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23 Simple Health Tips For Bloggers

Last week, I asked a simple question and one which bloggers and Internet freelancers often ignore: What do you do to stay healthy?. Such a question is easy to ignore, and any discussion of the topic is easy to dismiss as irrelevant mumbo-jumbo. But I can assure you that it’s not.

I also made the case in that post that health is a topic of vital importance. Think about it. Why do you work? You work, fundamentally, to preserve and enhance your own life and the life of your family. Many of us get so obsessed with work that we forget why we do it, and in the process, neglect the very things we work for: ourselves.

As a blogger, your well-being should be something you think about. You should pay attention to the state of your body and the state of your mind. Do you find yourself feeling sluggish a lot of the time? Do you find yourself feeling depressed? These are signs that your body is giving you that are indicative of something being wrong. By taking these signs seriously, you can use them as cues for action.

The good news is that I can personally attest to the fact that respecting and committing time to the health of your own body can pay huge dividends. Your mind will be clearer. Your motivation to act and be productive will get stronger. Your ability to interact with and enjoy other people will increase.

Over the last two years I’ve been systematically trying to take my body seriously. I’ve taken its cues and made every attempt to improve my overall quality of life. Below, I’ve listed 23 tips that will help you do the same.

Twenty-Three Health Tips For Bloggers

1. Before you drink coffee in the morning, drink a glass of water (keep a steady supply of water at your desk). This will help minimize the negative fidgety-buzz that coffee can give you.

2. Start your day off with a 20 minute walk

3. Walk away from the computer at least once every two hours and take a step outside

4. Keep at least one 10-25 pound dumbell by your desk, and use it at least once a day when you notice that your in the middle of a productivity funk.

5. Eat one small meal every 2-3 hours

6. Start your day off with twenty minutes of Yoga or Pilates. I’m personally a fan of the GAIAM series.

7. If you can’t sleep, take a sleeping pill. Sleep is critical to your overall well being. Just make sure not to take sleeping pills more than 3 days in a row.

8. If you feel sluggish, get down on the floor and do some push-ups

9. If your mind feels twitchy, it’s probably because you’ve had too much coffee. Drink some water and get some fresh air.

10. If you feel depressed or sad, immediately find a friend on AIM or in a private forum to talk with. It does wonders.

11. Buy an odometer/speedometer for your bike. Then go for a bike ride around 2pm each day. It’ll give you a “second-wind” for the day. Challenge yourself to go a little bit further and a little bit faster each day.

12. If you’re in a healthy relationship, have sex at least once every 3 days. I’m dead serious about this. It can be critical to both mental and physical stability.

13. If you’re addicted to IMing, porn, RSS reading, movie watching, shoe shopping, music searching or whatever else dominates your time…. TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOURSELF and YOUR TIME … addictions of any kind are not healthy – a healthy person has full control over him or herself.

14. Once a quarter, try something new. A hobby, an online project, a daily habit. Trying something new and succeeding at it is both physically stimulating and mentally liberating.

15. Buy a dog. While a puppy may result in mental torture and sleep deprivation for a few months, the benefits are pricless. Dogs lift your spirit and can give you the incentive you need to take a walk. But please don’t buy a dog unless you are serious about giving it a walk at least twice a day.

16. Try detoxing your body for a week. When I’m feeling really bad physically, I use two principles: A) Drink nothing but water and B) Eat nothing but fruits, vegetables and nuts

17. Get some sun. Seriously. Half an hour of good skin exposure to the sun can revive the body.

18. Find an excercise partner to help stay motivated. If you can’t find an exercise partner, motivate yourself through the habit forming stage with a massively enticing reward (50 inch Samsung LCD with a PS3 anyone)?

19. Minimize your intake of processed breads and carbs. Keep a healthy stash of nuts and fruits (grapes and walnuts are a great snack) to satisfy your snack cravings.

20. Guys, challenge yourself to work on the beer gut everyday for 10 minutes and stick with it. Take that challenge as seriously as you take your latest internet project or fantasy football team. Girls, challenge yourself to work on the cellulite areas. Take that challenge as seriously as you take your latest internet project or the your desire to get your 101st handbag.

21. Don’t drink alcohol after 7pm. Not only can it prevent you from sleeping deeply, but it can also result in more carb-based weight gain. Or…you might wake up the next day with a bad headache;-)

22. Challenge yourself to save alcohol and desserts only on the weekends. Your body will feel much more stable during the week if you keep it toxic free.

