Last year on October 1st I made a commitment. To start blogging as a business. Half the distance, meaning 6 months ago, I checked out things in a series called The First 6 Months Of Blogging. Those first 6 months were really exciting. But time flies and a lot of stuff happened since then, so it’s time for another series. The last 6 months were full of new experiences and interesting things. This time, I will break the series down to only 4 areas: writing, promoting, money and personal benefits.

Be aware that this series will contain much shorter and descriptive posts than you’re used to, but I do this on purpose. I think every blogger who does it for a living needs accurate information. I do this series as a pure act of sharing in which I’ll describe my experience in the hope it will be useful. I suppose you already have the motivation, drive and self-discipline you need in order to blog for a living, so these posts won’t try o convince you about that. Your blogging goals may be a bit different and your approach could also be contrasting with mine, but what counts is that you will have a look at somebody else’s experience and hopefully learn something valuable from it.

Here’s a short description of what you will find in each post (you will find them here starting tomorrow).

The First Year Of Blogging – Writing

In this post I’ll analyze some of the writing activities every blogger performs on a daily basis. From posting routine up to guest posting or blog audit, this post will describe some of my breakthroughs as well as some of my biggest difficulties with the cornerstone of every blogging venture: content creation. One thing to notice is that I’ll include my ebook as part of blog writing. In fact, launching my ebook was one of the most interesting activities in the last 6 months.

The First Year Of Blogging – Promotion

As I already wrote in my 100 Ways To Improve Your Blog, one should carefully undertake the task of promoting his blog. Unless you pay an agency to do that for you, nobody will help you with that, so you’d better take it seriously. In the last 6 months I learned a lot about blog promotion and tested several techniques. I also changed my domain name, going from a “.ro” based domain to a “.com”. This had a huge impact on my traffic, although I still don’t have a page rank assigned. All in all, promotion wise, it has been an enlightening phase.

The First Year Of Blogging – Money

In this post I’ll describe what I did to earn some money out of this blog. As I already said it, I didn’t have any contextual advertising (AdSense, that is) nor display advertising. All I did was some affiliate networking and publishing my ebook, at the end of September. The last 6 months included a lot of summer, so to speak, and that usually shows in the cash-flow. Nevertheless, since this blog isn’t my main income source, (yet), I used this span just to observe and adjust some things.

The First Year Of Blogging – Personal Benefits

As always, the main focus will be on my personal development and how this first year of blogging about self improvement actually impacted it. There are a lot of things I will talk about, from self-discipline to motivation, from skills to experience, from interaction to goal setting and achievement. Blogging as a personal development tool is still one of my first options when it comes to self improvement.

So, stay tuned and be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss any of this.