Now, in a very general sense, we all network. Unless you’re a recluse it’s unavoidable. “Networking” is just a way of describing our interconnectedness. I know someone who knows someone who knows you, you know someone who knows someone who knows Bill who knows Amy. That’s just how we naturally operate. We’re social beings. If that’s all networking was I could totally get behind it. I enjoy meeting and talking to new people. As you probably know, though, that’s not all networking tends to be.

On the internet (and I suppose in business in general) I found networking to be a very frustrating endeavor, especially for those who, like me, don’t offer much clout or aren’t easily swayed by the wills of mere acquaintances (no matter how much they pretend to be your best friend). If you want to be successful at networking online you have to play the game, one I found to be tedious and inauthentic.

The goal is essentially this: Find people who can do stuff for you and pretend to be their friend so that you can manipulate them into doing stuff for you. Sounds like a totally worthy goal, right?

I didn’t think so either.

I kept at it for a while anyway. Every time I’d raise an objection, I’d get an earful of justifications. “If every person you’re networking with,” they’d argue, “is also looking for you to do something for them then it’s mutual and totally okay.” Sure, I guess. When it comes down to it, though, those are exactly the people I don’t want to meet or communicate with in any way whatsoever.

“Well, if you want to have a blog that’s influential, those are exactly the people you have to communicate with.”

Fair enough. I halfheartedly pushed on (though I knew better). What frustrated me wasn’t meeting new people, but meeting people who, for the most part, only wanted me as another weapon in their arsenal, one they could call up instantly to reign down terror on their enemies and further expand the borders of their greedy empire.

When you don’t play by their rules, these people can get pretty pissed off. They tend to hold petty grudges. If you’ve ever missed the politics and drama of high school, try connecting with these kinds of people.

I don’t know, though. Maybe you already have connected with them. That kind of networking is the status quo and we’ve all been influenced to at least play around with it. Maybe you already know how it is.

I’m not buying it though.

The best people and the best bloggers I’ve ever met I met organically through shared interests. They are good people who don’t care if you can help them promote their latest ebook or vote for them in some contest. They’re passionate and authentic. They won’t sell you out for a buck or turn their back on you when you stop being useful.

Those are the only sort of people I want to connect with. No sense going out of my way to impress anyone else.

I sold out and I sold out hard. I greedily gambled my voice on a lazy, soulless payout. I lost everything and gained nothing in return. Now I have some wrongs to right and some people to help. Here’s what changes today.

No More Revolutionary Language Without The Revolution

The thing that bothers me more than anything is that Wage Slave Rebel has slowly morphed from something that at least aspired to be revolutionary into something that looked exactly like every other “revolutionary” blog out there.

It stopped being an authentic call to arms and instead transformed into bullshit marketing. I’m reminded of this any time I visit a self-described lifestyle design site. They seem to think that it’s revolutionary to become the oppressor instead of the oppressed.

Yeah. Totally world-changing. It reminds me of a quote from Leo Tolstoy:

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.”

They want to get on top so they can feed and heal the people they are crushing. What I want to advocate is something entirely different, an alternative way of doing business that works hard to benefit everyone. I hope the following changes contribute to that goal.

Restrictions on Affiliate Crap and No More Ads

Wage Slave Rebel is a passion of mine and so is writing. Ads do nothing but devalue whatever blog displays them. How can you be sure if my opinion is actually my opinion or if it’s being influenced by some outsider’s money? Occasionally I get requests from internet marketing assclowns selling get-rich-quick garbage to display something on Wage Slave Rebel. Accepting offers like that would provide nothing of value to readers and would result in me selling out my own beliefs.

You’ll notice that WSR now sports an “Ad-Free Blog” image in the sidebar. This site will never again see an ad.

About affiliate marketing, I think that if the affiliate genuinely uses and believes in the product they are selling and they know their audience, it can be beneficial to everyone. That being said, affiliate marketing will be severely restricted on Wage Slave Rebel. I guarantee that you won’t be seeing it any time soon because there’s nothing I can honestly recommend.