23. Your mental health demands that you are working on projects that you enjoy and that elicit creativity. If you find yourself bogged down in meaningless, tedious work, start taking the steps to transition into healthy, rewarding work by carving out time each day to pursue your own interests (rather than those of your boss – even if your boss in an alter-ego of yourself;-)

4 Tips For Improving The Conversation On Your Blog

Blogging is a one-to-many medium, but smart bloggers know who to turn it into an active group conversation between the readers and themselves. This requires the ability to communicate effectively – and it’s something that us bloggers can train ourselves to do better.

Here are four simple tips to help you improve your communication skills – this will not only help you in blogging but also in your networking efforts and life in general.

1. Simplify Your Message

Quite often what you say gets drowned out in how you say it. This happens because we tend to add extra, unnecessary information to our message.

Forget about impressing people with big words or complex sentences. They can make you look smart for a while but at the end of the day if you’re not getting the results (as a blogger this could be subscriptions, comments, product sales, etc), then all your efforts are meaningless.

Omit needless words. Keep things simple and focus on one thing at a time. Each blog post of yours has a particular purpose (that could be search engine traffic, comments, subscriptions, links, etc). Keep that purpose in mind and write accordingly.

Getting your message across means that you have to make what you’re saying absolutely clear to the other person. Don’t attach your feelings, second thoughts or justifications to your message – just be clear, be clear, be clear.

2. Talk To The Person

As bloggers we tend to have this annoying tendency to ramble on – it’s as if we like hearing ourselves talk (or reading our own words). The trouble with this approach is that when you write like this you have the wrong audience in mind. Who is your audience – your own ego or the guy sitting at home on a Thursday night looking for the banned Alicia Silverstone ad?

It is super-important to get the right picture in your mind about your intended audience BEFORE you start writing. Ask yourself who your audience is, what their needs are, how you can fulfill them and how much time you have to do this (time can be limited by a number of factors – attention span (can’t write too long a post), competition (be first with the news), etc.).

When blogging, remember that you’re talking to your audience and they have specific needs, motivations and preferences. If you don’t respect that, they won’t respect you.

3. Be Credible

People won’t believe you / trust what you say if they doubt your credibility.

There are two ways to convey credibility to your audience: First, show conviction – if you are confident and believe in what you say, it shows through your writing and attracts readers to you.

Second, back up what you say with your actions. If you are preaching a certain SEO technique or are giving weight loss tips, it makes a world of difference if your audience can see that you follow what you preach. For each blogger it will be a different story – celebrity bloggers can’t practice what they’re preaching (primarily because there’s not much preaching going on)- but in many cases you’ll have situations where you can boost your credibility and if you get the chance, make it count.

4. Seek a Response

As you blog, remember that the goal of all your blog posts is action. If you dump a bunch of information on people without leading them to the next step, you’re not doing your job. Every time you blog, give your audience something to feel (the need to improve their blogging skills), something to remember (how to be a better communicator) and something to do (the formula to become a better communicator).

If you’re successful in doing that, your blogging will improve and your audience will become more responsive to what you are asking them to do.

Takeaway

If you want to engage your readers and improve the conversation on your blog, you have to a) be clear, b) refocus your attention towards the audience and c) become credible.

Anyone can ask their readers for action (although it’s surprising how many people forget to do so) – but no one is going to listen to your subtle or obvious suggestions unless they have a reason to do so. And unless your audience understands and can relate to your message, they won’t feel inclined to respond.

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How Do You Cope With Blogger Burn Out?

This morning someone asked about coping with ‘Burn Out’. As bloggers we don’t just suffer from blogger burnout but also burnout from working on 20 different things at the same time and from matters other than blogging.

Everyone has a time when they ‘crash’ – the trick isn’t to avoid such instances but to know the best way to get back up. Look at ‘burnouts’ as your mind telling you that something is going wrong, that you’re offtrack. If you have a system to make course corrections, you’ll be able to get back to your feet with little downtime.

Here are 5 things to consider when you’re faced with a burnout – you are also welcome to provide your own suggestions in the comments in case you think I’ve missed out on something:

5 Steps To Coping With Burn Out

  1. Say No: Start saying no to people for 2 weeks – just say no to everything the first time. give yourself more time.

  2. Delegate: Delegate like you’re going on a long trip tomorrow and need people to ‘manage’ your business for you. Do it NOW – no, seriously, go and do it now and then come back.

  3. Vary Your Routine: I don’t have a single day that goes like the last one, and while it DOES have a negative impact on my income it’s also wonderful for keeping me sane. You can have somewhat the same times for waking up, sleeping and perhaps 2-3 hours of your most important work. But beyond that, keep things flexible.

