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 about… There was no comparison. You hear it all the time “blog about something you LOVE…”

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 one… 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 editors… 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 brain…”

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 are 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…

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2008. | Permalink | 35 comments

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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 — in the broad sense of acknowledging ignorance of EVERYTHING — 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 staircase… 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 Spiritual 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. Spiritual Blogging is problogging 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.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments

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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 block… 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 question… 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.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments

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I found Slade’s last article, Stumbling Again — 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. I’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 500–600. 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 Spiritual 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. Spiritual Blogging is problogging 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.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2008. | Permalink | 10 comments

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I focus my blog marketing attention on building subscribers – the essential capturing and retention of traffic. My major criticism of traffic from sites like StumbleUpon is that, while the raw numbers (in terms of hits, visits, and pageviews) can be huge, the conversion rate is weak.

Back in November, 2007, Andrea Hessand I were talking shop and discovered that we disagreed — some of my most effective subscriber-building strategies, Andrea considers her weakest, and vice versa. Considering that Shift Your Spirits and Empowered Soul share a very similar niche, I’m a little bit stunned that we could have such different results.

Spiritual Blogging continues to evolve from my general, professional web development days of a few years ago into more of a place where I share my experience in the personal development blogosphere, specifically — the peers among my Shift Your Spirits readers who are also spiritually-motivated bloggers.

A lot of New Age & Personal Development bloggers I consider my peers and colleagues tell me they don’t read meta-bloggers — the bloggers who blog about blogging. Really? I assumed you were just as burned-out and saturated on those kinds of blogs as I am, that maybe I’m wasting my breath with this resource…

The lesson ultimately is that some strategies work for some bloggers; what works in one niche may not work in another. Different strategies may work for different bloggers in the same niche… So, as long as I continue to receive questions and requests for advice about blogging from you, I’ll continue posting my opinions here, and sharing what works and doesn’t work for me…

In the case of social bookmarking, a few years ago, blogging entirely about web design resources, del.icio.us brought me tons of traffic because del.icio.us users tended toward practical problogging interests. Blogging about spirituality and metaphysical subjects, I’ve never seen a single blip of traffic generated by del.icio.us or digg users.

I have seen a lot of traffic coming in from StumbleUpon.com, without actively courting it. I still had a Stumble account floating out there from 2005… Three years is a long time in the virtual world.

I’d love to be proven wrong. I value Andrea’s opinion, and I’m not so set in my ways that I wouldn’t give it another look (especially since I’ve publicly dismissed it).

Andrea invited me to participate in an active, traffic-building venture, so I dusted off my account and quizzed her to try to see if there was something I was missing. Andrea shared a few tips with me that make using StumbleUpon more active and engaging and highly-targeted:

• Reviews – share a blurb or brief comment about the pages you add to your account
• Fans & Friends — focus on the networking functions — make sure to explore the collections of those in your network — the more highly-targeted, like-minded connection doesn’t come from the stumbling “masses” — the most valuable traffic and potential subscribers are the other bloggers who share your niche.
• Stumble One Another — the personal one-on-one alliances with other peer bloggers can be actively used to promote and review one another’s posts

Update: Andrea offers some additional tips:
In the comments, Andrea added “These methods really upped the quality of traffic I was receiving from StumbleUpon”:

• 1. Reviewing other people’s stumbling blogs. Not their written blogs, but their collection of stumbles. It’s a great way to make friends.
• 2. Saying thank you through Stumble when someone reviews your stumble blog, or even just a blog post.
• 3. Visit the profiles of your friends’ friends. I always check out who’s been visiting me - they will come and visit your stumble profile to do the same. If they visit your blog, based on your stumbles, it’s excellent quality traffic!

The simple fact is Yes, StumbleUpon does increase my traffic. The jury is still out, for me, on whether or not this traffic is impacting my subscriber count (but my conversion tactics are weak on both my blogs right now, following a little re-design work).

The More, the Merrier — Wanna play?
Andrea and I share the opinion that if we are indeed benefiting from this experiment, then the more the merrier!

So I’m inviting you to join in and participate. I plan to continue watching the performance closely; having other blogging peers actively stumbling and reviewing one another’s posts should have a noticeable impact.

I easily discovered and added Andrea and Albert to my network of friends, but you may already be there, and I haven’t found you yet.

If you would like to join our StumbleUpon network, please leave your Profile/User Page address in the comments — or add us as directly through your Stumble Friend requests.

