “isn’t putting in time the same as putting in effort?” .. and the answer is NO. Putting in effort usually means research, capital, and marketing. To run a successful blog, you need a few ingredients to help you along the way such as a professional design, an understanding of SEO, and the right marketing tools such as twitter and facebook. Putting in effort is somewhat misleading, because some of the effort is external, but it all comes back to you. Any money or learning you put into your blog is an effort that will help you keep this leg balanced. As I mentioned with time.. a weekly schedule to teach yourself something new will really help you along.

Remaining Consistent

I see two very common mistakes relating to consistency:

Scenario A involves traffic, a blogger (whether new or veteran) sees the blog as a failure because traffic is low and doesn’t seem to be climbing. The worst thing you could do in Scenario A is give up on it. Think of a blog as real estate or stock.. it’s value may fluctuate significantly, but if you look at the course and direction of the internet as a whole, it’s value is always increasing. If you look at the short term, you’ll see failure, but dedication and consistency will almost always prove successful (combine that with a good exit strategy and you have yourself a business plan).

Hype is like dessert: most of the time it’s incredible, but too much will make you sick

Scenario B involves lack of time or effort. Yes, I’m aware I’ve already mentioned these two points, but bare with me. If you’re putting a lot of time into your blog and it’s not growing you may be focusing on the wrong areas. I see lots of blog focus on social media or spend loads of money on advertising, and they feel highly successful because they see their numbers jump.. for a while. The problem is people get bored with hype, it’s like dessert: really great, but too much or too often will make you sick of it. People need meat and potatoes in their diet. Many loyal readers will favor quality over quantity. My site for example rivals others that have 300+ posts and write daily.. yet it only has around 60 posts.

Put it all together

The last piece is a not-so-secret ingredient, and doesn’t need a paragraph to explain.. you have to be passionate about what you share. Blogs can definitely be profitable, but if you content doesn’t communicate passion and true interest, people aren’t going to be interested in what you have to say. Write to share about what you love, not to make money. Once you’ve built up a successful blog of loyal readers, then try and strategize the financial successes. I’m sure other bloggers would tell you differently, but I’m telling you from my experience that heart has more value than profits. If you enjoy what you do, there’s no price that can replace that.

Or go a whole new direction completely and lose the plume:

What are your thoughts?

Starting a business without Capital Investment

It’s easy to say that it can be done, but it’s a whole different story to actually execute. Like I mentioned before, take notes from the Getting Real plan. Start your business by moonlight.. don’t quit your day job and jump right in (of course we’re hypocrites saying this because we jumped in, but I wish we had moonlighted first). Either negotiate with your employer to work part-time for a while or start your business at nights.. that way you have the income still to support your bills, but you can start planning and developing your business. Begin networking with other businesses in your field and going to seminars on weekends, because one of the greatest tools in starting a business is connections.

Along with the moonlighting, establish a budget. You may not know all of the costs to operate your business, and you may not be able to prepare for every road block or pitfall. What you can do, however, is give yourself a cushion. Depending on your liabilities (bills), you may want anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 saved up before you quit you job and go full-time as a business.

[podcast format="video"]http://thinkclay.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/business-sense-with-a-few-cents-desktop.m4v[/podcast]

About our Web Company

This post is based on our opinions and testimonials with starting our Web Company. Thinkclay is a blog by Clayton McIlrath based out of Lansing, MI. You can find more us by searching: Lansing Web, Powered by WordPress and Graphic Design Portfolio

Defining Success

Before you learn HOW to be successful, you need to define WHAT success really means to you. Many define success based upon income, net worth, popularity, global effect, lasting impressions, etc. When defining success, you should sit down and really think hard as to what success is to you and why. You’ll find that your own views of success are simply a combination of the views that other people have shared with you. The problem with defining success is that you must first define yourself and what makes you truly happy. I won’t dive deep into what happiness is or how to find it. You need to build yourself internally and do some Self Discovery before you can effectively use those principles externally.

Discovering the Process

Randomly, when I was young, I used to sit and ponder and dream about the strangest principles and fundamentals to life. One principle that I developed was to change my thinking of how the pyramid of life worked. I realized that many people live their lives according to an upside-down pyramid: reacting to the effect of situations rather than reacting to the cause. I figured that my foundation and success in life would stem from my subconscious, self-image and thoughts before I could even use the tools (education, capital, social, etc) that I may posses. I immediately wrote down (on my bedroom wall at the time) a principle that I wanted to follow for my life.. this is what I wrote:

Thoughts become Dreams
Dreams become Premonitions
Premonitions become Reality

This life (and perhaps the next) are structured upon the building blocks of what we think, not what we know

The crazy part is, I came across this EXACT same principle in this book, with very little differences in wording:

Thoughts lead to Feelings
Feelings lead to Actions
Actions lead to Results

Motivation

After you’ve done some self-discovery, you’ll need to do more. Find out what you’re passionate about and what motivates you and then brainstorm some ideas to use your passions towards your own business or investment. This is one of the most important tools to being successful. Make sure that you separate your motivation from anger, fear or the need to prove yourself, as these are motivations that will die out because you’ll never succeed by your own standards. Instead find motivation in purpose, contribution and joy! These are the motivators that will make you successful.