But I do want to go ahead and lay out some rules for the displaying of affiliate marketing links on Wage Slave Rebel. They will have three requirements.

1. I have to use and believe in the product myself.
2. I have to very clearly and obviously mark the link as an affiliate link in the same line the link appears in.
3. I have to also provide a non-affiliate link to the product immediately preceding or following the affiliate link.

Also, if you happen to find an affiliate link, please contact me so that I can remove it.

Real conversation

Do you know who the majority of people who comment on blogs are? Self-promoting bloggers who parrot whatever your point was so that they can seem like they’re contributing something significant to the conversation when in fact they just want to get their URL displayed in the comments.

Author links will no longer be displayed on Wage Slave Rebel. Also, no more CommentLuv. The people who comment have to offer something truly substantial to the conversation. If you can slip in a relevant link to your blog within the context of a comment I won’t remove it. I’m not against bloggers promoting their blogs. I’m against false conversation perpetuated by bloggers promoting their blogs.

Any comments that don’t adhere to this linking rule will be deleted.

Setting the Content Free

Wage Slave Rebel’s content will now be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I know the popular thing these days is to do a full uncopyright and release your content into the public domain. I’m not doing that for two major reasons:

1. I don’t want people making money off of what they get for free.
2. If someone makes a derivative work from any content found on Wage Slave Rebel, I want the users of that derivative work to also have the same rights that I gave its creator.

Anyway, the content is available for pretty much any purpose. Feel free to use it or distribute it however you’d like.

Idea Anarchy

I have a company called Idea Anarchy. I founded it in January of last year, but it has spent most of its existence as a useless name. There was no strategy or business model to go along with it until a couple months ago when I partnered with Mike Roberts from Big Goal Hunting. His skills complemented mine perfectly. I could do the design and the tech and the writing, he could keep us focused and create systems of accountability for reaching our goals. We both put a hell of a lot into the business.

I think it’d be an injustice to position myself as a CEO of the company. I’m not into that. I’m not into the whole employer/employee thing in general.

Why not?

Because it causes wage slavery. Literal wage slavery, not the cutesy idea those armchair revolutionaries like to blog about so they can sell ebooks. If you escape the clutches of a tyrannical boss and set up your own entrepreneurial endeavor and then pay others solely for their labor, you aren’t doing anything particularly remarkable. Unless being an asshole is particularly remarkable. You’re just upholding the status quo in a way that puts you at the top.

So from here on out, Idea Anarchy is officially a democratically-controlled worker cooperative. Mike owns an even stake in the business and has as much power as I do to control its direction. The same will be offered to anyone else that joins us (and we’ve got our eye on a web programmer in the near future). If you work for Idea Anarchy, you own Idea Anarchy. Simple as that.

The Blogging Course

I started buying into all the passive income hype earlier this year. There’s nothing wrong with passive income, per se, but the people who want passive income typically want it so that they can free up their time to do what they love. Well, guess what? The thing I love to do can easily earn a comfortable living. I just got greedy.

So greedy that two weeks ago I launched a blogging course while being solely focused on the money it could make and not the reason I created it in the first place. This course took me twelve weeks and countless hours to build and I have no doubt that it would prove to be a priceless resource to anyone who joins it. But my focus wasn’t on helping people. My focus was on lining my pockets by picking yours. It was a financial failure and I’m glad because it was a catalyst for change.

Here’s the truth, though. I didn’t create the course for me and I didn’t create it for the hell of it. I created it so that people could experience it and learn from it and enjoy it. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Starting today, the blogging course will be available on a pay-what-you-can basis, whether that means paying 1 cent, $1000 dollars or sending me a picture you drew (Yeah, I’ll barter). It doesn’t matter. You pay what you think it will be worth to you. If you can’t afford to pay, no problem. Just contact me and you’ll have yourself a free account.