• Slade — http://slade.stumbleupon.com/
• Andrea — http://andihess.stumbleupon.com/
• Albert — http://urbanmonk.stumbleupon.com/

If I’m going to be wrong about my judgment of social bookmarking, and whether or not it’s worth the efforts, then I’d like to be really, really wrong.

Slade Roberson is a professional blogger | author of Shift Your Spirits and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Spiritual Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and professional blogging strategies with other writers in the Spirituality | Personal Development niche who want to broadcast their mission on a global scale.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2008. | Permalink | 114 comments

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Barbara wrote:

After reading about the exercises you employ, I decided to look at what I’ve written over the last year or two.

My writings didn’t have the planning or intention or organization. Yet, as I re-read things I wrote, there was a bit of wonder. As in, did I write that? Where did that come from? I was pleasantly surprised at an insight I had gained.

*Note that she used the word Wonder – delicious! That’s one of my favorite words in the English language.

Andrea Hess responded with:

Barbara’s comment totally sparked something for me - ALL of my “aha!” moments are written about in my blog. That’s where my articles come from - whatever I am working on in the moment, and all that I learn as I go is reflected there. So maybe I’ll just read the articles that I wrote last year for each month of this year …

All the comments are great — but these two in particular sent me on an internal journey beyond my original exercise — and this post represents what the spiritual blogging and writing voices within me have been contemplating…

Don’t forget the wisdom you share with others is still there for you, too.
You’re blogging about personal development or your spiritual journey — you’re processing personal lessons along your path and packaging them for other people. You’re dispensing some form of transcendent advice on a regular basis. My purpose, professionally and spiritually, is an on-going exercise in telling other people how I do what I do, walking with them along their own journeys, and adapting my life lessons in a practical way for others to use.

Sharing your wisdom works in the other direction, too. Like a massage therapist who experiences energy transference — receiving some of the same benefits of massage by giving a massage — I would’ve never anticipated how much personal, intuitive wisdom I discover by doing readings for other people.

Sometimes, what you most need to hear comes out of your own mouth. Sometimes, what I most need to tell myself is best said by telling it to another.

Look at all the wisdom you’ve been putting out via your blog posts:

Have you read your own words as a recipient instead of just the Author? It’s easy to concentrate solely on your professional Voices — listening to your channel for that Uber-blogging Voice that’s always writing, processing, planning posts.

You know the One — a few months into your regular blogging and you’ve got the Volume of that Voice dialed up so high that you sometimes wish he’d shut up and let you just put in a load of laundry without your having to listen to an impromptu Stain-fighting Infomercial!

He becomes a bit of a cocky, blustery gas-bag once he’s been called on — what your readers don’t know is that, while you may post once or twice a week, you actually hear an on-going blog-author monologue like a 24 hour talk radio show that never ends…

Or maybe it’s your Inner Design clairvoyant who constantly whispers Font Names to you as drive past billboards or critiques Flash animation during television car commercials. Or maybe she won’t let you read a magazine without saying “Ooo, lovely page layout!”

The point is: Your intentions are mostly projective. You’re processing, preparing, planning, and putting out. You’re in Publishing mode…

• Do you practice what you preach?
• Do you take your own advice?
• What have you told another person to do that you could stand to do yourself?

(Hey, I’ve got a list on all the above, believe me…)

It’s all right there for you to revisit with a different ear. Start with your oldest blog posts — it’s easier to achieve the necessary distance — to externalize your Author’s voice — when more time has passed, when the article is not so fresh in your mind that you can recite whole paragraphs. The more you’ve forgotten what the original impulse felt like, the better you can hear your own wisdom.

I’m working on some technical design and layout improvements — one of the best new plug-ins I’ve implemented is Clean Archives. (Shout out to Urban Monk for the recommendation!) Not only can my readers see all my posts laid out in one gloriously singular location, I can reflect on the path of past months/years of blogging, too, with a fresh perspective.

Not only does revisiting your own wisdom allow you to examine the patterns of what you’ve manifested with your blog, in the context of the Evaluating the Past Year/Setting Intentions for the New Year, it could also be a great way to generate new posts.

• How has your position evolved on a particular topic?
• What has occurred since you original wrote that old post?
• If you rewrote it today, what would you add? What would you change?
• Are the personal challenges/solutions you explored a year ago still relevant?

