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For the last year, I’ve had about 25% of my total office whiteboard area covered in scribbled blog post ideas. I’m trying to clean it up now, so yesterday I went through and put them all in a file with a short explanation of what each idea meant and what inspired me.

As it turns out, I have no idea what many of these are. Some of them are good ideas and I can remember what made me think it would make for an interesting post when I wrote it down. But look at some of these:

• balance
• hidden cost
• ego
• job search
• trading pain for pleasure

Granted, those are concepts that you could talk about (though I have no idea about the last one), but they don’t really provide much in the way of an interesting angle. I’m sure I had something interesting in mind when I scribbled this down, but those bits of inspiration have been lost.

Why didn’t I just sit down and write the post while it was fresh in my mind?

The time to write a post is right when the idea or inspiration strikes. Without fail, the best blog posts I’ve ever written have been those I sat down and drafted in one sitting when the topic was fresh on my mind and heart. You don’t have to write the final form, but being able to take 15 minutes and pound out a quick draft is incredibly valuable. Not only will it end up taking less time because you have the engine of inspiration pushing you, it will end up being a much stronger post. Your mind is incredibly powerful at finding connections and patterns, and when you’ve been ruminating on something enough for a blog post idea to spring to mind, your writing will take on a clarity and electricity that is very hard to match later when you sit down and look at a three-word description of the idea. When an idea goes stale, the little connections and thoughts and angles that you were holding in your mind are lost. What you’re left with is the obvious and tepid approach that almost anyone writing about the subject could come up with.

If you don’t have time to draft an idea when inspiration strikes, the next best thing is to write down the idea and any mental clues that you can use later to recreate cognitive environment that gave birth to the idea.

For example, I had a phone conversation yesterday with a friend about personal finance education. There’s a good blog post in there somewhere, though I haven’t figured out the exact angle. But when I recorded the idea, I wrote down the context of the conversation we had, what I had read earlier that prompted this conversation in the first place, some of the phrases and conclusions each of us said during this conversation, etc. Later when I’m writing a blog post, I can read through this stuff and remember this conversation much more vividly, and thus recreate the mental patterns that led me to think there was an interesting post idea there.

As the title indicates, working when inspiration strikes is much bigger than blog post ideas. It applies to all ideas. Inspiration is such a powerful engine for getting things done, and I think that anytime any kind of inspiration strikes, it’s worth it to play with it immediately and see if there’s some potential there. Don’t just write ideas down; go play around with them and see if there’s something there. You don’t have to finish it right then, but you might find something life-changing in that flash of inspiration that you would have missed if you had let it go stale.

What good ideas have you had that you let go stale? What amazing ideas have changed your life because you pursued them when they were fresh?

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Here’s the lesson: momentum is everything.

I see this in a lot of areas in my life; blogging is just the latest one to bite me. It comes down to focusing on your successes. If you’re doing something and it’s working, double down. Don’t start looking around for something else that you can do as well. Build on your current success; it’s working for a reason!

And be extremely careful about taking a little time off. The last time I did that it took me three years to start my daily blogging again. No good, and that’s why I’m forcing myself to get back into it today, even though starting up after not doing something for awhile is rough. My writing just feels rusty in my head, so it may take a week or two to hit my stride.

It’s 10x as hard to create something new as it is to optimize something you already have that’s working.

Have you experienced this? I can’t be the only one

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Writing is an inherently creative task, and like any creative task, the creative process varies from person to person. I know bloggers who sit down and write their daily posts in a near-stream-of-consciousness flow, spend a minute or two checking for any glaring errors, and then hit publish. And while their posts aren’t consistently amazing, they do often push out some pretty good content.

Other bloggers I know carefully crafts their posts over a period of days or even weeks, refusing to publish them until they’re nearly perfect.

My method is quite a bit more haphazard and inconsistent: my posts come to me in fits and spurts, each a unique “personality”. Some just pour out of me a few minutes after the idea has hit, while I’ll wrestle with others for weeks. I’ve got dozens of drafts in various stages of completion, because while the initial idea was intriguing, I just haven’t managed to piece together enough bits to consider it worth sharing.