If you’d like to sign up, you can head over to http://blogging.ideaanarchy.com.

So that’s it. This is the new direction Wage Slave Rebel is going in. In the next few weeks I’ll continue to refine and expand these views, but this is the foundation. Since I’m no longer influenced by money, the writing you’ll see on Wage Slave Rebel will only get better and be more representative of my actual opinions. I’m looking forward to it!

But for the beginning online entrepreneur agility might seem like a vague, barely graspable term, maybe even a useless buzzword. How can agile methods of business creation and management practically be applied? What does agility entail and how can one go about achieving it?

Creating an agile business is easy and practical inasmuch as you are comfortable with doing less and doing it faster. To understand how an agile business works, it helps to know a bit about agile software development. While not directly related to online business, agile software development has already laid out the appropriate philosophies for aspiring online entrepreneurs.

The Agile Manifesto

In February of 2001, a group of computer programmers convened a meeting to discuss alternative methodologies for software development. They wanted something more lightweight than the methodologies that were dominant at the time. What they came up with was a manifesto for agile development. The manifesto said:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The agile software development movement therefore represents a minimalist approach to the development of ideas. It calls for simplicity, customer satisfaction brought on by the rapid development of new and useful features and close cooperation between everyone involved.

You’ll have noticed that I’ve placed the last item in bold letters. Your attention needs to be called to that item because, while online entrepreneurs can learn a lot from the Agile Manifesto, the last point is the one that needs to be at the core of everything you’re working for.

Your Purpose as an Online Entrepreneur

Yesterday, I wrote that business plans are useless for online entrepreneurs and this is why. At the core of nearly every online business is a certain reverence for change. All online businesses are responses to change, from Yahoo! which grew out of a need to organize the web to Twitter and Facebook which grew out of a need to socialize it.

The way people interact with technology and the way they want to be able to interact with technology are in perpetual motion. The businesses that are most successful are those which pick up on these patterns and deliver amazing products or services based on those patterns. As an online entrepreneur, your goal isn’t to plan for the future.

Your goal is to listen for the future.

Bursts of Madness

You have to set up your business in a way that you’ll be able to listen and constantly adjust. The way that has worked for me and for plenty of other online businesses is to adopt an iterative development process. It’s often said that any move is a good move, even if it’s the wrong one. This is the philosophy of iterative development. The goal is to get something out the door. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it shouldn’t be perfect, it just needs to exist.

Start with the foundations of your business. For someone wanting to start a web design business, this would mean setting up a one- or two-page website. It doesn’t mean deciding who your niche is. It doesn’t mean figuring out how you’re going to market it. Leave those for the next iteration of your business. Continually add the essential services and features to what you’re doing.

This is key, too. The things you add to your business must be essential. Don’t add things for the sake of adding things. Say no many more times than you say yes. Do only what you need to do to get where you want to go and nothing more.

One of the best ways to grow a business is to apply a time management technique called timeboxing. This is essentially a breaking down of your business into a series of smaller projects that have their own goals.

So let’s go back to the web design company example. What are the essential features of a web design company. Well, they have to have:

1. A list of services
2. A list of prices for those services
3. A website promoting those services
4. A method of accepting payment

It could be much more in depth than that, but those are the basics. If we were to apply timeboxing to our development process then we might give ourselves one week to create a list of the services we want to offer then another week to research what the prices ought to be then another week to set up a website. This way we are continually adding the essential features to the business in quick iterations.

It’s never overwhelming to focus on delivering one amazing feature at a time over a short period.

Constantly Revise

Developing a business in this manner necessitates that all of your processes be in perpetual review. Nothing is ever at it’s final state. You can always narrow it down even further to make your business more efficient and more successful.

For example, starting out as a web design company you’ll likely offer general web design services. In the first few weeks, however, you might see that you are getting more projects from non-profit organizations who want their existing sites maintained. If that’s the case, you would take another week to revise your services based on the new information. Then you take another week to revise your prices and another to revise your website.

