Reading recommendation: 279 days to overnight success

I quite enjoyed reading 279 days to overnight success by Chris Guillebau. It’s a useful guide to people that want to earn their income from blogging. And if this is not your aim (as is the case with yours truly) it contains some useful ideas that apply to many fields from writing to building online businesses. Here’s a few ideabytes that I took the liberty of elaborating on:

Instead of targeting the ‘general audience’ choose a specific niche instead. Or even better – create a totally new niche.

Quantity begets quality. Chris recommends to write a thousand words a day, if writing is where you earn or want to earn your main income. If not, the same principle applies. Some successful salespeople focus on making a certain numbers calls or client visits per day, no matter what. This ‘input metric’ is a hundred percent under your control and if you reach it every day then not only do you probably reach your ‘output metric’, whatever it is, but you’ll also get closer to Malcolm Cladwell’s 10.000 hours.

Spend as much on marketing as you do on writing. Again, this is true no matter what you do. Unless you work in marketing, because you’ll probably get fired if you only work half the time.