How do you blog a book or become a successful blogger? This question typically is met with practical and tactical advice.
But there are other ways to help yourself become an author and produce a high-trafficked blog. And they have little to do with publishing frequency, SEO, promotion, and copywriting.
In my new book, Creative Visualization for Writers: An Interactive Guide for Bringing Your Book Ideas and Writing Career to Life, I discuss five “alternative” ways to move your blog or blogged book to the next level and achieve your writing and blogging goals.
Let’s explore each one.
1. Self-Examination
Personal growth provides the foundation for every writer’s or blogger’s career. In fact, successful people in all industries build their careers on personal development or their ability and commitment to change.
When you discover—and change—your unsupportive habits, negative thoughts, and limiting beliefs, you stop holding yourself back. If, for example, you want to blog your way to a book deal but you only publish one post per month rather than four or five per week, you need to discover why. Are you afraid? Do you believe you are not good enough? Or is blogging and authorship an attractive idea but just too hard and time consuming? Maybe you don’t have the passion for your book project—or for blogging.
Without self-exploration, you can’t know what stops you. And you can’t change unsupportive thoughts, beliefs and habits to supportive ones. With self-exploration, you overcome your blocks and move quickly toward success.
2. Visualization
Your vision of your career as a blogger and author drives the actions that move you toward achievement of your goal. When you consciously daydream about or imagine your goal of developing a high-trafficked blog and landing a book deal (or successfully self-publishing), your brain fires in ways that help you achieve it. The mind doesn’t know the difference between your visualization and what you do in the world. Therefore, when you visualize, it gives your unconscious and conscious mind, as well as your body, messages that help you achieve your goal.
Creative visualization has been used in a variety of circles and situations. Athletes visualize themselves competing successfully. Personal growth proponents use it to help them complete a fire walk. Business people use it to help them in meetings or negotiations. Bloggers, too, can use visualization to help them blog consistently, attract and engage readers, and produce books on their blogs.
As you imagine your blogging and writing success, you condition yourself to make those dreams real.
3. Goal Setting
Some bloggers and writers prefer not to set goals. Without goals, however, it’s hard to succeed. Goals help you set intentions, commit to them, and measure your progress in a concrete manner.
Goals provide personal commitments and keep you accountable to yourself and your dreams. They also put your visualization into play in the physical world. It’s how you energize the action that brings what you have imagined to life.
Plus, goals produce step-by-step action plans. Each goal can be chunked down into smaller ones to tackle. They give you a way to keep track of your progress toward the big goal.
Goals are your roadmap to success.
4. Enhanced Creativity
Bloggers can’t wait for inspiration to hit. They must invoke their Muse each time they sit down at the computer to compose a post.
Productive writers can’t wait to feel creative either.
Writers and bloggers produce work at the same time and in the same place daily. At a minimum, they write regularly to meet their blog posting deadlines.
In this way, writing becomes a habit. That habit creates a trigger so when you put your fingers on the keyboard, creativity and inspiration kick in.
But if you don’t feel inspired when you sit down to write, you can use creativity exercises, such as writing rituals. Before writing, some writers meditate or journal, exercise and read, light candles and say prayers.
Writing ritual are habits. They tells the mind it’s time to write. And the mind responds accordingly.
5. Focus
It’s hard to write a blog post—or even promote it—when your attention is scattered. Lack of focus causes bloggers to produce unfocused posts and, as a result, an unfocused blog.
Creating a blog plan can help you focus on your blog’s primary topic. With a plan, you focus on subjects that support the success of your blog. If you want to blog a book, you also need a plan and a way to focus on the book you are writing post by post.
Additionally, focus on your goal of successful authorship in two other ways.
Write and Say Affirmations:
Affirmations are positive statements that negate your negative thoughts. So if you think writing a book is hard or that blogging is too time consuming, you can affirm My books take shape easily and quickly on my blog.
Affirmations are a staple of positive psychology and can help you feel more confident and courageous about your writing project. They help you counteract the negative thoughts and limited beliefs you uncover during during your self-exploration periods.
Color Your Vision:
Coloring is like meditation. It gives the mind something to do, which quiets your thoughts. It’s relaxing and allows important information to bubble up from you unconscious mind. That’s why the adult coloring book trend has been so successful.
Try coloring pictures that relate to your visualization of successful authorship. By doing so, you feed your mind pictures of what you want to create. You supplement your visualization efforts with another way to focus on what you desire—a successful blog and book.
For example, you could color a picture like this one, which is included in the “Focus” section of Creative Visualization for Writers.
If you color a picture like this one, your mind then focuses on your end goal—a successful book.
Try using these five strategies, which complement the traditional advice about how to blog or blog a book. In the process, you will move toward your goal of becoming a successful blogger and author.
If you would like to try self-exploration, visualization, goal setting, creativity, and focus exercises to help you succeed as a writer and blogger, purchase a copy of Creative Visualization for Writers today. It has over 100 interactive exercises to support you on your journey to blogging and writing success.
Have you tried any of these methods? How have they worked for you?
Photo courtesy of Comfreak / Pixabay.com
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