Scott H Young

It looks like this is number one hundred for posting. That’s almost one hundred full articles, discounting a few of the smaller post updates I had made. Since I average about 2000 words per article that is approximately two hundred thousand words of personal development. The decision to start this blog has to have been the best decision I have ever made in my life, and I say that with complete honesty. Blogging has skyrocketed my growth and allowed me to connect with thousands of other people who share that same passion for getting the most out of life.

Big rounded numbers seem to inspire moments of reflection in our society and I suppose I am no different. I thought I would take this time to step away from my normal updates of personal development information and discuss the past, present and future of this website. In one hundred articles this site has come a long way, much further than I had anticipated. I have set pretty challenging goals for this site so hopefully it will continue to surpass my expectations.

Past

This blog started in late February. I had begun working on Goals! An Interactive Guide in January and I was having trouble doing the written portion of it. I found writing more than a thousand words on a particular subject was pretty difficult and I lacked a particular writing style that I found comfortable. So I decided to start my blog and improve my writing skills as I went to work on the program.

I had initially thought of this blog as being the vehicle to develop traffic for my interactive program. Seeing the incredible successes of many other bloggers, I never considered that my content could really stand out in a purely written medium. So I went to work on my program and blogged as an addition to that.

My first few posts didn’t even get a whisper of traffic. Without any prior web presence to leverage, my first posts had absolutely no one reading. I had no intention of making this a link blog, so I figured I would have to get traffic another way. By posting comments on other personal development blogs and contacting other bloggers in the area I was able to build a slow trickle of traffic. According to the stats package provided by my hosting provider I was getting between 150 and 200 page views a day. Hardly monumental, but I kept writing.

In May my traffic skyrocketed after a link from lifehacker.com took my traffic from about 300-400 page views to 20000 in a single day. Although this traffic leveled off sharply afterwards, I was still left with about 1250 page views and dozens of blogs linking to my Habitual Mastery series. With the sudden success of the blog, I was beginning to think that blogging may be a more valuable route than my program, but I continued on.

From May to this point my traffic has tripled and is growing steadily. Although some days are up and others are down, my traffic continues to rise. I have between a 25% and 50% monthly increase in traffic. Unfortunately, only a small fraction 5-10% of my posts create about 90-95% of my traffic, which means many posts take off while others lie asleep in my archives. Habitual Mastery, Enthusiasm and Energy Management all took off, yielding huge increases in links, while others don’t even generate a comment.

Present

After releasing Goals! An Interactive Guide, I have become convinced that blogging is the correct route for the current moment. Building content and increasing my visibility through writing is probably my best place to focus for right now. My stats package given by my hosting provider tells me that I now receive an average of 2500-3500 page views each day. I suspect this figure may be somehow inflated as my AdSense and Google Analytics accounts show scaled down versions of these numbers. Despite this I am extremely happy with the traffic increases I have been able to generate.

I am also experimenting with different writing styles and formats to see if I can unlock any secrets into the successes of my posts. The distinctions between those posts that give huge boosts of traffic and those that die into obscurity seems to be mostly a mystery to me. I have written a lot of ‘how to’ articles in the past week, and I may experiment with other types of posts. My only theories on what posts work and what ones don’t is that the posts that are successful tend to be fairly basic and general, but also about a topic that isn’t being covered much. Energy management and enthusiasm aren’t wildly original topics but they both gained me a relatively large amount of traffic. If any of my readers has any idea why some of my posts are better than others, I’m all ears.

I recently added AdSense ads to this website. AdSense terms of service forbids me from sharing specific details about my revenue or click through rate, but I will say that there is much work to be done. I hope to optimize the ad positioning so that they provide the least distraction but also are visible enough that users can make use of the services offered from them. I think the ads are fairly relevant to my subject as I often find myself intrigued by their headlines as I browse my own site (AdSense publishers are forbidden from clicking on their own ads).

I plan to ask the AdSense team about how generalized of information I can share with my audience about revenue earnings. I know many of my readers are fellow bloggers who may be curious about my own goals, revenue and success with this blog. Although I have absolutely no intention to turn this blog into a personal diary of myself, the goals and aims for my own growth are often similar to the goals and aims for growth of my readers. As I said previously, my 2008 financial goal is to make $20,000 Canadian annually from this website. I’ll try to insert tidbits of my progress into my regular postings I try to center around you.

Future

AdSense optimization is my side activity for the moment. I have to resist the temptation to switch around the layout every five minutes so I can get a large enough sample to test from. Most of the other publishers I consulted said that a week was a good length of time for a trial, two if the changes are big. The nice thing about AdSense success is it seems to work best when it is the least distracting. You may see some ad changes over the next few weeks as I take steps to try out different layouts.

My blogging strategy has remained fairly similar, write my ass off. Because I don’t have any more major projects on the go, my focus is completely on writing content. I should be able to do 1-2 posts per day and maintain the quality you have come to expect. I also plan to eventually publish the written chapters from my goal setting program onto this blog so those who can’t access the program will still be able to get that information.

