Slade on Blogging

Creating the End of Your Writing Project

Slade Roberson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:59:43 +0000

Have you ever “visited” the spot on the shelf in a major bookstore or library where your book will one day live?

If you’ve ever created a Vision Board as an exercise in Manifestation | Attraction, then you may appreciate the technique of creating visual mock ups of completed projects — even before you start them. Creation and Manifestation are about channeling abstract thoughts and ideas into something “real” — giving form to the formless. Inspiration — the Really Big Cool Idea — is the beginning, the middle, and the end of a creative journey.

I generally advise against what I call “Time-traveling” — spending too much mental time in the abstract past or future without being present or taking action in the present — because more often than not this contributes to anxiety.

But for long-format projects — such as writing books — the emotion and the tactile sensation of the future completion can be a motivation/visualization tool.

Up until recently, this has been a somewhat embarrassingly private activity that I thought might sound a little “silly,” but then last week I heard Dr. Wayne Dyer say that he does the same thing when working on a book — creating mock ups of the books he’s about to write or currently working on.

At an Angel Therapy® Practitioners gathering, Doreen Virtue told us that when she was trying to get a book deal, years before we all had access to digital desktop publishing software, she cut the logos of the major publishing houses she was targeting off paperbacks she found in thrift stores and garage sales and pasted them all over her house — as a manifesting technique.

Mock-Up Book Covers and Dust-jackets

Create cover art for a “completed book” — before you write it.

I do my own graphic design and illustration work because I enjoy it as a creative outlet in and of itself — and as a one-man self-publishing operation it’s also a cost-effective business necessity. I also employ this as a brain-storming, channeling, manifesting, and creative visualization exercise.

I have a shelf in my library dedicated to my own writing projects — many of which I haven’t even finished yet. I literally create dust jackets with my own titles, artwork, and my name on the spine and wrap them around whatever hard-covers they will fit.

I’ve even gone so far as to use print-on-demand publishing services like Lulu.com to upload, print, and purchase very realistic perfect-bound paperbacks that look and feel as close to the “real” thing as possible. Yes, they are blank inside! I then use them as project notebooks or glorified rough draft sketchbooks to record and capture the material as I’m working on the project.

Most of my “virtual” ebooks, products, courses, tutorials — the ones I only sell in digital format to the public — still exist for me in highly-limited edition print volumes. These are very helpful during the editing process and when I want to reference a specific page or passage without scrolling through a long PDF.

The idea here is to feel the sensation of the completed, physical book, to “trick” or program my mind to work with the emotional energy of the end result. I can feel what it’s like to hold that finished product and use that as a beacon to guide me toward a finish-line.

Have you ever “visited” the spot on the shelf in a major bookstore or library where your book will one day live? About ten years ago, I was working in a metaphysical bookstore. Before the store opened, I brought in some of my mock-ups, placed them in the sections where they would be shelved, and took polaroids of them. I blush to tell you this — at the time, I was very furtive about the whole activity. If anyone had “caught” me, I would have felt exposed as some kind of desperate wannabe.

Back then, I thought Shift Your Spirits was going to be a book — I never dreamed that it would end up being a web site. The final format was not at all what I originally intended — it actually became something quite “bigger” than a book — it manifested many years later as an entire business.

The “cover imagery” is very different from that original mock-up — I also had very different tastes in typography back in the day. But I can’t help but remember the image in my mind of that spine on that shelf with the title and my name.

CD Covers and Jewelboxes

Create cover art and insert booklets with liner notes for audio products — before you write and record them.

Again, even though I may sell lectures and guided meditations as mp3 digital downloads — the overhead and distribution makes a lot more sense for these projects — I still create mock-ups of physical CDs. Most of these CDs live in the armrest CD holder in my car. Some of them are actual burned copies of existing audio products I’ve created — but in nearly all cases I created the artwork before the project was even started.

Word processor templates
I was told by an editor several years ago in a writing/editing/publishing course to format the document in your word processing software to match the font, size, and spacing of a printed book, so that as you are working on drafts — especially when you are reading/editing the printed manuscript — it literally looks as much like the “real deal” as possible.

Internet Marketing
You’re probably well-aware that for years internet marketing gurus have advised writing your sales page before you write the product, and in some cases, even pre-sale a course before you’ve created it. I have certainly done both — there’s nothing like a sales page to outline what you want to provide and absolutely nothing like a pre-booked teleseminar filled with paying clients who are going to show up at a certain date and time to motivate you to prepare the lecture and exercises.

Web Design Mock ups
Most web site and blog theme designers are certainly familiar with creating layered, Photoshop composites and wire frames as a way of planning and organizing the layout of future content. I have dummy sites and test blogs and PSD’s all over the place — for every potential iteration of every site I’ve ever designed. For every site or blog that you actually know me for, there are ten or twenty that are totally underwraps or may never even see the light of day…

I discover thousands of words — picture first.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.

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Software Tools for Writers

Slade Roberson — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:12:04 +0000

Blogging and Writing (with an intentional capital W) are two overlapping but certainly very different activities to me. I consider blogging to be about publishing and marketing — blogging is my “job;” writing is my aspirational dream and a greater part of my identity.

I aspire to run as few programs as possible — to exercise a work flow that incorporates not every piece of software I can use but only those that I can’t live without. It seems like I’ve tried out ten times as many writing tools as I’ve actually adopted.

When I was working exclusively on Windows PC systems, I whittled my everyday tool set down to a Firefox browser (with Web Developer plugins — can’t live without a live CSS in-browser editor — and default tabs set to my WordPress dashboards) Adobe Photoshop (for composite web layout grids and graphics) and just about everything spilling into and out of my uber-drafting virtual sketchbook MS Office OneNote.

OneNote

There’s never been a piece of software that I have loved and used more than MS OneNote. When it first came out, I felt that someone had actually written a direct interface for my brain and all its various compartments — from rough-drafting words, to dumping code, to scrapbooking images and links… You name it, there’s nothing I worked on that didn’t live at least partially in OneNote.

Up until 2008, all my articles, tutorials, and non-fiction books were written using OneNote (compiled into PDF using Adobe Acrobat Professional).

OneNote’s super-extensible, customizable notebook binder concept rocks. I can hardly stand to use anything else that comes out of Microsoft, yet here was the one shining example of what they were capable of creating.