Your karmic life lessons — often the flip-side of your mission or purpose — are likely to continue to be both your biggest successes and your greatest weaknesses at the same time. Your Stuff doesn’t really end — the Game doesn’t have a Finish Line so much as there’s a new board to flip, a revved up recycle, a graduation to the Next Level.

Evolving is Revolving.

The Aha Moment that you wrestled to find six months ago, a year ago, five years ago… How has it come back? What new bigger, badder form has it returned in?

With nearly every issue you’ve explored in a single post on your blog, there is an entire Category — a Series — that’s playing out in your real life.

Just as an example, the one post I’ve authored that I re-read and apply as if I’ve never heard it before — again and again — is The Art of Surrender. No matter how many times I “get it,” no matter how much faster and more efficient I become at recognizing the pattern of my need for Surrender, I keep finding myself needing to Hear it again.

New Year’s Energy provides the perfect time and space to look at where you’ve been, where you’ve come from, where you’re going, and where you’re AT. How much does all that time-traveling bring you to the same place?

What is the relationship between Evolution and Revolution?

Slade Roberson is a professional blogger | author of Shift Your Spirits and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Spiritual Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and professional blogging strategies with other writers in the Spirituality | Personal Development niche who want to broadcast their mission on a global scale.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments

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New bloggers quickly become enamored with this technology, in and of itself, and easily become lost in all the tangential micro-goals associated with blogs — design elements, promotion efforts, social media diversions, code wrangling and tweaking, bells and whistles… Not to mention issues directly associated with your editorial schedule, marketing, and maintenance of blogging as an activity — when to blog, how often to post, what to write about, sourcing images for illustrations, how to attract new visitors, how many readers are converting to subscribers, what are you offering them as an incentive for paying attention to you… Then there’s the goal of income — making money — or a more meaningful expression of the value you’re creating — there’s a bottom-line there somewhere…

While you’re busy doing all THAT and more, playing with your new toy and loving the sound of your own voice — in love with the “Neato!” aspect of seeing your voice and your message at work in the world — have you lost sight of why you’re doing all this blogging in the first place?

The initial goal greatly resembles the end game.

Jessa of ClairvoyantGuidance.net said something very insightful to me about blogging-to-be-blogging that I want to share with her blessing:

“When I first opened my blog I read all the other blogs that were “experts” on blogging and attracting money. I commented, I participated in memes, I loaded up my feed reader — and then I hit the wall.

I was exhausted!

When I looked at the energy of the blogosphere — I just felt all this TENSION and PRESSURE to PERFORM — to be more PRODUCTIVE.

So I did some thinking and asking and praying and realized that I did not start a blog to be a popular BLOGGER, I started a blog to be a POPULAR and REAL Reader [Jessa uses the term “reader” to describe a professional role as a clairvoyant, intuitive, medium].

Big Major Difference.”

Amen! The difference is major. Take Jessa’s example here and adapt it to your mission: “I did not start a blog to be a popular blogger, I started a blog to be a popular _____.”

For someone who is not sucked into the problogging hype, Jessa impresses me for the degree to which she “gets” blogging and how to use a blog to support her mission and her goals — I think the very fact that she is conscious of how blogging to be blogging becomes just a kind of global scale navel-gazing is what puts her efforts in line with her goals.

I wonder when the “experts” who blog to be blogging about blogging do everything ELSE:

• If you post 3, 4, 5 times a week, when are you writing or working on anything other than your blog?
• What do you plan to do with all the attention? What do you do for all your readers besides send them posts?

The more “successful” my blog Shift Your Spirits becomes, the more work I have beyond the blog — one-on-one client services, joint ventures with other authors and businesses, more potential books, programs, and goals to develop. Those all are the reasons why I blog in the first place — my posts are the tip of the iceberg.

Is your blogging mission — your Big Chunk of Goals — all tip and no berg? Revisit your mission statement and also complete the following:

• “My blog allows me to ______.”
• “My blog attracts people to me so that I can _____.”
• “My blog impacts my mission/my business by _____.”
• “If each and every one of my subscribers/regular readers could hire me/contact me to engage them in a one-on-one relationship, it would be so that we could _____.”

Remind yourself — realign yourself — with your goals; your goals are something beyond blogging just to be blogging… Aren’t they?

Feel free to use the comments below to express, share, and manifest your blogging mission: “I did not start a blog to be a blogger; I started my blog to ______.”