This makes it difficult to write a daily blog post, because some days I have plenty of ideas and things to write about and I find the words flowing easily, while other days I have absolutely nothing. Most frustrating are the days in the middle, when I have a faint glimmer of an idea that wants to be expressed, but I just can’t make the words work.

Add to this the pressure of needing to produce something every day. Pressure generally isn’t conducive to a creative atmosphere for me. But I have a public commitment to post every day, so I have to post something. This often results in posts that I’m not thrilled with that could have been 10x as good if I could have waited a few days to publish them.

The obvious solution would be to wait until the post is better before publishing. I’ve gone this route in the past, and without a specific, consistent habit of regular publishing, I go months without writing anything. No, I need to keep the daily habit, but figure out how to increase the overall quality.

So here’s what I’ve come up with. For the rest of March, I’m going to write a blog post every weekday, just like I have been. But I’m also going to write one on Saturday, and one on Sunday. And while I’m at it, I’m going to write two posts every day instead of one. But I’m just going to continue to publish a post Monday through Friday, as I have been. Since there are 20 days left in March, that will give me 40 posts in total that I’ll have written by month’s end, but only 15 published. Which means I’ll 25 surplus posts in the hopper, or five weeks of daily posts.

“But Ryan, if you’re going to just start writing twice as much, won’t your quality go down??” Good question, and it’ll be challenging for the next few weeks, but here’s the key: I’ll then have a five-week buffer where I’ll have the opportunity to examine a post and make any changes necessary to take it from OK to great. It’s like the QA portion of the conveyor belt in a factory: I want to make sure I fix the duds before they get shipped out to customers. This way I’ll have some breathing room to do that.

And bonus: not having the psychological pressure of getting today’s post out today will hopefully improve the writing as well.

I generally like to tell people about things like this after I’ve done them, but I’ve been planning on doing this for a couple months now and it hasn’t gone anywhere, so I’m hoping that by telling thousands of people about it, I’ll be able to actually buckle down and do it.

So if you have anything you’d like me to write about, now’s the time let me know.

PS – And in keeping with my theory that I won’t be any different tomorrow, I’m starting right now.

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But I opened 2011 by screwing that up. January 2011 was the first month that I didn’t meet my goal of 20% growth in income. In fact, I made less than in December. A lot less. It was a bloodbath, actually.

I made just $219.38 in January 2011, down about 73% over December 2010, when I made $809.54.

So why did I lose so much income? Two primary reasons:

1. My post quality just wasn’t as high. I’ve been busy with some other projects and I’ve not had as much time to dedicate to researching and writing posts. This is something I’m making a big focus in February and March.
2. Traffic is way down. A good portion of my traffic growth over the last four months of 2010 was the fact that I was getting lots of posts to hit the homepage on Hacker News, which brought a lot of traffic. But in January, not a single post of mine hit the homepage, despite several garnering enough votes to do so. I dug deeper and apparently my domain is being penalized at HN for some reason. I don’t know why, but that’s the reason my traffic is down so much from that source.

So how am I feeling? I’m disappointed, obviously, but I’m neither surprised nor upset. Of the two reasons above, #1 is completely my fault and completely fixable, and #2 is something I’ve been expecting and preparing for. I realized a couple months ago that in order to grow this to something that could replace my income, I’d need to do two things:

1. I need to expand my audience. What the readers of sites like Hacker News want is not really what most people want. And while I’m sure many will accuse me of being shallow for commercial appeal’s sake, I really do blog about things because I enjoy helping people and exploring new ideas. And I’d like to try doing that for a wider audience, that’s all. As a result, I’ve been expecting to move away from traffic sources like HN; this was just earlier than I was hoping for.
2. I need to focus on subscribers. Being subject to the whims of social media sites is nerve-wracking and frustrating. It encourages cookie-cutter content with overhyped headlines, just to get attention. I’d much rather build relationships with a base of subscribers who are interested in the same things that I am and who are willing to take the time to get to know me and to learn to trust me. I would love it if most of my growth came from subscribers forwarding posts to their friends. That kind of relationship-based growth is harder in many ways, but much, much more valuable. And bonus: you’re not dependent on a 3rd party for your traffic.