It pains me that there is (as yet) no version of OneNote for Mac Office. And no, I’m not willing to run Windows on a partition on my MacBook — it’s too awkward to turn my computer usage into some pretzel-like, Windows-addicted frankenstein for one program. I will happily be the first in line to download OneNote for Mac if and when it happens. Last year I finally got to switch back to Mac and I am totally satisfied with my Windows-free work life.

For those of you who are writers using Windows PCs — there’s no program I would recommend more highly than OneNote.

Evernote

After switching to Mac about six months ago, I transferred the bulk of what I normally did in OneNote to Evernote — a free program that’s available for both Windows and Mac systems. I had dabbled in Evernote years ago, but it felt a bit like OneNote’s kid sister, with a similar concept and many overlapping features… but, eh, not quite.

Over the past few years, Evernote has evolved in a fantastic direction. Like OneNote, it has an extensible notebook/binder concept and is also one of those local machine wiki-like databases that never requires you to hit a Save button.

Evernote can also handle anything you want to drag and dump into it — from words to links to images to entire web pages to HTML/PHP/CSS code.

One cool bonus feature with Evernote that I do really dig is the built-in, user-friendly “cloud” function — Evernote automatically syncs everything you throw at it with an online version of itself. Every writer knows the pain of data-loss — for this reason alone, not to mention the free price tag — you should absolutely (at least) work with Evernote, no matter what kind of system you’re running.

MS Word
Of course it’s either ubiquitous or universal — very cross-platform compatible — but after switching to Mac I also wanted MS Office for Mac because Word on a Mac offers one lovely optional feature borrowed from OneNote — “Notes View.” Notes View has a notebook/binder concept with a drag-and-reorder tabs function for outlining and working on larger, more complex document structures.

But here’s the maddening oversight that absolutely makes me crazy and renders Word for Mac near-useless for me:

When you compile as a PDF (a must for ebooks and other downloadable documents when you’re running a web-based business) Word for Mac strips your freaking live links out of your PDFs! What were they thinking?! Is it a bug or just sheer stupidity? Who knows… I could hardly believe it.

iWork Pages
If you want to open, edit, save Word document formats on Mac, but you want to compile PDFs, then just use iWork Pages for God’s Sake. No “Notes View” or notebook-esque concept, but at least the PDF security features are super user-friendly and obvious.

OpenOffice
Of course, there’s OpenOffice.org if you’re looking for an open source (totally free) alternative to MS Office for any platform.

(Unfortunately, I must say that OpenOffice runs a bit slow for me…)

Now, let’s talk specifically Creative Writing

Scrivener

In 2009, I began working on some larger projects — two levels of an imminent professional intuitive training program as well as a return to working on fiction, specifically novel-writing which I had allowed to simmer on the back burner while building my blogs and web presence.

Writing fiction and becoming a published novelist is probably my highest aspiration. I needed a program that specializes in longer-format fiction/novel writing.

I have been using Scrivener to outline and draft my non-fiction professional intuitive training programs — partly as an experimental usage of the program before loading it down with fiction.

So far, I absolutely love Scrivener. If you’re a creative writer working on a Mac, you can’t beat the functionality or the gorgeous $39.95 price.

Storyist

I am also playing around with Storyist — another Mac program very comparable to Scrivener, but with a $59 price.

So far, I can’t say that there are too many features that justify the extra $20 over Scrivener — other than the ability to store character-profiles and more word-processor-like text formatting.

Both Storyist and Scrivener have built-in systems for script and screenplay writing, as well as short story and novel templates — with an emphasis on printing industry-acceptable manuscript submissions.

I believe if I had to choose between Storyist and Scrivener based on price, Scrivener wins out and will do most of what I require this kind of software to do. For longer-format non-fiction books, Scrivener also accomplishes everything I need it to.

For fiction? Really character-driven stuff? I’m leaning toward Storyist for organizing notes and tags and profiles around casts of characters.

Links — Writing Tools, Programs, and Software

Literature and Latte, the maker of Scrivener, also has a great resource page with links to outlining, mind-mapping, and writing tools for creative writers.

The Links Page has a collection of many popular writing programs – for both Windows and Mac systems — as well as useful descriptions summarizing the features of each.

What writing programs do you use?
Please share your recommendations in the comments.

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Aligning Images in RSS Feeds

Slade Roberson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:16:14 +0000

Design Problem:
The images in your posts look perfect on your blog, aligned to the left or right with the paragraph text beside the image, but when the post is delivered by RSS to a feed reader or to your subscriber’s email the styling is “broken” — the paragraph text “falls down” after the image or appears at the bottom of the image.

The Reason this happens:
When a post is displayed on your blog — at the web address where it lives online — the post and all its formatting (images, paragraphs, headers and subheaders, bullet lists, blockquotes, etc) pulls style instructions from the style sheet (style.css) in your blog template or theme.

When that same post is delivered by RSS feed — to someone’s feed reader program or to their email — it’s a kind of “copy” of the post content that is no longer “living” on your blog. The post is displayed in a different environment where it is no longer receiving instructions from the style sheet. The formatting, style, and appearance gets stripped of its original instructions.

A simple solution:
The easiest way to preserve your image style formatting is to embed the style instructions in the HTML image tag, so that the image “takes the style instructions along wherever it travels” outside your blog.

Manually edit the HTML image tag:
If you don’t know much HTML or CSS, chances are you use a Visual Editor mode when composing and editing your posts. You can either turn off the Visual Editing in your “Writing” options, or choose to “view the HTML code” when your in an edit post screen.

Look at the HTML for your image — it probably looks something like:

src is where your image lives online; where you uploaded it. This is where the feed reader or email delivery of your post finds the image to display. alt or title tags display the alternate name you gave the post (which you may have been prompted to enter when you inserted the image into your post).

Add style instructions to the img tag
style=”…”

You can borrow these style instructions from your blog theme or template, found in the style.css file, so that it most closely matches the appearance on your actual web site.

If you want your image to align beside the paragraph text, you want it to float either to the left of right.

NOTE: In the following code examples, the lines are “wrapping” because they are longer than the width of this content area — there would be no line break in the URL of the src — the actual code is all one line, ok?