It’s a neverending process of improvement that also manages to keep you from getting overwhelmed.

If you want to start an online business, do it today! The wonderful thing about the web is that you don’t have to know exactly what you’re going to do. You just have to get started.

Photo by laffy4k

I was reading books like The Six-Week Startup or Small Businesses for Dummies or The Idiot’s Guide to Home-Based Businesses. At the time, I thought I was getting a good, solid business education by reading these books.

In actuality, though, these books were nothing more than hinderances to my aspirations. They gave out truly one-size-fits-all advice about business, as if just because it works for the well-established McDonalds it will work for a newly-minted one-man web design operation.

The worst piece of advice these books gave me? Write a business plan.

Business plans are bullshit for aspiring online entrepreneurs, and I’ll tell you why.

They Delay Action

Speaking from personal experience, it is overwhelming to think you’re required to write a business plan when you get started. You probably don’t have much (if any) experience in owning or operating a business. You’ve probably never written a plan before. You aren’t even 100% clear on why it’s necessary.

They tell you that you need to do complicated and detailed market research, but they don’t tell you how to go about it. You’re supposed to collect this number or that number, but you have no idea where these numbers come from.

Your lack of knowledge in this area can really put a damper on your entrepreneurial dreams. That’s a lot to do just to get started. I put it off for months and months just because I wanted to avoid having to wade through a plan writing process.

Planning is Guessing

As David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried of 37signals would say, planning is guessing. If you’re just starting out on the web, you can’t plan for anything. You have no record to pull from, no way to estimate numbers or to guess sales. You don’t know which kind of marketing has proven effective and which hasn’t.

A brand new online entrepreneur — especially those attempting to reach untapped markets — has no way of knowing what to expect. This makes writing a business plan a huge waste of time. It’s much better to just get a start on a vague notion of a business rather than spend hours and hours fabricating unproven forecasts.

It Can Lock You Into Failure

The web evolves and it evolves quickly. This requires a certain kind of agility on the part of online entrepreneurs. From experience, I know that 95% of the time you’ll start out in the wrong place with the wrong service targeting the wrong people, but overtime you’ll be able to narrow everything down to what works. You just have to be able to change direction.

If you waste weeks creating a business plan, you’ll likely give it much more weight than you should. You’ll stick with broken bullshit plans a lot longer than necessary. If you have a rigid plan that you attempt to follow religiously, you won’t be able to change directions quickly enough. Anyone can succeed on the internet if they can manage to flow and evolve with current trends.

The Solution is Simplicity

You don’t need to write a huge formal business plan. While launching Idea Anarchy, we created very informal text files to plan out what we were doing. Most of these plans didn’t relate to exactly what we wanted to do, but what we wanted to feel when we were doing it. We wrote things like

1. Help 3 people or businesses a month.
2. Incorporate as much open source software as possible into what we’re doing.
3. Have fun.

As far as actual business goals went, we kept it pretty vague. We knew we wanted to do something with web design and consulting. That was it. That’s where it started. Specific goals aren’t helpful because you never know where you’ll actually be needed.

Create a vague strategy for your business, just one sentence to a couple paragraphs about what exactly it is you plan on doing. In the beginning, go back and revise that every week taking into account what you’ve learned. Eventually you’ll be able to narrow down exactly who your targeting and what services you offer.

You can’t fail if you keep it simple and stay flexible.

Photo by Hamed Saber

I hated both of these jobs. I spent the better part of 2007 daydreaming about my escape, about how within a year I’d be scaling Sugarloaf Mountain and operating a very rewarding (and very profitable) online empire. I’d grown up with the internet. Computers were all I knew. Surely my life’s purpose wasn’t to hang around a hospital toweling up the charcoal vomit of overdose victims.

By September I’d had enough. I put in my notice with no idea of where I’d go, just this vague notion that it’d have something to do with web design or with the web. I wanted to work for myself.