Many internet marketers have a phrase, “Content is king.” I’ve come to learn this is complete bs. Content is not king. Value is king. As I mentioned earlier, about 20 percent of my posts have gathered 80 percent of the links for this website. A fact I must have to face is that those posts probably had more value to more people than my other posts. When I was away for two weeks at the start of this summer, my traffic actually went up by 100% because of just a few posts saved over that period of time. This has really made me believe that it isn’t the amount of my posts, but their ability to impact that makes the biggest difference in my overall levels of traffic.

Unfortunately, I have few clues as to why certain posts succeed more than others. So in order to create a few gems, I am going to experiment with variations of posting style and strategy. I’ll also experiment with different marketing techniques to get my content out there and hopefully something will stick. I’ll let you guys know if I discover anything.

Close to a year ago I set two financial goals for my life. My first goal was for $20,000 annually by my twentieth birthday (2008). My second, long-term goal was $200,000 annually by my twenty seventh birthday. Are these goals realistic? Who knows. In just looking at how much my life has unexpectedly changed just in the five months since I started blogging, I think a ten year goal is likely to need adjustment far before it is ever reached. In ten years I may decide that two million dollars annually is a more appropriate target or I may decide to take a vow of poverty, shave my head and live in a monastery . The only problem (or possibly its greatest benefit) of living a life dedicated to growth is that it changes in beautiful, magnificent and bizarre ways you never expect.But I don’t set my goals to reach them. My goals are merely a device I use to accelerate my growth, not an objective in themselves. If I later decide I need to change them, it won’t matter because I was only using them as an anchor of growth, not a milestone. Every day is a milestone for me, I don’t need to achieve a goal to feel that fulfillment. My goals just make sure I stay on track with how I want to grow.

Steve Pavlina’s financial success really inspired me to pursue a different objective than just financial freedom. I really like the idea of conditioning yourself to live on only a small fraction of your earnings and then using the rest of that money to help others to grow. Buying bigger houses, more cars and toys doesn’t fulfill me. But if I could earn enough money to achieve maximum growth with that resource so that I could then use the extra to help others, that would be truly fulfilling.

Above all else, the best way I think I can gather traffic is to continue my own personal growth. The more I read, practice and implement the more I can write about. By truly experiencing growth I have the ability to write about it and help others do the same. By maintaining my commitment to personal development I might very well be doing the best thing possible for my traffic levels.

Thank You

This website would be just a bunch of bytes and data if it weren’t for you. I hope I have been able to help in just a tiny way of repaying you for the help you have provided me. Although I can talk on and on about this being an act of contribution, it is probably best described as an act of pure indulgence and selfishness. The sheer benefit to my own growth from the words I have received from my readers has really allowed me to get the most out of my own life.

I hope that sharing my ideas, experiences and research has given you just a fraction of the immense benefit it has provided me. In any case I wanted to thank you for coming here and reading these posts. I wanted to thank you for sharing with me your own personal stories as you try to build better lives for yourself. Thank you.

So I end this post with a question for all of my readers. I have set a lot of goals and made suggestions for my blog, but what would you like to see from this website and myself from the future?

Obesity is reaching alarming figures in Western countries today. I have heard figures sited as high as 60% for the overweight population. Despite this, the statistic is that nearly eight out of every ten people are not meeting the basic requirements for activity. Fitness and healthy living is important for maintaining energy levels, keeping the immune system strong and living longer lives. I have seen figures that say that more than eighty percent of all cancers are directly linked to lifestyle. Drowning in our own opulence, we have highly automated lives where extra physical activity must be added on top of our schedules in order to stay healthy.

Health and fitness is one of my favorite subjects. I exercise for at least an hour every day and usually closer to two hours. I usually accumulate about 35-40 km of running each week and I use a local gym five days a week for an hour each. The longest I’ve currently run is 15 km, but I’m hoping on running a marathon sometime in the next year. I can currently do twelve chinups, sixty pushups and three hundred sit ups at a time, and I am still focusing on improving.

Staying fit and healthy are critical for my ability to do almost anything else. I often hear people gripe about how they don’t have enough time or energy to exercise. This is nonsense. You don’t have enough time or energy not to exercise. An hour of exercise each day often doubles my productivity from when I have been completely sedative. Fitting exercise into your daily routine is crucial.

So, how can you start your own consistent fitness regimen? If you are already exercising to some extent, then you may be wondering how you can make that exercise more consistent. I believe in focusing on lifelong fitness without all the gimmicks. Fitness must be an element of your life that you maintain for yourself, not just for a great beach body.