Floating an image to the left of the paragraph text

Floating an image to the right of the paragraph text

Note the little bit of margin added
In addition to the direction your want to float the image, add instructions for a margin of white space to appear between the edge of the image and the text — otherwise, the edge of the paragraph appears too close to the edge of the image. If you float or align the image to the left of the paragraph, then you need a bit of space — a margin — to the right of the image; if you float or align the image to the right of the paragraph, you want a margin on the left side of the image.

Make sure that there is no space between the closing bracket of the image HTML tag and the first letter of the paragraph text!

Save your edit.

Now, the style instructions for how the image and text display are embedded in the HTML, wherever it travels and appears.

This works perfectly in RSS feed readers and RSS-to-email delivery such as Feedburner Email, where you don’t have control of the email template code. It does NOT work in situations where the RSS of your post is picked up and displayed on another web site, such as Facebook RSS Note applications. Another web site may have stylesheets that override your instructions.

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Selling Your Services on A Budget

Slade Roberson — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:40:45 +0000

Question from a reader about selling professional services on a budget:

I am trying to set up a system for my business where I ask clients to send me certain information as soon as they’ve booked a consultation. I also want to be able to promote multiple consultation options, such as different durations of time, or email versus phone consultations. I noticed that you sent out an automated PDF to me as soon as I booked my session with you explaining what information to submit to you for my reading.

I wanted to ask you how you accomplish this — is it a feature of your shopping cart or did you set that up with PayPal somehow?

I’m hoping it’s possible to do it without a high-priced shopping cart system. I did a free trial of 1shoppingcart for a while but it was so complicated and expensive!

Yes, there’s a very affordable alternative to expensive shopping cart systems
If you look in the footer of my blogs you’ll see my affiliate button/ link for

E-junkie Shopping Cart for selling digital downloads and tangible goods

But professional services such as phone consultations, readings, and coaching sessions are not downloadable digital products – such as ebooks and mp3s — nor tangible goods, so…

I simply adapt this system to “sell” the instructions for my readings, consultations. I also “sell” the details for teleseminars, teleconferences, and live workshops. E-junkie allows you to upload and deliver a digital file for each item that you sell, so I package instructions and details for the intangible professional services in a PDF document.

This greatly reduces the amount of correspondence that normally occurs in setting up a session with a client — I communicate all the repetitive, basic information that I tell everyone in the PDF. (A PDF is of course the most universal document file type that everyone can read across multiple computer operating systems.)

If your business is new and you’re trying to keep your online operating costs low, E-junkie is an amazingly affordable alternative to expensive shopping carts.

E-junkie integrates with your existing free PayPal account
it’s very user-friendly
the architecture and code is much more current than the older shopping cart systems
and a basic account (which I used for years) is only $5.00 USD per month!

(Since I started selling larger files, such as lecture mp3s, I’ve had to bump up the storage with a slightly more expensive monthly subscription — but, for a variety of readings/consultations, the basic package is all you need.)

E-junkie allows you to upload a file to sell, so what I do is create a PDF of my reading instructions and “sell” that document as the “product.” When someone purchases a reading, the money goes into my PayPal account and the client receives an email with a download link for the PDF that contains all the details for booking her reading — an email address to contact me at, the subject line I prefer, all the personal information I require from the client before I can do the reading, general scheduling guidelines, my private phone number, expected turn-around times, and suggestions for presenting her background information and/or questions, etc.

I must tell you, after years operating an online business and using a variety of frustrating, clunky, and expensive payment processors — and more years searching the Google haystack for something different, I jumped for joy when I finally discovered E-junkie.

I recommend E-junkie with the highest integrity; I do not promote a product or service that I don’t have a personal connection to. This link is an affiliate link, so I do indeed get a small kick-back when you use it. E-junkie’s affiliate program is one of the most successful I’ve ever participated in. Most months, a handful of affiliate commissions easily covers the cost of the service, making it better than free — it’s a small but consistent passive income stream.

Depending on what you charge for readings or consultations, just ONE client can pay for the E-junkie service for months.

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Do Not Follow

Slade Roberson — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:08:49 +0000

A year and a half ago I entreated everyone to jump on a Pollyanna Blogosphere movement to install plugins that reverse the out-of-the-box rel=no follow function in your external comment links.

I must advise you to deactivate and/or remove this plugin immediately. I don’t want to give away any of Michael Martine’s WordPress SEO Secrets, but let’s just say he managed, in about two sentences, to change my mind about this once and for all.

This was the first piece of optimization advice I enacted (that I wasn’t already employing) after studying his search engine optimization tutorial. Within two weeks of this one change, all by itself, I gained an entire point in pagerank.

Like World Peace, the Golden Rule, the Wiccan Rede, Compassion for Your Fellow Man, etc… in theory it’s a great concept — if everyone actually participated in it. Which, like so many things morally and ethically superior, the vast majority of people do not willing participate, thereby reducing the effects of the well-intentioned individual to a crumb of sand against the ocean.

While a little smidgeon of reward in linkage goes from my blog to each commentator, there are so many hundreds (thousands) of other comments you’re leaving elsewhere where the links are not being followed. The cumulative positive effect on the blogs of my commentators is barely noticeable, while the cumulative impact on MY blog is hundreds of external links to blogs with lower pagerank than my own… a net negative, in a major way.

I realize that I can’t single-handedly raise up anyone else’s pagerank in the search engines by following their links, yet I can drag my own pagerank down very quickly with the same noble function.

Do not follow my original advice. Do not follow external links in your blog comments. I recommend you go check your pagerank right now, then immediately deactivate the Do Follow plug-in. I humbly apologize to anyone I may have swayed in this regard.

We’ll find some other ways to save the world, ‘k?

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Blogging for Practitioners

Slade Roberson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:12:39 +0000

I’m breaking one of my own rules of “evergreen” posts — which is to begin by referring to my absence. “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while” is such a waste of type in most cases, as many of the people reading it come along well after the break and miss the time context entirely. For the majority of readers, this post is one click away from the last one…

But in this case, the extreme hiatus of exactly one entire year deserves a bit of explaining. As you may recall, I experienced something of an identity crisis and felt I was smothering under the commitment to continue being a blog marketing coach. One of the things I like to practice in my life is taking an axe to things that are causing me discomfort, wherever possible. I like to go through the motions and observe the emotions of what it feels like to release something that’s not working. It’s a great way for me to get clear about where my priorities lie.

