Looking for motivation. And finding it

I am a very simple target-oriented kind of person. I like to set up objectives for the day, week, month. I work with a very straight forward agenda each day and my activity is carefully calculated for covering a lot of activities, hobbies, social obligations and network needs. As writing is my favourite pastime, I tried as much as possible in my professional life to find working opportunities in this domain. And, after a lot of work and training, I succeeded. I loved to do it so much that since I am 18, I hardly had one single month without writing and publishing something. 

All being said, I can consider myself a happy and successful person. I almost have everything I want - at least for now - and I always did almost everything I wanted to. You will rarely find in my recent life moment of deep depression because I hated my office work and my grey cubicle in the multinational company. I am simple enough to say a clear 'no' when I felt breathless because working in a domain or with people that cannot help me to grow. I am selfish but I am convinced that when I am happy with what I do I can share and help a lot of people so better move forward although the financial benefits can be a little bit more or less affected.

From time to time though, I feel the need to find out more motivation and a clearer direction for my daily activities. In nature, as in life, too much or too less are never good environments for a good work pace. For instance, as I always work intensively on Sundays, the usual 'start of the week' for more than half of the world is very often a very exhausting part of the week for me. As I travel on Sundays - with early and late work batches -, I am rarely on the road and I try - theoretically at least - to do as much as I can from my agenda. But I do not expect a high level of productivity, as the tortoise's pace is what I cope with, at least for the first half of the day. 

What I usually do in such unpleasant situations? The first impulse for my productivity is to start doing the easiest tasks from the to-do-list: answering simple mails, checking texts, editing photos, setting up the writing schedule for the day. I am also looking for topics of interest: I do have a look at the latest news about food and interior kitchen design for my foodie blog, I browse creative boards for Pinterest, I have a look on my notebooks to see if I do have organized notes for a very easy post. Once I start writing, I would love to write more and more and thus, my hunger for doing more things is revealed. Good move both for my audience and for my writing skills.  

Sometimes, I simply try to find out the best inspiration from people around me that may help me to have a fresh beginning with some of my projects. For instance, today, I was a little bit tired to think about some of my writing projects - maybe of them waiting to be took into consideration for a couple of years already. Not that I did not write properly in the last years, but due to my spontaneous nature, I often do some intensive writing and editing in the first 2-3 months of life of the project but once I do find some new inspiration, I prefer to put everything on hold for a while. In the end, I finish everything I have in mind, but somehow late. Unless I do not need to answer some very tight deadlines of a publisher - which does not happen in the last 3 years since I rather prefer to self-publish. 

The answer for more organisation was to start talking with a very organized and talented friend of mine, who is publishing almost yearly at least one book. We talked for a while, updating each other about the projects and what we want to do, or already did. A very simple conversation between old friends with a common passion. At the end of the conversation, I felt more empowered to continue what I started and eventually set up deadlines for the new ones. Being together with people with similar interests is very important. In case that you did not find yet your community, you still have a chance to get the proper inspiration while finding online communities and blogs that can offer you symbolic or even direct support for your endeavours. 

Good luck everyone and have a wonderful productive week!

See your online business grow

It is not the first or the last time when I say that I am living in the perfect possible worlds (for me). I am happy to be connected with people from all over the world and share ideas and suggestions. I love that I can use Skype for conference calls, new clients, friends and relatives. I love that it is possible nowadays to travel with the speed of light and see so many wonderful places around the world. I am also happy that nowadays with a bit of inspiration, courage and a lot of work I can publish my own books and articles and be completely independent work-wise. When I grew up in a communist country, coping with censorship, 2 hours of TV per day and frequent light black-outs I could not imagine that such a world exist, but the best in life is to expect the unexpected. 

In the last weeks, I dedicated almost all my time to my growing business of the travel blogs. Somehow, I find amazing realizing for how many time I was only concerned about writing and reading, without considering to organize a bit my time and my skills and launch something serious and clearly targeted. But it is not too late to get on the right track, even though I feel sometimes that I am centuries away from a real achievement.

The main encouragement is that I see each day how things are changing positively. At the beginning of each day, I try to find some new tools and quality communities and every two days I check the results - mainly the audience. Last week, I used extensively Google+, through the dedicated communities of bloggers and travel writers, as well as StumbleUpon (till now, only in a passive way, simply sharing my pages, without too much interaction). I see how things are improving and I feel that I am going on the right path.

The main sources of inspiration not only from the point of view of writing style, are the successful blogs: you can see, for instance, how to set up a professional media file (I am more than thousand visitors away from such an achievement, but I am getting ready), what could be the opportunities for sponsorships, what are the best networks to increase traffic, how to address different topics, what could be the opportunities for more visibility. My biggest problem right now is the look of my travel blogs (but of that one as well), especially my lack of understanding of the qualities of Wordpress. The plan for today and tomorrow is to get some crash course, unless I want to pack my articles and move to another online house. 

Another thing I should do as soon as possible is to set up a list of possible sponsorships that may help me advance some of my writing and travel projects. Usually, this is the weakest link in my professional evolution chain, but I hope that after I will have a tasty cake and a strong cup of coffee, I will be able to be more focused and bold.

The adventure continues! Keep in touch!

What are you writing for?

My blogging and writing activity goes very well, thank you for the question. It is a lot to do and explore - especially when working full time for travels and foodie blogs. But, as I said on several occasions, writing and living with the impression of doing extraordinary things it is not enough. The blogs need (a lot of) promotion and intensive networking. Sometimes, you also need also some serious resources, financial, especially first because I need to diminish my time spent with various freelancing projects and second because in some cases a little bit of advertising may help. 

Time-wise I need to learn a lot about SEO and ads and various tips how to use Wordpress as a pro. And in between I need to improve at least another foreign language I have in my pocket because I need to go as international as possible. The list is getting longer and longer each day.

However, if I start thinking mostly about what I need to do to promote my posts, I forget something the most important part of my online story: the content of my stories as such. This is why I have blogs and Facebook page and Twitter account: because I want to share stories. Being present only for the sake of the social media profile does not solve the issue of who will write my posts as good as possible to be considered by publishers and companies for getting more work and visibility. No one will go to find out interesting topics or to prepare interviews if I am stuck checking how many people unfollowed me. 

At the beginning of the online adventure, there may be a lot of time needed until getting to an acceptable level. Learning how to use some good tricks - I started to use recently Google+ and I have only good words for this decision; the same goes to StumbleUpon (hope to write more about those experiences in a separate post) - and trying to be as organized as possible when it comes to various online events - such as the Twitter chats that I love more and more instead to the lonely autistic way of posting on my own and connecting from time to time to some fellow Twitter friends. 

The objective of the next weeks is to create more quality content, end up some interesting advertising deals and learn some decent principles of using successfully YouTube. The more I write the more I want to spend more time for my articles and this is why I want so much to do what I am doing. All my work, time and valuable resources should be spend doing the single thing I always wanted to do: writing. The rest is part of the right appreciation that my (hope) quality work might obtain.