Start Simple

Look through any magazine and go through any store and you will be bombarded with advertisements for health and fitness trying to convince you to buy a particular product in order to get that perfect figure. Sometimes it is a pill, sometimes it is a complex device with the express purpose of getting you to do a sit up. Treadmills, elliptical machines, diet pills and fancy health club memberships are unnecessary. These things can be great in improving an existing fitness regimen, but they cannot form the foundation. Fitness is one of those few things that actually becomes less effective with more technology.

I can’t help but laugh whenever I see some bizarre sit-up device advertised. Especially when they simultaneously promote how easy it is and how effective it is for building abdominal muscles. First of all, the sit up is one of the most basic and simplistic exercises available. Secondly, the reason a sit up builds your abdominal muscles is because it is difficult. It has been scientifically shown that simple full-body exercises like push ups, chin ups or crunches are more effective then using a device. Now I just have to hope Google doesn’t serve up ads to make a hypocrite out of me.

The second and subtler part of this first step to lifelong fitness is that you should make your fitness routine as easy to follow as possible. I’ve read a few fitness books and a lot of fitness articles and quite often they promote this insanely detailed and complex strategy to get in shape. Although I have no doubt that these programs would probably work if successfully executed, that is a big if. Starting with a really basic strategy for fitness can allow you to shift it into your life more seamlessly.

If you are thinking of including running in your fitness program, here is a good start. Just run for thirty minutes every day. Don’t put any pressure on the distance you have to run or the speed, just commit to thirty minutes. You will find on lazy days you may run very slowly, but at least you will do it. Committing to run ten miles each day, may cause you to abandon your program whenever you don’t feel you can do it. Committing yourself to the simplest possible strategy to implement fitness is essential to ensure it sticks.

This also means flexibility with your fitness program to insert into your life. You may find it impossible to get a full hour of exercise each day, so you might have to split it into two thirty minute sections. You may decide to include a brisk walk up the stairs in your office each day. A little fitness is better than none and a simplistic strategy to provide that fitness is even better.

Find Exercise You Love

The real reason people don’t exercise has nothing to do with not having enough time, it has to do with not getting enough enjoyment. With the national statistic of seven hours of television each day, on average, there is plenty of extra time to take thirty or sixty minutes and devote to an exercise program. The real problem is that most people find exercising boring, painful or even embarrassing. By linking those sorts of emotions to exercise, it is very hard to imagine a lifelong commitment to it.

The truth is that exercise doesn’t have to be going to the gym or running outside (although those are two of my favorites…) Exercise can be dancing, martial arts, sports, hiking, swimming or anything that involves moving your body. Finding exercise that you absolutely love to do is essential for a lifelong commitment.

So when you start building your fitness regimen, you may want to experiment with different forms of physical activity. Brainstorm a large list of all the things you do enjoy that are related to fitness. Finding exercise you love is half stubbornness and half creativity. If you commit that you will stick to your fitness plan and keep experimenting until you find something you absolutely love to do, lifelong exercise becomes much easier.

Maybe the key to enjoying your exercise doesn’t lie in changing activities but just changing something about those activities. One of the most popular ways to make exercise more enjoyable is to listen to fast music. Running becomes much more interesting when you are listening to fast music or an audio program. You may also decide that combining your exercise with social or volunteering activities gives you the enjoyment to keep doing it. Going to the gym with friends is often more interesting than when you are just by yourself.

Condition Exercise as a Must

Is exercise a should for you or is it a must? Do you say to yourself that you should exercise, or must you exercise? The difference in that answer will make the difference in your health, and ultimately your life. Conditioning exercise as an absolute must in your life is necessary to ensure it sticks long-term.

Start by conditioning the habit to exercise just like any other habit. Set yourself up with a 30 Day Trial period whereby you must stick to whatever strategy for fitness you have settled upon. Make sure that this is a habit that you can easily stick with. If your strategy is too complicated or too specific, it may be harder to keep. If your strategy is flexible but still captures the essential need for physical activity then you will have more control over keeping that schedule.

The next step is to ensure exercise reaches a higher priority in your life. Don’t tell yourself that you should exercise, say that you must. Setting an unbreakable standard for exercise will allow you to condition the habit of exercise until it is consistent. Once you’ve exercised with your daily schedule for an entire year it may be harder not to exercise than to exercise.

You also need to raise your standards and see not exercising as something unacceptable to yourself. You need to see exercise as something that is an essential part of your day, no matter what. I know for myself I see exercising like I do bathing. I don’t suddenly stop showering once I go on a vacation, so why should I stop exercising.

The steps to starting your own fitness regimen or making an existing one more consistent are simple. First, start with a basic strategy. Don’t buy complicated equipment or fancy pills in the hopes they will motivate you. Start simple. Secondly, find exercise that you absolutely love to do. This could mean completely switching the type of physical activity you do. You could even make minor adjustments such as listening to music or going with friends. Finally, condition your habit of exercise until it is an unbreakable standard in your life. Do these steps and you will be along the path to a lifelong commitment to health.