My motivation for success:

• The freedom to help others in need by donating my time and money
• The flexibility and freedom to spend quality time with my family
• The knowledge and wisdom to share with others and help them succeed

Love it or hate it, I re-designed the Chosen Development website. I was growing tired of the Organic theme that I had developed for it originally. Even though it was highly creative and artistic, it was too busy and the colors were too bleh. I decided to go with a VERY simple layout, color scheme and dark, web 2.0 style. This a typical style for me, but I’m proud of that. Chosen development consists mostly of the work of myself and my business partner, Shane and he loves the new design as well. I’ve also integrated our new Creative Brief Interview so that we can automate the initial research and gathering phase.

So check it out, and give me some feedback either way!

Night Royale

View or Download

Simply Ornate

View or Download

Several3

View or Download

Zeke 1.0

View or Download

Night Transition

View or Download

JS Box

Check out the demo site to view and download

Brilliance

View or Download

PocketT

View or Download

Overstand

View or Download

Consider this
Gas has been cheaper in the last 3 months than it has been in over 2 years!
Produce sales haven’t escalated beyond normal scale
Inflation hasn’t risen dramatically

So what really is the source of this recession?! It’s all negative media. Like I said, recession has become a buzzword.

Let’s face it, people tend to be negative. What do you search for on youtube when you’re bored? I bet it’s not world causes or positive messages and uplifting words. No, you’re probably looking up worst car crashes, fights, celebrities at their worst, etc. This is what people want.. drama, and the media has fed us exactly what we’ve been craving for years.

But we’ve had too much…

People are getting sick of hearing the word recession. Business and families are being dramatically influenced and people are hurting. The only way to get rid of the recession is to reverse our thinking. Our thinking towards spending, and what we soak in from the media on a daily basis.

I’m making an effort to stand for something greater than myself.. will you join me?

[podcast format="video"]http://thinkclay.com/wp-content/uploads/podcasts/against-recession-hype.m4v[/podcast]

Kazaa and Limewire are DEAD

It’s amazing to me how many people are still using the old method (pure) Peer to Peer (P2P) which connects a user directly to other users to download software, music, movies, and other media. Peer-to-peer applications such as limewire, kazaa, morpheus, ares, and others, were popular through the late 80′s and early 00′s. Many people still recognize and remember these popular names of programs and when they decide they want to download a song, they often go looking for what they know. But using these legacy programs could cost you.. a lot. I’m sure everyone reading this post has heard of the Music Industry’s attack on downloading and P2P as it’s been all over the news for the last few years. These media industries are finding and suing individuals for downloading media illegally and the easiest way for them to execute these seek-and-destroy lawsuits is to use a rapid spread environment like legacy P2P applications (to classify legacy, I’m referring to 1st-3rd generation P2P). Let me give you a hypothetical which is the most common model for these seek-and-destroy lawsuits to use:

You hear a song on the radio that you really want. It’s a very popular song and you know you’ve seen it all over the net, but haven’t been able to find a site to download it from for free. You know that you could probably download it the way your friends have been doing it for years.. let’s think.. well, you don’t know much about how they download, but you know they use a program called limewire. Or maybe you even used limewire a few years ago, but stopped for whatever reason for a time.

So you google and find a copy of limewire to download and install. You run it and search for the song. Minutes later your song appears to be downloaded and working just fine. It’s shows a full 3 minutes or so, and even the file size seems to be a normal mp3 size. Let’s pretend you even go one step further to be safe and run a virus scan, and the file appears to be okay. So you open it up in your music player, and nothing plays, it’s just blank. You mess around with it for a bit, and then give up and delete it, thinking it must just be a dud.

Stop the hypothetical. What you just did was download a trojan, a file that appears harmless but opens a “back door” on your computer allowing someone to enter in silently. Many media industries now have the right to compromise your computer and then scan and find just how many files are illegally downloaded on their. They gave them this right by downloading and opening that music file. You knew it wasn’t legal, but you did it anyway. That’s all the justification that empowers them to come at you and sue you for all the music you own illegally. This has happened to a large number of legacy P2P users and is still happening in the present. It’s no joke, and it’s something to be worried about.

