What To Expect From My 2019 Blogging Efforts

I love blogging, but its place in my life will shift in 2019, once again. Now that I've completed my race to 400 total published articles, my focal shift is now towards finishing my second book for discouraged small business owners. Thus my goal will be much less ambitious here on the blog with a much smaller target of 50 new total articles (compared to 117 in 2018).

2019 Blogging Schedule 

This shift of focus towards the book means a bit of uncertainty for my blogging. In the fall of 2017, I launched a weekday blogging challenge with five new posts per week over four months. To pace myself at a better rate, I shifted to publishing three times per week in 2018. To ensure I make progress and finish my second book, I'll need to pull back even further to once per week, for 2019. 

With a weekly post planned, my blogging may still be a bit sporadic through the first quarter. Once I get the manuscript for the book completed, I'll shift back to a steady schedule, with a possible increase of pacing.

Blogging Benefits

The primary challenge I have now is the volume of time I pour into blogging without a financial return. In the past, this blog has helped me prospect for new freelancing clients, grow as a person, help others, and contribute to my second book project (another product I can sell). In the long term, the creation and growth of this blog will provide substantial benefits, including financial. For that reason I’ll continue, but since it doesn’t yet earn an income I’ve got the flexibility to mix it up. 

Creating additional products, like books, provides me with monetization options, setting the stage for future benefit. In order to sell these products, I need a substantial audience to do this. Thus the juggle of growing the platform and creating products continues. And my efforts will likely oscillate back and forth between these two as I grow this online platform.

An additional strategic element to this effort involves content distribution. With as much quality content as I've produced, I've spent much less time on getting it in front of people, and I've relied heavily on the search engines indexing and driving people my way. So far, that continues to grow, but I'm interested in diversifying my traffic streams by pushing further into some of the promotion experiments I've been testing over the past year. With a great library of content to work with, I’ll have ammo to push these experiments further. 

Lastly, there is the type of created content, and the structure of the library I'm building being accurately reflected in the website experience. While I've begun to take steps for people to discover and explore this library of growing self, business, and others content, there’s a large amount of work remaining to get to the finish line. Since I'm the one doing the work, progress is limited to my bandwidth and top priorities. 

2019 Blogging Content & Channels

In regard to what content topics you can expect, they’ll be several posts like this one for planning and mapping out 2019. With my focus on the book, you can expect small business oriented content as I’ll use the blog to help me flesh out final ideas. I expect to also launch several more interviews giving others an opportunity to share their systems and stories to live better and work smarter. You can also expect more book commentaries to hit the stream as well. In regards to my monthly lessons learned and experiments posts, these will shift to a quarterly basis (instead of monthly). 

Beyond this, I’ve got numerous ideas, outlines and partial blogs already in the pipeline for living better and working smarter. Outside of posts talking about and promoting the book, I’ll be shaping and publishing these. 

I’ve also volunteered to guest blog on a few different websites (to help build my digital footprint), so I’ll be posting here when and where that’s happening. 

If any of this gets to be too much, causing delays for finishing the book, blogging will be the first thing to pull back and pause to make sure that the project is moving forward as expected. 

Wrapping Up

As I work on completing The Jump, experimenting with existing content distribution, reshaping my website with an intentional focus, and sustaining blogging activity, I'll have the opportunity to set the stage for really making blogging a revenue generating effort in 2020. As income generates from blogging and I earn more as a freelancer per hour, I'll be able to snowball that momentum into additional time and energy here on the website.

For now, the top priority is growing small business owners, teams, and income as a freelancer. This next book is a way for me to codify how I work with entrepreneurs and acts as a powerful calling card for sustaining my primary income source.