In the case of relationships (and of course I cheekily treated my blogging break here as a break up with my readers), I observe the distance of exactly one calendar year. I approached the hiatus as a potentially permanent termination (even though I wasn’t sure whether or not that would be my ultimate decision). It wasn’t — I’m back. I never really went anywhere… I’ve been consulting with you individually all these months.

My Business and Blogging Goals from One Year Ago:

1 — Reach the 10,000+ subscriber goal post I’ve mentioned establishing with my agent when I launched Shift Your Spirits.

I reached 10 K in readership Fall, 2008.

2 — Achieve and sustain a 5 K per month minimum income. I’m a single guy with no dependents to support and 5K represents a very comfortable monthly income for me — AND that amount well exceeds any full time salary I’d ever been paid working for someone else (about double). So, no fear-based or logical argument about the relative safety of having a job-job versus the challenges of being self-employed can realistically creep in, at this point in the game, to undermine my perseverance. I had hovered in the 3 - 4 K per month bracket for a long time. I questioned whether or not I should be advising people about making a decent living online if I could not present myself as an example.

Right around the time the economy supposedly began to hit rock bottom, I hit my financial growth goals traveling in the other direction. I have maintained the 5 K minimum for four months now, from November 2008 to present. Which affirms for me the feeling that while outdated business models may be crumbling, this newer, lighter, more global and democratic model indicates an entrepreneurial vision of the future.

3 — Teach workshops on intuition and develop a home-study version of the courses. I taught a few live workshops on divine dialoguing and automatic writing, and then took the material into the teleconferencing realm, with great success.

By the end of the year I eventually produced Automatic Intuitive Response — a home-study, digital product version of the courses to create a passive income stream.

4 — Train other practitioners in my field to do the intuitive readings that I do. This is a big project. I’ve been working on a professional intuitive certification program of my own for many months.

I now have three students I am mentoring locally as a way of beta testing my course materials.

5 — Develop my sales funnel with a greater variety of price points. Obviously, the digital version of the workshop provided a more affordable price point for those who may not want to invest in private readings. The professional intuitive training will cap the high-end of my products and services.

6 — Establish an affiliate program to grow my business while helping others grow theirs. Done. With more to come…

7 — Study with an expert in my field and seek additional certifications for my work. It’s not like professional intuitives can just take a class at a community college, even if we want to. I have enough academic degrees for now — I wanted something with a shorter time commitment and a focused, practical result. I also wanted to observe a master in my niche from a practical perspective. I chose Doreen Virtue’s Angel Therapy Practitioners ® program as it most closely overlapped in many ways with what I’ve already been doing.

8 — Find a community of colleagues and peers with which to network. I met some amazing people, found a soul mate, and joined an enormous global group of like-minded peers.

9 — Travel as part of my career. For years now I’ve had the flexibility and mobility of a business that can go anywhere I can take a laptop, but I didn’t have the additional income to make that happen. My trips to Hawaii and Phoenix/Sedona were a nice manifestation of this dream scenario.

10 — Write more of what I want to be writing. For my creative well-being, I desperately needed to prioritize my non-blogging writing to make time to work on fiction and memoirs. I quickly carved out a space in my writing schedule by ditching this blog (for awhile) and reallocating the time to other projects.

Basically, none of these goals was centered on blogging about blogging. At the time I went on hiatus from this blog, only twenty percent of my total income came from marketing consultations and tutorials. (I figured by allowing this blog to drift on its own, I would likely kill off any remaining involvement on this end of things…)

But many unforeseen developments brought me back here:

Although my overall income did continue to grow by focusing on Shift Your Spirits, my percentage of income from marketing consultations and tutorials remained consistent. I’ve continued to receive requests for blog coaching from this site even without any active promotion or marketing efforts.
The enormous Angel Therapy Practitioners community has generated a whole new crop of students interested in marketing their practices/businesses on the web the way I do. I’ve discovered that there are more people than I ever realized who have a healing arts practice, and perhaps some minimal web site presence, yet no active blog marketing strategy.
I’ve already foreseen that the students I’m teaching to do professional readings will require my business model and marketing strategy as well. 99% of my clients come from blogging — how else could I advise another coach or medium to generate a clientele?
A number of clients were booking Spirit Guide Readings to ask me for blogging advice — even those who were not interested in the “woo woo” personal/spiritual consultation! I created special coaching options for these business clients here, and they found them through links on my Shift Your Spirits About page or inquired by email.
You know what I discovered while not “officially” writing about marketing? I LOVE to talk about marketing! I crave this topic of conversation. I enjoy teaching the practical aspects of blog development as much as I do intuitive development. I have boundless blab for this topic, and it provides a healthy balance for me.
I feel guilty about the fact that I am constantly learning and changing and evolving my business, yet I haven’t talked about it here at all. In some cases, I have done a complete 180 on some of my recommendations and it makes me queasy to think that I have not corrected or appended [the now possibly "bad" advice] I’ve put out there… I have a few additional posts I plan to put up ASAP — like, this week — to rectify the situation.

I never went anywhere. I never really stopped talking and teaching about the blogging. Now one thing is for certain — I have no desire to be a general problogging guru. The subject is “kinda well-covered,” if you overlook the fact that most of the business blogging advice is clearly for other industries. I learn a lot from those guys, but only when I adapt it to my business specifically. And most of the spiritual practitioners who are coming to me for blogging advice are misguided about what works for our field.

So, long story short (and this is definitely on the longer side of what I plan to post here) — for those who are personal development coaches, paraprofessionals, and healing arts practitioners — with goals that resemble my own — I still have a lot left to say. I still want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow, simply by sharing my personal journey behind the screens.

No Big Pretentious Brand or Trademark to smother under anymore — just a place to leave notes about this part of my life and the business I’m building — the part that is simply Slade, blogging…

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Smothering My Authentic Voice

Slade Roberson — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:48:01 +0000

This is a bit of a rant. A long confession. A truly personal slice of deep dish me.

Can we talk about our relationship for a minute? It’s not you; it’s me. I’m absolutely smothering under a role here — and fronting is so not my style.

Maintaining multiple professional brands is draining me. The transition has been unfolding over the past two years, and I’ve reached another “molting” stage. I’m running out of room in this current shell.