The 4 Hour Work Week

I spent a few months freelancing jobs I found on Elance. Just odd jobs. Editing audio, writing reviews, designing websites. Anything I was capable of doing, I applied to do. If you know about Elance at all, you know it’s a great place to find cheap labor. For that reason, it’s a really shitty place to find a job, but for a beginner like me it was all I knew to do.

I failed spectacularly at freelancing for nearly a year and a half, working hard, but barely making enough money to live on and doing very little in the way of empire building. It was around this time that I first read The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. This opened me up to a whole different way of thinking about online business.

I had been focusing on all the wrong things. I’d been focused on service-based freelancing rather than the creation of so-called “Muses”. Success was, apparently, very easy to come by.

Like many, I followed Ferriss’ advice step-by-step and started planning product after product and testing (at least superficially) what would sell and what wouldn’t. I wrote ebooks, started learning how to make landing pages, explored public domain content for anything I could turn into a product.

And then I had huge success! I deserved it! I took shortcuts. I did just a minimal amount of keyword research and pushed out shit I wouldn’t buy or use myself! I made hundreds of thousands of dollars and finally found my path to freedom!

I’m just kidding. It didn’t work. I failed again and it was even harder to take than my less-than-spectacular freelance career because at least with freelancing I had no expectations. Implementing the methods used in The 4 Hour Work Week were supposed to make me thousands of dollars a month, but they didn’t… and for good reason.

The Reality of Working Online

I don’t fault Tim Ferriss or his book for my lack of early success. I fault the sense of entitlement that typically afflicts my generation and the nature of online success itself. By the time someone figures something out well enough to write about it (especially if this writing reaches a massive audience) then those methods are already outdated and not very useful.

Only in the last 6 to 12 months have I found any real success online and I can tell you the secret to it. It might sound cliché, but I promise this is what has worked…

It takes persistence.

It takes a willingness to fail to get where you want to go. I’m not saying you should aim for failure the first time around or that failure is imminent. As a matter of fact, I would even say that it’s impossible to have an outright failure in online business if you keep a look out for the opportunities that arise when things aren’t working out. It’s so easy to morph seeming failures into successes.

I’ve been in this game for almost three years. I had failed and failed and failed, but I worked through every single one of those failures and learned as much as I could from each. I started to recognize my weaknesses and implement systems that would focus more on my strengths.

As my company continues to make more money and grow and as we continue to launch new products and services, I have to look back to where I’ve come from, to what I’ve gone through, and realize that no matter how bad or how difficult it seems, it’s always possible to push through.

If success is all you want in life, pushing through is all you’re capable of.

Photo by Sergio Tudela

When I work, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s not work. It’s me sitting down at a computer and doing the things I love to do anyway: coding, designing, writing. I can quit working on any particular thing at any given time. I have no bosses and no hard deadlines, and yet I still have money to pay the bills and money to indulge myself in books and software.

I’m living in near absolute freedom.

The Accidental Minimalist

Everyone has heard the saying (or some variation of it) that goes like this:

“You can’t have what you want. You should want what you have.”

And I’m in a position of wanting what I have. I’m what you might call an Accidental Minimalist. I didn’t make a huge spectacle out of owning less. I didn’t turn it into a blog post and shout it from the mountain or proselytize the minimalist gospel to the lost lifestyle designing sinners. I didn’t even know it was a big deal.

I had and have less because I get less. I was broke for most of my life and now I have enough. The end. I was a minimalist out of necessity and that’s carried over even into what I consider to be the most financially successful period in my life thus far.

When you don’t have many things to begin with, minimalism is more of a habit than a trendy label or some spectacular anti-consumerist movement.

The Internet Lifestyle

People have crazy ideas about what it means to work on the internet. It’s the same kind of ideas that they have about millionaires. People too often equate wealth with freedom, but that really isn’t the case. I’m a bit of an essentialist myself, so let me put it this way: the freedom you want comes from spending money on only the things you absolutely need with very few indulgences.

