The key to sucess: DO more THINK less

You can’t simply will your business into existence. Darren Rowse, editor in chief of ProBlogger.net, recently talked about how he took his blog from a simple hobby to a full-time job. So whats the key to a successful business? Stop day dreaming and get to work. I’m guilty of sitting back and ‘thinking’ and planning about what I would like my blog to become, but there comes a point when you are doing more thinking than actually doing. The turning point for Darren came when his wife came him the ultimatum.

“You’ve got six months to make it blogging full time.” After that it was get a real job time for Darren, something many of us are desperately avoiding.

I’d been talking a lot…. dreaming a lot…. creating a lot of pretty graphs…. and not really DOING a lot.

I didn’t really see it (I was too close and too caught up in my dreams) but my wife knew it and so she set me an ultimatum – a deadline that changed my thinking and more importantly led to me changing the way I went about my blogging.

I knew that if I were to succeed in going full time in the next six months that that had to change. I needed to start looking at my blogging as a business now – even though it was only earning a day or two a week’s income.

11 Things Darren did from that day forward:

* Started putting more time aside for blogging

* Became more focused upon my core tasks of creating content

* Wasted less time on distractions

* Became more strategic in my thinking and set goals to work towards

* Began to look for new income streams - beyond AdSense

* Looking for advertisers – finding businesses in my niche and pitching my blog to them

* Seek out guest writing opportunities on other blogs and even in main stream media

* Setting deadlines, posting a certain number of posts a day and set a calendar

* Networking more with other bloggers

* Invested more time and money into learningof different aspects of blogging

* Looked for a business coachwho could teach me how to be more business minded

That day began the process for me of looking at what I do as a business.

While not a lot changed on my blogs that day – the impact over the last 4-5 years has been significant. I’ve not looked back and many of the things I changed back then have become patterns and a natural part of my blogging work flow.

Many times we can get caught up in the dream. Take some time to reflect on how productive you actually are vs. how productive you could be. When you don’t have a boss it can be easy to take it easy on yourself, but its important to remember that the key to success requires DO’ing and not just THINK’ing.

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