A brief history of where I’m coming from:
From 2003 to 2006, I maintained a general web design, publishing, and consulting brand called PageCoach. I did everything that I do now — for everybody else — coding, copywriting, coaching. I specialized in transitioning Email Newsletter Publishers to MovableType powered blogs.

In 2006, I defected to WordPress with, what I thought at the time, was a purely personal project — Shift Your Spirits. It was life-changing — the degree of success that came from putting my skills, my work, and my energy into something I was truly passionate aboutâ€¦ There was no comparison. You hear it all the time “blog about something you LOVEâ€¦”

PageCoach was a virtual glass office building, and Shift Your Spirits began as a little shed out back. In nine months, that shed grew to be a cathedral and absolutely dwarfed my day job. My blog development clients began to stream in from my church crowd — so many of you were spiritual entrepreneurs and bloggers too — even my marketing clients shifted to reflect my spiritual venture, my personal and professional evolution.

So, about a year ago, I packed up my web design business and moved it into a little office in the basement of my virtual church. I proudly and painfully ditched my years of pagerank in favor of a more authentic domain — SladeRoberson.com. (The one thing I plan on doing as long as I’m on this earth is being Slade Roberson.) I took all my general business problogging advice, packaged it in tutorial format, and put it on a shelf, where I could still pull it down and offer it to anyone who asked.

Remember the cool professor you had in college who you could go out for a beer with after the lecture? That’s what I hoped to create a space for. My intentions with sladeroberson.com/blogging was to provide a place for me to blog about the blogging, write about the writing, and commune with a select few of my Shift Your Spirits audience who wanted to meet me after class.

The reason why I’m smothering is that I go to the podium in my cathedral on Sundays to preach about spirit — it’s the greatest job I’ve ever had in my life. The problem is, I’m not meeting my peer bloggers in my office for private fire-side chats and behind-the-screens dish — I’m still just trading hats and podiums and lecture halls.

I wear my minister’s collar and my big grand papal robes, but instead of loosening them and letting down my hair, I’m hurrying, sometimes breathlessly, to change into my Creative Blogging Teacher’s corduroy jacket and meet some of you in another huge room.

It’s another podium. It’s another uniform. I’m working two “jobs” and it’s not working for me anymore. The bulk of my income now comes from working full-time as a professional intuitive — and I love it. Marketing consultant is no longer my safety net/paycheck — it’s a second job that doesn’t even pay as well. It’s burdening me.

Here’s what I need to happen:
Several years ago, I began working with a literary agent/editor who was the first person to show me that my authentic voice is in my correspondence. When he was working on the author bio/background information that he presented to publishers as part of my press kit, he said to me “The back story on how you wrote this series of novels is better than the novels.” Ouch.

But, God, was he right! It’s no wonder that my entire career now revolves around one-on-one readings and phone consultations.

Recent private conversations with my blogging peers that I thought would be the source for blog posts here haven’t materialized. Here are some examples of questions just in the last week that produced intensely rich dialogs that are still absent from this blog:

How do I deal with blogging about issues that family and friends might find uncomfortable? What do you do about your parents reading your blog?
How do you move past the fear of asking for what you deserve in terms of fees for professional services? (I was the student on this oneâ€¦ I don’t want to be the teacher here all the time.)
Why your inexpensive passive digital products are not likely to bring you a full-time income.
If you’re truly called to do the kind of work I do, you can learn how to be a professional intuitive.
Do I have spirit guides who specifically help me write? (No, actually I have spirit guide editorsâ€¦ What a fun question!)

Why aren’t these my blogging about bogging posts? Because instead of letting this be the place you meet me outside of Shift Your Spirits to talk shop, dish dirt, and simply hear what works for me and what doesn’t, I’m still trying to be too many things to too many people.

I love to share my “professional tricks of the trade” — but my intentions are not to have a web design business anymore. I’m not becoming a blogging consultant — I’ve been a blogging consultant. I’m a minister, an intuitive consultant, a spiritual coach and a writer.

Why do you read this blog?

You’re simply a fan of Shift Your Spirits and you want more of me — thank you from the bottom of my heart!
You read Shift Your Spirits and you say “Wow — I want to do what he’s doing!”
You say “I’m a personal development blogger and I’d love to pick Slade’s brainâ€¦”

You see yourself in me, and I see myself in you. It’s as simple as that. But in this current format, it’s not happening for me.

I don’t care about offering you “20 Hot Tips to Get Your Blog Posts Dugg to High Heaven.”
You have a million places you can go to read that [repetitive crap]. The real me would much rather say “Dude, all that time you’re wasting with your head up the ass of some social media scheme is NOT creating content. It’s not making you a better writer. It’s not doing nearly as much for your business as you hope it will. Is your life purpose defined by having the most friends on Facebook? Is your personal mission about becoming you, or are you becoming Steve Pavlina? (Steve’s got it covered…)”

See, I need to be a little crass sometimes.
I wear the serious/caring/positive/good-vibes hat on Shift Your Spirits. That voice is real, it is authentic — but I’ve got a few more facets of my persona that are breathing through a pillow. I need to turn off the microphone, step away from the podium, and be your friend who is a full-time, successful, spiritual entrepreneur who can tell it to you like it is.

Not like it is for everyone — anyone — like it is for me.

I want to leave a record, a trail, a map of how I got where I’m going. For those who want to go somewhere similar. Because that’s the only place I can take you to with any kind of authenticity or confidence.

So what happens now?
Well, for starters, my general problogging tutorials may be going away. Let’s say they are Limited Edition, so grab a copy now. I’m going to repackage my recipe with every single tip, trick, and tool that I know — for someone whose goals are identical to mine. I’m going to blueprint my entire business for coaches and intuitive professionals who want to build an entirely blog-based marketing machine to support service-based business models. But all that belongs in a product — this is my blog about blogging. I’m not running anymore freaking infomercials in my private kick back space.

Remember your forts and tree houses? I need a club house. I think I’m going to stick my virtual club house right here. You are invited. It’s going to be an infomercial free zone.

I despise generated adspace and high-traffic blogging schemes. From my perspective, which is all that I can really share — THAT blogging concept is an up-hill battle; it most likely will NOT provide you the income to quit your day job; it is NOT the way to create value for your readers. (If you want the real truth, if I have to navigate a big Google Adblock pylon to get from your Post Title through that first poor little squeezed-to-death paragraph — your content is unlikely to engage me. I’m a reader too, you know and I represent a lot of your potential visitors.)