You don’t want the money. You want the freedom you think the money provides, but the truth is if you can’t find that freedom in yourself using whatever money you are getting now, if you can’t pull it together in your present circumstances then adding money to the equation will only make you worse off.

Making money on the internet won’t free you. Only restraint and a bit of frugality can do that.

Photo by lrargerich

If you’re like me (and I’m willing to bet you are), then you’d rather resentfully wade through paragraph after paragraph of mediocre drivel than exert the effort required to be engaged by a talented author. The web is in dire need of some toning down.

Here are a few ideas about how to make your blog more boring!

1. Write About Yourself and Write for Yourself

There’s nothing as intolerable as helpful content that teaches, entertains or informs while also exuding a particular relevance to my life. Bloggers should be exalting all the menial events and tasks that interrupt their day. This includes (but is not limited to):

1. Anything and everything your pet does.
2. What you are eating at any given time.
3. Cryptic details about your latest breakup.
4. Which Justin Bieber album you’re currently listening to.

The less you focus on me, the reader, the better off you’ll be in the long run since you’ll have an accurate record of your meaningful life.

2. Stop Focusing On One Topic

Nothing irks me like a blog that’s well-organized. A blogger I can peg down is a blogger I don’t want to read. Everything you post should be from a “Stream of Consciousness” kind of narrative, you know? Make me work to figure out who you are and what you’re about. Talk about your job today then your lawnmower tomorrow and then give me a good old rant about why Digimon is so clearly superior to Pokémon. (I’ll give you a hint: it’s the advantages of the Digivolution over the simple evolution mechanic presented in Pokémon.)

3. Don’t Bother with Good Design

A WordPress blog isn’t really a blog without that too-narrow width and that beautiful blue default header with the tasteful gradient. Differentiation is overrated. So is personality. The more you look like every other cobbled-together piece of shit out there, the better off we all are. No thinking outside of the box. Keep it plain. Keep it simple.

4. More Google Ads, Damn It!

I never get tired of those, especially when you put them in the middle of your content…

And above it…

And below it.

If you aren’t giving your ads precedence over your content, you are doing yourself and your blog a huge disservice. The more Google ads you put up, the more likely one of your readers is to accidentally click on one thinking it’s part of your post. Who knows, by the end of the year you could have earned tens of dozens of cents.

Seriously, though.

I hope it’s abundantly clear that this post is pure sarcasm. I’ve run across all of these problems while scouting out new blogs today. If you want a blog to succeed, do the opposite of everything I’ve said in this post.

For non-sarcastic blogging tips, check out my free ebook, 5 Essential Steps to Becoming an Awesome Blogger, by clicking this link and entering in your email.

Photo by Bennigan

To any onlookers unfamiliar with the practice, the entire process can seem painful, monotonous, drawn out, but the end result is breathtaking. So breathtaking that surely the monks would move the design to a sacred place where later generations can admire its detail and stand in awe of its magnificence.

But that’s not what they do. They dismantle it piece by piece and dump it in a river. The point of a sand mandala isn’t so much its creation, but its destruction. That despite the amount of time put into making it and the beauty of the end result, it’s not meant to last forever. It had its time and now its gone. It’s a lesson in detachment.

The Worship of Bad Ideas

Detachment is a lesson anyone who dreams about earning a living online would benefit from learning. Aspiring bloggers, internet marketers and entrepreneurs all suffer from Idea Idolatry. They become so infatuated and attached to their ‘babies’ that they choose to keep their ideas alive even when they aren’t working out. They’d much rather own their failure than admit their mistake. But coming up with beautiful ideas isn’t what makes you succeed online. As Glenn Allsopp put it in his post at Smart Passive Income, “Instead of looking for some genius idea or a secret that it seemed everyone was keeping from me, it finally clicked that maybe, just maybe, it was the actions I took rather than the knowledge I seeked that would allow me to finally make money online.”