Slade Roberson is a professional blogger | author of Shift Your Spirits and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Spiritual Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and professional blogging strategies with other writers in the Spirituality | Personal Development niche who want to broadcast their mission on a global scale.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2007. | Permalink | 20 comments

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Tagline | Mission Statement | Blog Title & Description
There seems to be an obvious pattern in the lives, challenges, missions, and paths of writers with blogs — your blog tagline or description, typically intended to orient your reader, is more importantly, a message to the self.

When seeking personal direction, often what you most need to hear — the most valuable advice or affirmation you require — will simply come out of your own mouth.

Most manifesting techniques, goal setting exercises, creative entrepreneurial endeavors, and self-improvement strategies feature journaling; blogging is, of course, a kind of journaling — with a super-powered, dialed-up scale, and critical elements of community and networking.

Blogs as Manifesting Tools

• Words are the handles when thoughts become things.
• Writing down your intentions is nearly always a component of Manifesting Techniques.
• Sharing your intentions with others gives your thought-form a trajectory beyond your mind.
• Publishing is literally a vessel for your thoughts and intentions — a form of immortality — a way for a piece of your spirit to exist beyond your personal experience and life time.
• Assistance and opportunity most often come through networking with like-minded souls.
• Blogs offer a capacity to dynamically reach and connect with others who share your intentions, on a global scale.
• One of the best ways to channel information for yourself is to present a question as posed by another and allow your consciousness to respond, answer, and translate for that individual.
• By contemplating and exploring on behalf of others, you inevitably make discoveries on a personal level.
• By writing for an audience you organize your intentions with more conscious, careful, focused word choices than you might normally require when writing for yourself.
• In your private internal dialogs, it is easier for habitually fearful, negative, damaging ways of thinking to persist; by presenting your ideas for public scrutiny, the additional perspective of others is more likely to identify, challenge, diagnose, or affirm your intentions.
• Personal, private delusion doesn’t survive as well in the day light of the public arena.
• Blogging invites a self-policing editorial filter which can catch weaknesses in your intentions; if a weakness survives your editorial filter, it is less likely to slip past your audience without being challenged or questioned.

This is by no means a definitive list or a line of thinking carried to completion — just a few of my observations about how blogging fits into the contracts I make with my thoughts, goals, and intentions. What have I left out?

What would you add to this list?

Slade Roberson is a professional blogger | author of Shift Your Spirits and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Spiritual Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and professional blogging strategies with other writers in the Spirituality | Personal Development niche who want to broadcast their mission on a global scale.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2007. | Permalink | 9 comments

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Human beings are co-creating our future together. We are all coded with a deep sense of purpose. As a writer and blogger, especially in the realms of personal development, your blogging, your writing, your voice, and your sense of a personal mission or life purpose is woven with words. The internet is literally made up of words in the technological context — code.

Words are the handles when our thoughts become things. Information technology represents a tangible evolution of our power to manifest — to co-create reality.

Macrocosm — Microcosm
On the scale of the universal human, we discover and wield source code as a fine example of the emerging democracy of our thoughts, ideas, voices, and words. The collective wisdom — globally connected. Our understanding, our steady diet from the Tree of Knowledge is happening at all levels of creation — from cosmology and physics down to the scale of nano- and bio-technological wisdom.

On the personal level, there is a source code of conscious awareness waking within you. You are a social being; your deepest fulfillment is dependent on social forces. You feel this code switch on as a desire to “use your life” — to live your life with meaning and purpose — to create and express the piece of the experience you carry. The pieces only make sense within the context of everyone else’s bits/bites/bytes — like a switch in the grid that must be connected to others in order to function as intended.

You know this desire to participate as a kind of yearning you can’t put your finger on — a calling that can’t quite be named. You struggle to find it, even as it hides everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously. You know the life you wish to live must be made in order to be found.

“Can blogging really be that deep?” I hear you chuckling. Hell, yes it is! This is a miracle of our creativity we’ve already taken for granted. Step back a moment and remember your life ten or twelve years ago, and see how much your mundane everyday experience has expanded within the collective. Before we move further into taking the magic for granted, let’s be aware of what is happening here. Any participation in our collective wisdom is valuable — just using the web — lurking, without actively contributing — fires the grid of the emerging new universal human power.

You’ve already moved beyond that step to represent and participate in the minority of those of us who are seeding, growing, actively tending this new Garden. It’s hard to wrap your brain around the idea that as one of millions of bloggers you are still part of a special few.