Look, I guess, the bottom line here for me is that I’m not ever going to be a guest on Oprah because I teach people how to blog better. That’s not even remotely a goal of mine. Now, I’d love to show up on Miss Winfrey’s coach for any number of other reasons — most of them already in evidence, over here.

So, I’m breaking up with you?! Not at all. I actually intend to open up and show you even more of me. I don’t have the energy anymore to be anything more or less.

Posting this feels even better than the merciless feed reader purging party I threw for myself on Wednesday…

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Breaking Through Writer’s Block

Slade Roberson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:56:40 +0000

Before prescribing solutions for working through writer’s block, I wanted to simply put the idea out there that maybe it’s OK to be blocked.

When you’re ready to move forward and work through, Guest Author Jeff Lilly of Druid Journal continues the conversation, from a different perspective, with the following post.

“99% Inspiration, 1% Perspiration: Breaking Through Writer’s Block”

by Jeff Lilly

Oh my gosh, what should I write about??

Almost everyone experiences writer’s block at one time or another, and for some people it’s downright chronic. In my experience, it comes in two forms.

First — the usual kind — you don’t know what to write about. For some people, figuring out a topic for a weekly column or a term paper or dissertation is a huge problem. There’s something related, and almost as bad, that happens to me quite frequently: I get halfway through an article and I am brought up short because I have no idea what to say next. Maybe I’ve laid out some kind of problem or situation, and when I started I thought I knew how to end it, but in the course of writing it, it got off track, and the original plan just won’t work anymore. Or maybe I had a plan, and it should still work, but it doesn’t inspire me anymore, — I can’t think of anything interesting to say about it.

The second kind of writer’s block is also common, but a lot of people have it without realizing it. It’s what happens when your words won’t flow, and you have to work and scratch and scrape and sweat blood over every phrase. You have a topic, it’s an interesting topic, you have interesting things to say about it, but the words just won’t come; it’s like you’re trying to write in a foreign language. The sad thing is that some people write like this almost all the time, thinking that it’s normal; they really think the writing is supposed to be 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Well, it doesn’t have to be. If you learn how, you can make it so that every time you sit down to write, you can start with a fully formed, crisp, clear topic; you can start at the beginning and work your way through the end with a smooth, flowing stream of inspiration to guide you the whole way; and the words will come so easily, so effortlessly, it’s like taking dictation.

What’s the secret?

Automatic Writing

Automatic writing occurs when you act as an open channel for spiritual influences, allowing them to dictate what you are writing. People usually use it as a way of accessing their subconscious, communicating with spirit guides, and the like. What people don’t realize is that you can open a channel to access inspiration for other things as well — fiction and nonfiction, self-help and poetry, book reports and travel writing. Anything you can write, you can write “automatically”, and thereby infuse your writing with inspiration — inspiration in its original sense, injected with Spirit.

Of course, inspiration isn’t free. It comes at a price. It takes effort, it takes practice, and it takes a commitment to writing certain kinds of pieces — honest pieces, powerful pieces, transformative pieces. You can’t call on Spirit to help you write a better grocery list (unless you want your grocery list to be in haiku, or be the blueprint of a radical new life changing diet). What you write has to matter.

If you’re ready for the challenge, here’s what you do.

Step-by-Step Inspiration

1. Set a goal. As with any other kind of intention manifestation, get a picture in your mind, or feeling in your heart, of what you want to achieve with your piece. Or, if you don’t even have a topic, visualize and energize your overall goal for writing in general. Imagine how you’ll feel afterwards — the gratitude and elation of having written a truly inspired work of art. If you have time, cultivate this intention for a week or two, until it’s ripe enough that you’re desperate to start writing.

2. Relax. As you sit down to write, get comfortable, take some deep breaths, and unhinge your mind from attachments, outcomes, and distractions. If you meditate, you know how to do this: you are going into a semi-meditative state. Empty yourself, open yourself up, surrender yourself. If you’re not a habitual meditator, this may take some practice; but anyone can do it. You can also download my free guided meditation and listen to the first ten minutes, in which I guide you through some simple visualizations and relaxation techniques.

3. Gently rest your mind on your topic. Let the words come to you. Usually, I imagine that I can hear the words being spoken, or that I’m seeing them on the page. Sometimes I imagine that I’ve finished the work already, and I’m very pleased with it, and I’m about to read it again to check it for errors. I look forward to reading the words again, to seeing them flow like liquid gold across the page. Then I listen…

4. Get out of the way, and write. The words you see might not be anything like what you expected. Let them be what they’ll be! If you end up writing about something that you didn’t intend at all, that’s okay — you’re probably writing something that’s much more important. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of the way; sometimes your anxiety or preoccupation makes it so that you can barely hear the words. Take it in phrase by phrase, word by word, or syllable by syllable if you have to. I’ve had times where I was so stressed out I could only “hear” a few random syllables of what was going to come next, syllables that made no sense; but when I started trying to figure out what the syllables could mean, I got wrapped up in what I was doing, my anxiety was forgotten, and everything resolved into crystalline prose.

Example 1: Finding a Topic

A couple of months ago I was in the middle of writing a piece on intuition vs. logic when I completely ran out of gas. My goal in the article was to show how peoples’ intuition had been systematically undermined by an over-reliance on science and logic, and people needed to re-connect. The first half of the article was spent building up the point of view of the scientist, showing how intuition was flawed and unreliable. The second half would tear apart that point of view, and show how intuition was reliable after all.

Well, that was the original plan, anyway. But when I got to that part of the article, I realized I hadn’t actually prepared properly; I didn’t know what to say! I had just written:

So what should you believe in? Well, nothing, obviously. Agnosticism â€” in the broad sense of acknowledging ignorance of EVERYTHING â€” is the only rational choice.

This was the pivot point of the article. But what could I say? I had no idea. I began to panic… After all, if I couldn’t think of what to say next, maybe the whole point of the article was backwards — maybe intuition was flawed, and only logical agnosticism and skepticism could be a reliable guide…

Then I calmed down, relaxed, set out my intentions, and tuned in. It was hard, because of my emotional panic, but I managed to tune in well enough to hear a couple of syllables. Para. Para. What was that? Paralyze.

