On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my GTD system?

Blog performance
This week was a very successful week. The series on Mastering Productivity generated a tenfold of normal traffic on the day of publication and elevated levels in the following days. I’m grateful that quite a lot of those visitors decided to subscribe to the feed, either by RSS or by email. The numbers this week look great, with an average number of 319 subscribers, but the total mark has even broken the 400 mark on a single day.

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I’ve been blogging for some months now and I have started to monetize my blog. At first I was hoping to get break-even, but my ambitions are higher.

This article is about why I monetize my blog and what I try to achieve by it. I’ll also dive into how I’ll be monetizing my blog and what guidelines I’m setting myself for it.

Doing something I love to do
One of the best things in life is to do what you love to do. In my article about my mission statement, you can read who I am and what experiences I want in my life.

This blog is one of the things I love to do as I love the subject of personal development. Writing about it and interacting with you guys gives me a lot of energy, fun and insight at the same time.

If you add enough value…
I strongly believe that if you add value to the lives of others, value will be returned. My intention is to add value to your lives, and blogging is only one of the ways I intend to do this. But value returned does not come automatically. Most of the times you have to make sure that you can be reached. If you’re not ready to receive, nobody can give. So monetizing my blog is a way of empowering the world to return value to me. It is a way of saying I’m ready to receive. Click to continue »

Priscilla Palmer started with a small list of 5 personal development bloggers she liked, and it has grown into an immense list where I have been added as well. The list is still growing, but it’s already a very valuable resource, and I have copied the most recent version here (dated August 29, 9:00 CET).

If you have any additions, leave them in the comments here or over at Priscilla’s, and they will be on the list as well.

• Aaron Potts at Today is That Day
• Adam Kayce at Monk at Work
• AgentSully at Life Learning Today
• Al at 7pproductions.com
• Alan Torres at Made to Be Great
• Alex Shalman at AlexShalman.com
• Alexander Kjerulf at The Chief Happiness Officer
• Alexys Fairfield at Unraveling The Spiritual Mystique
• Albert Foong at urbanmonk.net
• Amber at Random Mangus
• Amie Ragan at Psychology of Clutter
• Amy Hedin at There is no Maximum to Human Potential
• Andrea Learned at Learned on Women
• Andrea J. Lee at Money, Meaning, and Beyond
• Andy Wibbels at AndyWibbels.com
• Anita Pathik Law at Power of four Way
• Anna Farmery at The Engaging Brand
• Antonio Thornton at AntonioThornton.com
• Ariane Benefit at Neat & Simple Living
• Ask Lucid at Ask Lucid Spiritual Development
• Barbara Sliter at Creatorship
• Belle Wong at Abundance Journal
• Billy Smith at The Organic Leadership Blog
• Blogfuse at LifeDev
• Brad Isaac at Achieve It
• Brian Clark at Copyblogger Click to continue »

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did my habit change go? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my GTD system?

This is the first weekly review I do on this blog. I’ll do this every week, a rhythm inspired by David Allen’s Getting things done method.

Progress on habit change
Starting September I will be giving a report on the progress here, for August you can find the latest report here: Looking back on the third week of the Early Bird Challenge.

Blog performance
I did not manage to get an article posted everyday. Last week I had a very busy week at work, which required me to work evenings and early mornings as well. I’m still working up to the level to get posts done everyday.

Liz Strauss of Successful Blog awarded me with a SOB-badge yesterday. SOB is an acronym for Successful and Outstanding Bloggers and I’m proud of it! The badge is sitting in my sidebar as of now. What makes a SOB is defined by Liz: Click to continue »

How to be an Original is 4 months old now. Three months seems to be the critical time frame to find out whether you’re a blogger or not. A lot of people stop at that point in time, and those that don’t seem to have a blogger’s dip with a dry spell in inspiration for posts. I have had that dry spell, but I’m not done blogging Not by a long shot, I like it way too much and I’ve learned so much while blogging, that I plan to continue for a long time.

During that dry spell, I had the feeling that I needed a routine in my blogging, that I was lacking structure. So I’ve been working on a weekly routine for How to be an Original for a couple of weeks now, well not really working on it, but it changed a little bit everytime. This is stuff that needs to mature over time. Here’s the routine:

Productive Monday
On Mondays at the start of the new week, I’ll be focusing on (personal) productivity. I use GTD as a system, but I adapt it to my own needs. I’ll be writing about the concepts, my experiences, tools I use and so on. Click to continue »