Nothing on this earth is not affected by our innovation as a species. Sure, we make some serious messes in Sandbox Earth — we’re toddlers who just dumped Pandora’s Leggo box all over the carpet. The pieces are all over the place. We’ve got plenty of deconstructivist intellectuals examining the evidence of our Big Mess with valuable insights we must heed… But when did the greatest minds in the world decide to be adept at pessimism?

The sense of purpose you long to define — the code you feel turning on within you, not without discomfort, is a nagging awareness that the glass can’t continue to be only Half Empty. Perspective is a creative choice; positive vision is a behavior.

What is the meaning of our new power that’s good? Our power is physical and virtual — science and technology. It is ultimately social and spiritual, too. And now this awareness of your place within the Hive overwhelms — makes you feel smaller, somehow less powerful.

“I’m just a little dude here with nothing but words and ideas to share,” you think. But God — your humble stories now have the power to go everywhere, to reach anyone anywhere anytime in an amazing display of applied human ingenuity. We make tools out of thin freakin’ AIR!

You should feel mighty.

Writers are the last to see themselves as healers. Words heal. Talking, listening, connecting, responding, sharing are all powerful healing arts. As an artist seeking the context of your purpose, you should be asking yourself:

“What are the images — the stories — of the future equal to our new power?”

The paths forward barely exist in our modern culture — we have few images of the future — we’re still stuck looking backward… Wringing our hands about what a mess we’ve made on Mother’s carpet and how we have to put it all back together…

How can we go forward with no vision of where we’re going?

• What is the direction of humanity?
• What are we evolving toward?
• What is my place in it?

What is my purpose?
Your purpose will found if you seek it while asking:
“What is the meaning of our power that ROCKS?”

We’ve lost our self-image. We’ve lost our story to jaded intellectual criticism, and the notion that being a glassy-eyed utopian hippy is somehow embarrassing, stupid, naive. That hopeful visions, the stories of our future, are for escapists lost in their own gas-bag clouds.

As an artist, as a writer, as a blogger, your purpose is to find the stories of our future, to collect them like pollen, bring them home and stock the honey — to build the signposts, the treasure maps to the world you want to live in beyond 2012…

Do you have a glimpse now of how amazing it is that you’re just another blogger?

Slade Roberson is a professional blogger | author of Shift Your Spirits and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Spiritual Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and professional blogging strategies with other writers in the Spirituality | Personal Development niche who want to broadcast their mission on a global scale.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2007. | Permalink | 15 comments

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The Freedom Teleseminar Offer: The Homestudy Way to Work and Live Like A Monk at Work

“What would be better than having the time and freedom to pursue your spiritual, personal development, and life goals, while at the same time being of deep service by sharing your wisdom and expertise with the world?”
–Adam Kayce, MonkatWork

I’m a great fan of Adam’s blog — while I divide my energy between Spirituality and Marketing in two separate blogs, Adam brings these two worlds together under one publication.

About the special offer, Adam writes:

In a nutshell, I’m converting three of my workshops to Homestudy DVD courses, and offering a teleseminar to show people how to do the same (including marketing, etc.). The topics of the Homestudy DVDs include self-healing, personal development (a hot topic these days, thanks in part to Priscilla Palmer), intuition, productivity, living one’s purpose, working at one’s potential, etc.

One of the fun aspects to the offer is that for people who sign up before next Wednesday, November 7, 2007 there’s a drawing for a free year of consulting.

The links here are not affiliate links; I don’t receive any kind of kick-back for sharing them with you. It’s an opportunity for me to compensate Adam for producing one of my personal favorite blogs.

Check it out…
http://monkatwork.com/special-teleseminar-offer

Tutorial Price Increase
If you’ve been thinking about downloading one of my tutorials but waffling over whether or not you want to take your blogging to the next level — grab them before the end of October.

I purposefully introduced Build Your Blog Subscriber List at a price under $40 so that you could definitely afford it. The number of you who have downloaded it suggests it’s at least three times as valuable.

November 1st, 2007 pricing goes up… Halloween is the last day to get your copy before the price increase.

Slade Roberson is a professional blogger | author of Shift Your Spirits and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Spiritual Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and professional blogging strategies with other writers in the Spirituality | Personal Development niche who want to broadcast their mission on a global scale.

© Slade Roberson, Behind the Screens, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments

Free Downloads:

You Should Be an Author

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