  4. Deal With Outside Stress: Are you sure it’s work that’s burning you out? Other stuff can bring you down more than you think. Find out what you’re worried about during the day, what sticks at the back of your mind, and deal with it. Habits and Problems can weigh our morale down a lot and suck the energy out of you like a thousand leeches.

  5. Refocus Your Priorities: Sometimes I get burned out when I lose sight of what I want to do in the long run and get stuck in dead ends trying to meet short-term objectives. It helps to follow #1 and get my priorities back in order.

You shouldn’t be getting burned out if you do things right – it’s a sign that something is wrong, and usually it has to do with your mind shutting down because it isn’t being allowed to focus on what you want to do. It your mind’s subconscious way of saying that you’re messing up, and you need to fix things.

So what do you guys do to deal with (and to avoid) burn outs?

Blogger Health: What do you do to stay healthy?

A lot of people are going to skip over this series of posts because it doesn’t address 50 Ways To Make 4 Figures Per Day From AdSense – instead, it focuses on a topic that most bloggers ignore. A topic of vital importance. Not only because it affects the very core of your being, but because it actually has a fairly direct correlation with productivity, and to be honest, monetization. So let me suggest to those of you who have made it thus far: pay attention. This might be the most important series of posts that I make at Performancing.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be doing a series of posts on Blogger Health. Quite simply, it is the most overlooked issue in blogging and needs to be addressed. Money, afterall, is no good if you’re unhappy, sick, depressed or dead.

But enough of the scare tactics. Your health is directly correlated to your blogging success. Over the last year, by paying close attention to my body’s needs, I have been able to increase my overall daily productivity in both quantifiable (measurably better ideas, faster execution, etc.) and qualitative (enjoy my work, less depression, etc.) ways.

As probloggers, we have the advantage of working out of our homes and on flexible hours. We should take advantage of that fact and take time out of the day to fine-tune our bodies. Unfortunately, many full time internet people don’t leave their homes more than once or twice a week. We should aim to change that.

But before I start writing this series, I want to invite Performancing readers to do a gut check. What’s the state of your health? How seriously do you take your health? Do you think about your health on an hourly, daily, monthly, quarterly basis? Or did you wake up one day like me faced with the seeming Catch-22 that not only had you grown a beer gut but that it’s also hard as hell to stop work in the middle of the day to pump some iron?

Committing to Your Blog’s Goals

Today I’d like to ask you two questions:

One – What is your most important goal for your blog?

Two – How committed are you to that goal?

The thing is, we make a lot of promises – but it’s the easiest thing in the world to say something, and the hardest to make it happen.

I think it’s important to establish what you want to achieve, and what you’re willing to do to achieve it, from the start. Sometimes your actions won’t match your words, so you may talk about wanting to do one thing (write linkbait) and end up doing the other (write about your cat). By taking out time to analyse your own words and actions, you can understand:

a) what you’re doing
b) why you’re doing it
c) whether your commitments are realistic or even desirable
d) what you really want to do

The first time you’ll do this, it should cause a major paradigm shift in your blogging focus. When I talked about character yesterday I mentioned that part of your blog’s character was staying true to your purpose and being in it for the long haul instead of short-term distractions.

It’s strong commitment to your blog’s purpose that helps you maintain that part of its personality, its character.

When it comes to commitment, there are really only four types of people:

  1. Cop-outs – People who have no goals and do not commit.

  2. Holdouts – People who don’t know if they can reach their goals, so they’re afraid to commit.

  3. Dropouts – People who start towards a goal but quit when the going gets tough.

  4. All-outs – People who set goals, commit to them, and pay the price to reach them.

At some point in my life I’ve been each of these four people – and I can tell you without a doubt that going all-out after something is freakin’ scary, tough to hold on to and when you start off, it seems like the price you have to pay is very heavy. However, once you’re on the other side, you don’t want to stop, and the sacrifices (in time, or money, or by giving up certain habits) you’ve made seem trivial in comparison to the rewards you’ve reaped.

It’s not the rewards the motivate you when you’re down though – it’s your internal commitment to yourself. Commitment means different things to different people:

  • To a blogger it could be writing another post after the first 25 haven’t received any comments.

  • To a copywriter it could be crafting another headline after you’ve written 40, just so you can make it as good as possible.

  • To a web designer it could be fixing that minor error in the site’s design that 99% of the people visiting it would miss even if they wanted to find it.

  • To a public speaker it could be pushing through self-doubt, nervousness and negative feedback in order to improve himself and become better.