What was that? Paralyze. Paranoid. Yes. My own fear was paralyzing me. I was paranoid that I wouldn’t finish the article. I wrote those words, and then I made the connection:

But agnosticism is paralyzing. It’s paralyzing and paranoid. If you know nothing, there are no good choices; all choices are ill-advised; so you are paralyzed into non-action. And doubt leads to fear; because if you don’t know what’s around the next corner, or under the bed, or at the bottom of the dark staircaseâ€¦ you imagine something horrible there.

If you allow doubt to sit by the throne of your soul, then you are reduced to a shadow of what you should be.

The rest of the article flowed out in a torrent, and I got some great responses to it. You can read the whole thing here.

Example 2: Finding a Voice

Earlier this year I was working on a large project, a sort of “Oz Encyclopedia”, in which I’d create encyclopedia entries for the Oz universe, recreating it and adding my own twist, in much the same spirit as the Dune Encyclopedia. (I haven’t worked on it for months, but I intend to go back to it one day…) I was sweating bullets trying to write the entry for the Good Witch of the North, Gayalette. Here’s an excerpt from what I had:

The Ruby Palace stands on the southern slopes of Mt. Edgewater, poised between the high white snows and the rushing Munchkin River below. At dawn, standing on one of the Ruby Palace’s many wide balconies, the sun seems to rise from the riverbed.

The river is wide and fast, though it is only a few miles from its source: the eternal snows of Mt. Edgewater. Hikers to the peak can stand on the precipice of Oz, and feel the deadly hot winds blowing up from the Impassable Waste below. These winds continue throughout the day, melting the snows and birthing the Munchkin River. At night, cool wet winds come up from the Gillikin Country to the south, covering the peak in a new layer of snow.

The Ruby Palace is the home of Gayalette, a powerful sorceress and ruler of the lands roundabout. Whether she is, in fact, the Good Witch of the North is a matter of considerable dispute.

And so forth. I thought this was ok — but totally blah. I felt uninspired when I was writing it, and that came through in the prose.

When I calmed down, relaxed, and plugged in to inspiration, here’s what came out:

The Ruby Palace of Queen Gayelette is a glittering crystal tower, standing tall in the cleft at the top of Mount Qaia, a jeweled dagger stabbed into the top of the mountain. By the light of dawn it looks like a shaft of faceted rose-colored sky.

The guest rooms of the Ruby Palace are perched near the top of the tower, directly underneath the royal audience chamber at its very tip. At sunrise, a guest can steal up into the audience chamber and marvel at the view in all directions. To the west, where a few stars still linger, the forest of the Winged Monkeys spreads out like a rumpled blanket from the feet of the mountain to the edge of vision. To the south, the scattered farms and cots of Gayelette’s subjects dot the purple Gillikin countryside. To the east, the newborn Munchkin River drops in a waterfall and pools at the foot of the mountain, thence winding eastward like a silver snake in the dawn’s light. To the north, the craggy, rifted expanse of the mighty Impassable Waste seems to return the gaze with casual menace.

It’s like a different writer entirely tackled the subject. (Maybe it was!) And believe you me, it was a thousand times easier to write, and infinitely more satisfying.

And this is what writing should be: thrilling, exhilarating, joyful exploration. Don’t believe them when they say writing is hard work! If you’re working hard, you’re trying too hard.

Just relax… And listen.

About Druid Journal
“For the spiritual searcher who feels called or connected to Nature and the Ancient World, my articles and recordings provide spiritual guidance, inspiration, and beauty, by fostering communication, openness, groundedness, and a sense of childlike awe.”
– Jeff Lilly | DruidJournal

Have an idea for a Guest Post?
If your blog’s mission or content focus is spiritual development, you may not have the opportunity to share your expertise as a copywriter and marketer. The reason I maintain Problogging for Practitioners is to share the behind-the-screens tools, techniques, and strategies that work for me — as the publisher of Shift Your Spirits — with my peers in this niche of the blogosphere.

General problogging blogs — blogs about blogging about blogging — are everywhere. Problogging for Practitioners is business blogging specifically for writers and publishers within the Personal & Spiritual Development niche. If you have an idea for a guest post that speaks to this group, please contact me with your pitch.

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Blessing Your Blogger’s Block

Slade Roberson — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:15:34 +0000

Last week, I received this email from a blogger suffering from writer’s block:

I seem to have lost my ability to blog. I feel completely uninspired and everything I write seems wooden and disconnected. I am not sure how to get out of this blockâ€¦ Any suggestions?

First Suggestion — Stop Trying!
Trying is not doing. Trying is its own form of self-fulfilling failure.

I could start throwing tons of How to Get Ideas or How to Write an Article tips your way — but a course of treatment can be ineffectual or even damaging without an accurate diagnosis.

The Curse of Writer’s Block
Many times, the features separating a curse from a blessing are matters of context and perspective. By now, you’ve probably read so many basic laws of attraction and manifesting techniques that you’re drowning in thoughts of what you should be doing.

You know that you attract more of whatever you place on the throne of your attention.
You know that gratitude for what you already have is the primary force that governs your having more.

Shift your perspective
Your writer’s block is a present condition — the complaint is not that you don’t know how to write, have no talent for writing, or have yet to launch your blog. There’s no reason to presume that this block is permanent — that would actually be a highly illogical conclusion. You can write, you’ve been writing, you will write again.

Cast aside this absolute perspective and be with what is — work the situation you are given. That’s what you have to work with.

Maybe your best course of action in this moment is to do nothing. Stop trying, stop pushing the river, and practice the Art of Surrender.

How can you become grateful for something you perceive as undesirable? How do you shift your spirits into the creative mode of transforming a block into a blessing?

How might the block be a blessing? Why would not writing be the best possible course of action for you at this time?

You’re driving along a road you normally take every day. Little do you know, a bridge washed out in a rainstorm the night before. You come upon a flashing orange barricade, a detour sign, and a workman waving at you to stop and turn around.

This block is not there just to thwart you and piss you off — it’s there to protect you from danger. The block is a blessing. Even if you don’t know until later that the bridge was out, you trust that there’s a very good reason for the detour.