So while I wanted to see January do better (and Feb isn’t looking amazing either), I’m still very excited for the rest of this year. I’m going to dedicate more time to content in the coming weeks, and I’m still working on several plans to grow the subscriber base. I’ll be sharing more about that in the coming weeks, but feel free to drop me a comment if that kind of thing interests you.

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December 2010 Blog Income Report

Here’s November and December:

The news here is mixed: I hit my goal of 20% growth over last month, which is the target that I’ve set for myself. If I can hit this target every month for a year, I’ll be making more than enough by the end of 2011 to live off the income from RyanWaggoner.com alone. So that’s good, but I’m also slightly concerned because I just barely hit the goal, while I completely blew it away last month (264%).

Upon reflection, I think my post quality went down slightly this month. I know that part of this was just the holidays, but it was also partly worrying too much about the big things to move the income needle in the long run, and neglecting some of the basics, like writing great content every single day.

So for January, my goal is to buckle down a little and get some of the bigger ideas for posts that I have out the door, as well as land 1-2 guest posts on top blogs that I admire. I also want to focus more attention on the advertising side of things, and I have some ideas on how to make that happen and get my CPM rates up so that I can bring the advertising and affiliate income more in line with each other.

2010 Annual Blog Income Report

Overall, I had a blast this year. I started blogging every day in August and I truly didn’t have much in the way of income expectations for it. A friend actually suggested I throw some Adsense on the site because it couldn’t hurt, and the last few months have been amazing. It’s really exciting to see something grow organically from nothing into a project that could actually replace my income within a year or two.

Goals for 2011

As mentioned, I pretty much just have one goal: be able to make a full-time income from this site by the end of 2011. To be more specific, I’d need to make about $5 – 6k / month from the site before I’d be able to stop doing all contract and freelance work. Starting from a baseline of $800 / month (which is what the site earned in Dec 2010), I’ll need growth of about 18% per month to reach my income goal by the end of 2011. I think this is an achievable goal, and I’ll be working very hard over the next 3-4 months to see if I can achieve it early.

Once again, thank you so much for being a reader; it means the world to me.

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Again, I can’t express to you how grateful I am for your readership, for leaving such great comments, and for your many emails of encouragement and suggestions. Please don’t stop and if you know of anyone else who might enjoy my writings, please share this site with them. Looking forward to a great 2011…Happy New Year!

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As a result, my goals for my blog have shifted a little. I originally started blogging every day without a clear purpose, but as my income has grown and I’ve received more emails from users who have enjoyed my posts, I’ve decided to make blogging more of a priority. I’m not in any hurry to do it full-time or anything, but I now think that’s a probable outcome in the next few years, and I’m going to focus my blogging efforts in 2011 on that goal.

Now, if you’re reading this and you’re thinking that I’m “selling out” or that I should really just be blogging for fun, not to make money, you’re not alone with your concerns. I’ve wrestled a lot with this question, because I really don’t want to just be adding to the noise and writing purely for the sake of making money. All I can really promise you is that I’ll do my best to add value with every post. I’ll leave it up to you to gauge whether I’m successful, and unsubscribe if not.

Speaking of unsubscribing, one of the big things I’ve learned is that I need to focus on building my subscriber base. My initial traffic came almost exclusively from Hacker News, which is awesome, and I’m really grateful for that push. But I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of being dependent on the Hacker News audience for all of my traffic and income. The community seems to be deteriorating in some ways, likely as a result of growth, and it’s becoming a lot more noisy. Building a relationship with a subscriber base means that I don’t have to worry about winning my audience all over again every single day. It also means that I can have a better conversation with the people who enjoy what I write, and ensure that I’m adding value for them.

I’ll talk in a later post about the specific methods I’m using to grow my subscriber base, but I’m really excited to see how things turn out. If you haven’t subscribed already, please do so now; I’ll be posting tons of great content in the coming weeks and months and you don’t want to miss out. Subscribe right now.

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