In simple terms: right now, someone else who is just as smart as you is working hard to get their blog to the top. They’re committed to the vision they’ve set for their blog, and they’re doing whatever it takes to make it a reality.

The big question is, why aren’t you?

Find that one target for your blog that you are willing to work the most for, and then get busy doing it.

Building A Better Blog? Work On Your Blog’s Character

Your blog has its own personality, regardless of whether you actively cultivate it or allow it to develop haphazardly. Your readers are attracted to your blog for a reason, and its personality plays a pivotal role in attracting visitors and converting them into regular readers.

When your blog slowly converts passerbys into regular readers, a relationship of trust develops between your blog and them. It is this trust that forms the basis of how your blog deals with its readers and as such the blogger (you) must do what it takes to establish and maintain that trust.

This is where your blog’s character comes in.

Let’s discuss for a minute what I DON’T mean by character:

  • I’m not talking about being morally right (immoral content goes, as long as that’s what the blog is designed for).

  • I’m not talking about reporting only the facts (rumours work, as long as that’s what…you get the idea).

  • This has nothing to do with the blogger (well, maybe a bit) – quite often the blog takes on a completely different personality from the blogger, and if that sells, that’s fine too. You don’t HAVE to be your blog, and your blog doesn’t HAVE to be you.

So what am I talking about?

Character in a blog means:

  • Delivering on what you promise (integrity and reliability are cornerstones for building trust).

  • Doing what you do to the best of your ability (effort and quality will be your secret weapons for converting visitors).

  • Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success (don’t allow short-term results to distract you from long-term objectives).

You may not have the most popular blog, or the best looking, or the most profitable. All those things are important, and we’ve talked about how to achieve all these things at Performancing. You don’t build a successful blog by copying the top bloggers on what they’re doing right now – you look at what they did at the start, what type of ‘foundational work’ they did to reach this level.

Getting the foundations of your blog and removing the cracks in it should be your first and foremost responsibility – everything else flows from that.

Does Your Blog Have Charisma?

How can you have charisma? Be more concerned about making others feel good about themselves than you are making them feel good about you – Dan Reliand

Most people think of charisma as something mystical, almost undefinable. They think it’s a quality that comes at birth or not at all. But that’s not true. Charisma, plainly stated, is the ability to draw people to you. And like other character traits, it can be developed.

And as I’ve discussed earlier, your blog (and you) have a certain personality, a brand that can be nurtured, cultivated and molded into anything that you want it to be. Because the personality of a blogger can be one of the biggest ‘crowd-pullers’ for the blog, it’s important that you get it right.

To create a blog that attracts others, you need to integrate the following points into your blog’s philosophy:

1. Be Passionate and Positive

Who would you rather spend time with – someone who is grumpy, bitter and depressed, or someone that is cheerful, positive and passionate?

Blogs are the same – most people get turned off from whiners and are attracted to those who have a positive approach towards life (I wouldn’t say optimistic – there’s a difference in having self-belief and in distorting reality). Or, as they say, when you set yourself on fire (passion), people love to come and watch you burn.

Being positive is more than just avoiding the urge to criticise – it’s a conscious attempt to focus on how things can be made better instead of focusing on what’s wrong, it’s the drive to focus on the good rather than on the bad. You cannot be blind to a fault or a mistake, but you can choose what you spend your time on – pointing out what’s wrong or showing people how to fix it.

And just about every successful blogger I know speaks with passion and conviction – it’s not an add-on trait, this is perhaps the single-most important ingredient to blogging success (and success in life).

2. Expect the Best of People

How do you react when you first meet someone or as us bloggers are likely to do, meet them online? Do you judge them on their name, on their past, on their reputation? Or do you start off by thinking of the other person as a “10”, expect the best from them and give them all your attention?

How we interact with others directly influences what they think of us. If you treat them as perfect 10’s, they’ll remember you as someone who makes them feel good about themselves – and that’s what you need to get them to come back.

With blogging and bloggers, this works on two angles. First is your approach to networking – how you interact with fellow bloggers, readers, journalists, sales reps, etc. Second is through your blog and how you treat your readers – whether you appreciate them and encourage them to do better, or whether you talk down to them, insult their intelligence and expect them to fail.

If you appreciate others, encourage them, and help them reach their potential (both through your blog and through your networking efforts), they will love you for it.

3. Give People Hope

Are you all doom and gloom or are you confident that despite hardships, it’s within your hands to achieve results? Hope does not mean optimism, it’s the confidence in your own ability (and that of others) to do what is necessary to overcome obstacles – and it is this confidence (or lack of it) that will shine through and either inspire your readers or turn them away from you.