Your fuel gauge warning light is on, it doesn’t necessarily mean your car is totaled or you weren’t mean to drive. You’ve been blessed with the knowledge that you need to go get more gas before you’re on empty.
Your creative bonfire has burned down to ashes. You’ve still got plenty of matches, but your wood bin is empty. The obvious course of action is to leave the fire pit and go gather more wood.
Your well is dry. Your bucket is empty. Taking a shower is out of the questionâ€¦ Go find a water source.
Your Muse, usually so dependable and chatty, is suddenly absent. She’s not answering her phone. This doesn’t mean she’s quit and will never return — maybe she’s just taking the day off — jeez, give her a break!

Keeping these metaphors in mind, assume your blogger’s block is a pretty good indication that you simply should not be writing right now:

Who might need your attention?
What activities are you neglecting?
What responsibilities have you pushed aside too often for the sake of writing?

Maintaining creativity requires a balance between Receptive energies (source material, inspiration, idea gathering) and Projective energies (making, building, sharing). You must do some of both. When you find you can’t do one, do the other.

What do you do?
Excluding tips for creating, writing, blogging — what are your suggestions for NOT writing? How do you fill your well, find inspiration? What do you do when your Muse is taking a much needed vacation? Please share your advice in the comments.

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More Strategies for Stumblers

Slade Roberson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:04:15 +0000

Spiritual blogger, veteran Stumbler, and guest author Reddy Kilowatt continues our group discussion about using StumbleUpon in a coalition of like-minded web publishers.

I found Sladeâ€™s last article, Stumbling Again â€” Traffic Experiment, extremely informative and illuminating, and it was the catalyst for the subsequent productive discussion, note sharing, and experimenting in the comments. This was a stimulus for quite a bit of discovery, which I shared in a rather lengthy summary in the comments. Slade kindly offered to turn my rambles into a guest post, so here it is:

I am discovering that a lot of the advice given by Bart the Bear of Moxie-Drive.com in a series of blog posts about the use of StumbleUpon for bloggers is sage counsel, and I want to summarize a few points which I have found important.

First Principals
First, content is king. You know this already. If you get 1000 stumbles, and no one is interested in your content, they will hit the stumble button without so much as a thumbs down. And if you cannot pique their interest immediately, even if you do have good content, they will stumble to the next site before the page finishes loading. Which brings me to the next two points.

First Impressions — Titles & Graphics
You must have an intriguing title, one that promises a benefit, arouses the curiosity, or otherwise immediately grabs the viewers attention. Then an attractive, attention-getting graphic can be of immense help. First impressions are critical.

The Initial StumbleUpon Discovery & Review
Once you have good content, a catchy title, and a stunning graphic, the next factor is the initial StumbleUpon review. There are two factors in this:

First, who reviews the article and gets it into the SU database. If someone has a higher SU profile, with lots of stumbles, friends, good reviews, etc, it will help if such a person is the initial reviewer.
Second, the keywords that person uses are critical to the ultimate success. For instance, a self-help blogger such as Slade would want his posts categorized as self-improvement, self-help, spirituality, blogging, etc. If the keywords are minimal or off-topic, it can be problematic.

Bart the Bear mentioned that if a number of stumblers review the article, rather than just give it a thumbs-up, it can help tremendously. And if they all use well-targeted keywords, all the better.

A Concrete Example
To give an example of all this, let me tell you of a recent post on our blog. It was an excellent article by Swami Nirmalananda, How to Misuse Your Power of Thought which was of a nature that it was of interest to a wide range of people.

We added an intriguing title, and a striking graphic.

Andrea of Empowered Soul, who subscribes to our feed, took an interest in the article and was kind enough to give the article a review. Since she has a good SU profile (she has 50 friends and has received 12 reviews), the stumbles started hard and heavy.

People liked the article and began giving it thumbs-ups. (It stands at 50 so far.) Although there are only 3 reviews at present, the quantity of positive impressions kept the stumbles coming.

The article broke onto the SU main page, and from there onto sites that do aggregations of social media sites. In the next 20 hours we have had 2725 visits to the site. (We normally have about 100 visitors a day, not including feed subscribers, when StumbleUpon is not bestowing its grace.)

Expectations
Should we expect such results whenever we post a great article? I have my doubts. I think part of it was the moon phase, the planetary positions, and the kindly look of the StumbleUpon genie. I frankly had no expectation of results for this particular article. I had not even done any solicitation of SU friends to have them take a look at the article.

I was focusing my attention on the next article, 19 Exceptional Web Resources for Spiritually Minded People, which I had anticipated would be a more popular article. It was a list article, and it had excellent resources, which are characteristics which are supposed to draw a lot of traffic and get quality links. (Is this a subtle hint to spirituality and self-development bloggers? ;-)) However, the newer article has yet to get the SU traffic I anticipated. Perhaps it followed too closely (two days) upon the more successful article. And perhaps it will yet take off. Iâ€™ve seen traffic from StumbleUpon come in unpredictable waves for the same article.

A few last observations culled from the comments:
Results from StumbleUpon seem to be accumulative. Your first efforts will yield small to moderate results, but this will increase somewhat with every new article reviewed, especially if Stumblers register their approval with thumbs-up or reviews. Our articles began with about 100 Stumbles per submission, now they average about 500â€“600. This can vary, though. Some get less, and some, like the Power of Thought article, have topped 1000.

Too frequent stumbling of your own articles can get you in the dog house with the SU genie. I am currently unable to do an initial review for an article from my own blog. If someone else does the initial review, then I can add one. How long does this last, and how many reviews of other sites need to be done between your own? That is yet to be ascertained. But I suspect this applies to too frequent initial reviewing of any site.

Summation
The moral of the story: as a means of drawing traffic to your site, StumbleUpon can be a tremendous tool if done with skill, and with a prayer to the SU genie.

About the Author
Reddy Kilowatt is the pseudonym for the monk who maintains the Atma Jyoti Blog — A Meditation and Practical Spiritual Life Resource (Atma Jyoti means Light of the Spirit in Sanskrit.)

Have an idea for a Guest Post?
If your blog’s mission or content focus is spiritual development, you may not have the opportunity to share your expertise as a copywriter and marketer. The reason I maintain Slade on Blogging is to share the behind-the-screens tools, techniques, and strategies that work for me — as the publisher of Shift Your Spirits — with my peers in this niche of the blogosphere.

General problogging blogs — blogs about blogging about blogging — are everywhere. Slade on Blogging is blogging specifically for writers and publishers within the Personal & Spiritual Development niche. If you have an idea for a guest post that speaks to this group, please contact me with your pitch.

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