But there’s hope.. say hello to Torrents

Bram Cohen invented a technology called BitTorrent in 2001 which allowed for P2P to become a safe place again. BitTorrent is a P2P file-sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data in smaller segments and is one of the most common protocols for file transfer. By some estimates BitTorrent accounts for almost 50% of all traffic on the entire Internet [source]. On top of that, isoHunt estimates the total amount of content/media is currently more than 1.2 petabytes. Those numbers are frightening to some and encouraging to others, take it as you will.

How BitTorrent works

Torrents start first with a seed. The initial distributor of the file(s) acts as the first seed. Each peer who downloads the seed also uploads them in segments to other peers, which allows for a highly efficient transferring across many users. Picture torrents as a puzzle, a minimum of one completed puzzle or seed is needed to begin spreading the pieces among thousands of users/peers and the addition of more seeds increases the likelihood of a successful connection exponentially. This meaning that if out of 3 peers you are PERSON A and you need PIECE 3, if PERSON B doesn’t have it, you check another peer. Once you find one, such as PERSON C, you can then retrieve that piece from that peer. Once all the pieces are retrieved, your application completes the puzzle and you have a final result of the file you were trying to attain. Relative to standard Internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor’s hardware and bandwidth resource costs as well as provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor. From a legal standpoint this has advantages as well, because rather than downloading song.mp3 which is clearly a music file, you are instead simply downloading segments of data, which can be argued in court on whether those segments make song.mp3 or are simply random bits of data that could make anything. I’m sure this would make sense why it would be harder for the media to inject their Trojan Files as well.

So am I safe using torrents?

While torrents aren’t completely safe from the media, they are even less safe from viruses. Don’t misunderstand me in that statement, however, because torrents are still quite a bit safer than the legacy methods of P2P. The original seeder can still inject a virus or trojan into whatever file they’re sharing, so it’s best to read comments or information about the tracker/seed and see what others are saying. Generally if it’s had a few downloads, it will also have a few comments and peers are your best defense. Overall torrents are the 4 generation of P2P file sharing, and are much safer than old methods.

I feel good about it, where do I go now

There are many torrent applications out there as well as many torrent search engines. I’m going to provide my bias opinions in my recommendations, but here is a non-bias torrent software listing.

Vuze

Vuze (formerly know as “azureus”) is a cross-platform torrent application that installs if JAVA is enabled. It may be slightly slower than other applications for initial load times and memory used, but for the average user, it’s well worth it for a better interface and built in search functionality that will most likely eliminate your need to search anywhere else.

uTorrent

Known as both “u-torrent” and “micro torrent”, this is the most popular torrent tool today. uTorrent is lightweight and fast, however is limited to Windows. While many prefer uTorrent, I find it to be a little less than Vuze.

BitComet

This application used to be my favorite, and it’s still up there, but it’s just doesn’t stand-up to how lightweight and simplistic uTorrent is.

Torrent Search Engines

If you’re having trouble finding a torrent, you can always manually look in different torrent search engines. Here are the best ones according to about.com:

• Special Mention: SpiralFrog – while not directly a torrent site, spiralfrog offers membership-only free and legal music downloads using a very special license-renewal concept
• Gpirate – is getting rave reviews from several About.com readers
• Mininova – is the successor to Supernova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web
• Torrent-finder – several readers from the central USA submitted this site recently. This site is gaining a bigger readership every day
• Demonoid – is now back online! They have established themselves outside of the USA this spring 2008, and have resumed torrent operations. Demonoid is still a private community, and members are held liable for any leeching that their invited friends do in this community. If you are lucky enough to get a Demonoid membership, invite your friends carefully, lest you lose your own membership.
• Isohunt – in a shocking turn of the tables this September, the Isohunt webmaster is counter-suing the Canadian music industry. He is claiming that previous copyright violation suits against him were unfounded, and that he is entitled to have his legal expenses recovered.
• The Pirate Bay – by readership size, is the most popular torrent search site today. Pirate Bay also has an immense database of 600,000+ torrents, the single largest database available on the web.
• Bitsoup – is a growing favorite amongst P2P downloaders. As the trend towards private torrent sharing continues, you will need to signup and join as a member to participate in the Bitsoup swarm.
• Torrentscan – is a search engine that searches other torrent search engines

Some more reading

• View the full list of top 35 Torrent Search Engines on About.com
• Complete Comparison of BitTorrent Clients
• Complete Comparison of all P2P Software