One theme you must have noticed here is that of confidence – the kind you have in yourself and your beliefs and the kind you show in others. To be honest, because we’re online and protected by relative anonymity and our blogs, this kind of self-confidence can be faked for some time, so fake it until you yourself believe it to be true.

Take a hard look at your blog and see whether it inspires hope or instills misery – unless the answer is firmly in the corner of ‘hope’, you’ve got work to do.

4. Share Yourself

Make yourself available to your readers – whether it is in terms of replying to comments, to email, sharing your IM details on your blog or just giving more of yourself in terms of personal experiences and resources. In a recent article titled “27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog”, I talked about how important it was to ‘give first’ and ask later. Sharing yourself is all about giving in terms of your personal time and attention.

In networking, this means helping out people you meet in solving their problems – trust me on this, if you just go out and help the next person who asks you, without asking or expecting anything in return, the rewards are tremendous. And you don’t just have to do this in person, you can do it on your blog as well. If you readers want something, give it to them, even if it means you having to spend extra time on your blog to make it happen.

Examples

A lot of the more ‘popular’ bloggers are well-known not only for being charismatic but also because they excel in their fields. However, to show you how sheer charisma can turn someone into a superstar, take the example of Edward Harrison.

Ed is a 60-something retired IBM employee, who started a blog about the football club Newcastle United in April 2007. Within a couple of weeks, his blog was gaining traction and in 2 months one could safely say that it was a roaring success. In the 5 months since the blog has been live, we’ve received over a hundred emails from readers and thousands of comments on the blog telling Ed that his blog is the first thing they check in the morning.

For me, that type of loyalty and appreciation cannot be bought, it has to be earned. Ed did not win over his readers by being the best writer, or the most knowledgeable, or the most insightful. Instead, he did it by doing 4 things right:

  • He’s a passionate Newcastle United fan, and it shows in the hard work he puts in the blog (anywhere between 5-8 posts per day) and in everything he writes. He’s also positive about his team – it shines through in his writing, is infectious and his readers love him for it.

  • He’s built a close rapport with his readers by trusting them to police themselves on the blog. Where you might see snarkiness run rampant on sports blogs, Ed’s blog is usually clean – and if there’s a troublemaker, it’s not Ed who has to speak up, it’s the readers. The community keeps the house clean.

  • He gives his readers hope by seeing the positives in his club and constantly thinking of how the team can go forward (as opposed to constantly criticising them). If you follow a sport, you’ll know the value of hope – and Ed gives that to his readers in spades.

  • Ed shares himself – responding to each email personally, taking the time to answer comments (which in my estimate takes him an hour a day) and has given his readers what they want by going the extra mile to fulfill reader requests for things like team stats and adding a forum, which takes up even more of his personal time.

When it comes to talking about something he loves, Ed is incredibly charismatic. He’s been my benchmark for a while now, and he’s the perfect example of how a blogger can become #1 in his niche by sharing his passion and enthusiasm for a subject with others.

Barriers to being Charismatic

  • Pride – Do you think you’re better than everyone else? How many arrogant, pompous, self-important bloggers do you know who are well-liked (and popular, for that matter)?

  • Insecurity – If you’re not comfortable with who you are and lack confidence in yourself, how can you make others feel comfortable and confident about you?

  • Moodiness – You may accept being nice one minute and snarky the other as perfectly acceptable behavior for yourself, but put it the other way around – how would you treat a person who behaved like this with you? Not with too much confidence and trust, I imagine.

  • Perfectionism – Like it or not, no one’s perfect. A perfectionist zeal can cause to focus on the small stuff – the 20% of the problems that aren’t important. You may love to nitpick (I’m a sucker for it) but resist it the first time.

  • Cynicism – Do you shoot down the ideas and opinions of others or do you encourage them to chase their dreams?

Self-Analysis

Self-analysis is a bitch – it makes you feel like hell and as a result most people resist the occasion to find flaws in themselves (you can’t be too self-critical though). I admit, I have all the traits I listed above, and for me it’s a conscious effort every day to not succumb to being cynical or snarky, and it’s quite tough at times to find the self-confidence to move forward with conviction.

However, I think that once you believe in something for long enough, it starts being your reality. In terms of habits, this is doubly true.

So take a good hard look at your blog and your own blogging habits. Chances are, you’re not doing everything as well as you thought you were. Chances are that you could use a gut-check and increase your blog’s charismatic appeal.

And to make it happen, there is just one thing you really need to remember:

When it comes to being charismatic, the bottom line is othermindedness.