Chances are if something hasn’t worked out for you, it’s not because you didn’t work hard or because you just weren’t meant to be successful. It’s because you bought into an inherently shitty idea and then didn’t let go. If you want to succeed online (and in life in general), you have to know when to dismantle your idea.

The Necessity of Agility

If you’ve ever given it any serious thought, the idea of being agile is really negative. It either means saying ‘No’ or quitting outright. Agility is having the ability to stop and change directions and guess what? It’s absolutely necessary for succeeding on the web.

The web is evolving every day. It looks different now than it will in six months and different then than it will in a year. If you want to succeed on the web, you have to follow trends and react to them. If the idea you have now doesn’t jive with current trends, you fail. If whatever it is you’re trying to implement isn’t working, there’s a really good chance it’s not going to work.

You have to be able to throw away your ideas as soon as you see they aren’t getting any results. You don’t hold on to them for the sake of holding on to them. You don’t keep doing what doesn’t work just because you spent weeks planning it or because you think it’s the most beautiful and perfect plan.

You have to let go.

In the last few weeks, I’ve designed and built four separate websites for my company, Idea Anarchy. What we found out in the last few days, though, is that the things we had originally planned had stopped being relevant to our overall mission.

This meant that I spent at least 40 hours creating beautiful designs that I loved and implementing them within WordPress just to delete them. My business partner, Mike, spent weeks stressing out and creating content for these sites. By the time he had finished, everything he created had become completely irrelevant.

That’s just the way it goes. Neither of us feel particularly sad about what we’ve lost because we know what we’ve gained. We’re yet another step closer to our ultimate goal and we’ve aligned the business even more with our personal philosophies.

Not only that, the business has started growing because of what we cut loose. We were able to focus on the core and grow something we’re proud of.

If you worship your ideas, you fail. Learn what it means to dismantle them. Learn what it means to let them go.

Photo by Mai Le

The blogging course will be officially launching in a couple weeks. On June 14th for 24 hours only (midnight to midnight) registration will be open and we’ll be limiting our first class to 100 students. I’ll make more information available in the next few weeks.

Right now, though, I want to celebrate the imminent launch by offering you a free ebook called 5 Essential Steps To Becoming An Awesome Blogger! This is an 11 page, 3000 word guide containing the most essential things you need to get started as a serious blogger. To get it, all you have to do is head over to the blogging course website and sign up for the blogging course mailing list! After you confirm your subscription, a download link will be in your inbox!

Enjoy!

Consistency.

What is Consistency?

Most people, when talking about the consistency of a blog, immediately go to schedules. For example, until recently Wage Slave Rebel had a pretty predictable Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule. I kept it up for months. I expect that anyone who has followed WSR would be surprised that I never considered myself consistent. Posts were up like clockwork and that’s all a reader can ask, right? And that’s the most any good blogger can do… isn’t it?

But I don’t think so. Any post that got published was just superficial evidence of a deeper, less consistent and, often, miserable process. When I talk about consistency being a necessary quality for a blogger (or any writer) to have, I’m not just talking about being able to pump out quality content on a regular schedule. I’m talking about being able to predictably and quickly pump out quality content. I’m talking about a streamlined process that enables you to dive right into your subject, write energetically and passionately and get out with what you feel to be one of the best articles of your life. And even more importantly, for this process to be easily accessible any time you wish to write.

I used to think that this kind of process was a myth. There was no way I could ever plop down in a chair, get into some kind of zone and come out with my own personal masterpiece each and every time.

But that’s exactly what I do now.

The Turning Point

About two months ago I started something that completely changed my perspective on blogging. Where my blogging had previously tended to be reactionary and event driven, this thing I started forced it to be proactive and passionate, but still formulaic enough that I can sit down and write whenever I want to and come up with something I love and something that I know will be valuable for the readers.

What did I do?

I started a blogging course. Not only did I start a blogging course, but I started it at a time when I was focusing on building Idea Anarchy Web Design. So besides having to create workflows and site designs, integrate payment methods, set up a project management system, figure out pricing and services, write copy, set up a portfolio and draw up marketing plans for the web design company, I had to write a blog post every single weekday for 90 days. Talk about overwhelming!

It was tough for me to write for Wage Slave Rebel three times a week. Every post was a chore and needed, at the very least, a two hour commitment. At the same time, I knew a blogging course was exactly what needed to be done. I knew enough about blogging that I could genuinely help people, not to mention it’s potential as a passive income source. It was one of those things that you just know you have to do, even if it means pushing yourself further than you’ve ever gone.

And I was definitely pushed. I was intimidated, overwhelmed, stressed, scared. I didn’t know how it would get done. I just started writing one day at a time. And day after day after day I started discovering, bit by bit, that mythical streamlined process. And then, finally, after three weeks of writing almost daily, I realized that I had found it.

How to Consistently and Quickly Write Pure Awesome

After realizing that, for a few weeks straight, I had been pumping out good content in less than one hour with little effort, I knew something had changed. I decided to analyze the things that I’d been doing that I’d never done before and to figure out which of those things had caused this amazing change. And after thinking back on the last two months, these are the things which I have found to have the most profound effect on my writing process:

1. Know Your Subject - First and foremost, you should be writing about something that you have a genuine interest in, but not just that. You should also regard yourself as an expert on this subject. Often times I’d find myself thinking it would be a great idea to have a travel-related post on Wage Slave Rebel. Maybe something about location independence. The problem? I’m not a traveler. I’ve never been a traveler. I’m not qualified to write about traveling and I’m not all that passionate about it. So what was the result? A shitty article that made me feel like nothing more than an inauthentic hack who was pandering for pageviews. When writing for the blogging course, I wrote about subjects for which I had true passion — WordPress, writing, technology. Most importantly, I consider myself an expert and an authoritative voice.
2. Know What You’ll Write Before You Try To Write It - More often than not I’d sit down at the computer with no clue whatsoever what my post would be about. I’d waste 30 or 40 minutes trying to think of some half-assed subject and when I finally came up with something it was never particularly good. I could never really get behind it, but I’d push forward with it anyway. The blogging course changed this. Each week has a dashboard that shows an overview of that week’s lessons. This meant I had to plan each week in advance. So every Sunday I sit down and write down five post topics and attach them to a day. Doing this ahead of time allows me to figure out whether or not I’m actually passionate about the topics I’ve chosen and it allows me to make changes without panicking. It can be a slow and thoughtful process. Then when the time comes to write each post, I know I’ve already got an awesome topic and that I’ve already got a lot to say about it. I dive write into the writing process and have a complete post that I love within an hour, all because of a little planning.
3. Be Held Accountable - This is without a doubt the most important thing I’ve learned. Accountability matters. If you’re answering only to yourself, it’s really easy to just bullshit your way through everything. A couple months ago I published a short post here on WSR to get a small test group together for the blogging course. And to my surprise, people responded. And even more to my surprise, people paid. When you have a group of people who trust in your knowledge enough to join a course that doesn’t yet exist and to pay you money for the privilege, you can’t fuck around. You owe it to them to deliver nothing short of excellence. Knowing that if I didn’t sit down and write then tomorrow I’d have a small mob demanding their money back was motivation enough for me. It’s kind of the ultimate kind of accountability. There’s really something very important at stake. I realize that most bloggers probably won’t have the opportunity to get paid directly for their writing, but you can mimic this same sort of accountability by publishing a very public posting schedule. If you tell your readers that there will be a post every Tuesday and Thursday and make a big deal about having a new post up every Tuesday and Thursday, then if they see you straying from that schedule they aren’t going to worry about following you. If you have something to lose, you’re more likely to do what you need to do.

And that’s really it. I’m not sure there’s anything more to it. It’s all about valuing your own knowledge, planning each post ahead of time and having someone depend on that post being delivered. It’s a simple system, but probably one that’s difficult to put in place.

What do you think?