Self improvement advice, articles
tips and strategies

One of the biggest challenges I found was to take seriously the self improvement advice someone else had written on a website. Read my story below.

• How can they have any idea about my problem?
• Who made them an authority on the subject?
• Why should I listen to them?

For me, that has slowly changed. Two short stories from my life will help to explain how. My first story on who needs self improvement advice - ME! - is about overcoming an addiction.

1. OVERCOMING CAFFEINE ADDICTION

I used to be addicted to caffeine. I think that if I had cut myself a few years back, coffee would have flowed out of the wound!

I would sometimes drink a lot more than 10 cups a day! I had read some articles about its affects on our bodies and figured that most of it did not apply to me as it didn't seem to be having any affect on me. Besides, aren't we all bullet-proof?

Well, after years of restless nights and riding the highs and lows of the caffeine tide, I decided that is was time to try something.

I couldn't find much on the health effects of coffee in bookshops, other than signs and overwhelming aromas encouraging me to grab a cup while I browsed the books, especially Borders Bookshop where they plant the coffee shop right in the middle.

I surfed several websites offering self improvement advice and found some that had similar stories. I tried their advice and ... Woohoo! I am over caffeine and I have not felt this good for a long time. It turns out that going cold-turkey provided the most effective method for me.

No more waking up feeling clammy. No more 2am visits to the bathroom. No more cloudy brain syndrome - well that's what I call it now. After freeing myself from the hold of caffeine I found that I had more capacity to use my brain, or more of it was functioning the way it was intended.

I got a headache that lasted for about a day and at times it was quite severe, but I pushed through the pain and came through the other side feeling like I had accomplished something really great. And it has been great ever since.

It was a breakthrough for my personal health and I was so glad to have persevered through what seemed like half an eternity (24 hours without coffee).

I still have coffee from time to time but I can now enjoy it for what it is and not just crave the next cup to get me through the next couple of hours.

... only a moving ship can be steered ...

My second story about self improvement advice relates to me taking my own advice to stop procrastinating and it has paid off a whole lot more than I expected.

2. DOING WHAT I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT

A decade or so ago I started thinking about how I could write a book that would help others with life’s little problems. In it I would write about my own achievements and how I had overcome a range of obstacles to build a better life.

I read many books and online articles about self improvement and personal growth. I told people that I was going to do it. I just never got around to it because it was mostly "talk" and it was easier to talk about it than actually do it.

I then read about how the Internet was fast becoming the essential reference tool for more than just those at university. Even people my age where spending more time online searching for answers to their questions.

A slight detour: It is common sense that if you want to turn a large ship it is necessary to have some forward motion. The ship might be heading in the wrong direction so it is okay to stop, get out the maps and charts and plot a better course. But staying there in the wrong spot, pointing in the wrong direction is not going to be of much use in the long run. It is necessary to get going again as only a moving ship can be steered.

I work with computers every day so I thought that I might be able to make progress on my book project and combine it with the internet somehow - and that way I would be probably enjoy it even more. I made a move and headed off in this new direction where I might merge the book idea with online publishing.

The first thing I looked at was vanity publishing sites. This is where you can upload a book, press a button, pay some money and have the book printed, bound and posted to you in about a week, with no limit on copies. You can print one or one thousand, all at a remarkably low price per book. I could have the book finished within a year and it would be online but then I discovered a hidden trap in the online world of publishing. As it turns out, it was not the first.

Traffic. Visitors who like what they see on websites will sometimes buy a product or service. I knew I had something of value to offer and therefore I was keen to make a start. Then I started to read about the next step after uploading the book to a vanity publisher. It is not much different to shops in the real world. Without customers walking in the front door there will be no sales.

I would have to get people to come take a look at what I had to offer. I hadn't upload anything at this stage as I was still doing research. But I was starting to feel a little disappointed after the initial euphoria of discovering the publishing sites. Traffic either cost a lot of money (buying ads) or only went to those sites that turned up in search engines as a result of a search.

Then I discovered blogging. It was something new and exciting that was taking the internet by storm. Everyone who was anyone had a blog. Even people who were nobodies (me included) started a blog. It promised to be the answer and it went well at first. With blogs anyone can be online with a flashy looking template the same day. It is brilliant technology.

I started to get a few visitors by visiting other blogs and posting comments on their blogs. They would visit my blog and post comments on my blog and so on it went. We were a bunch of happy bloggers.

Then I realised that blogs are like a big roll of paper. You write on it as it unravels and as you keep writing you keep unraveling. After a while you lose track of your work as it fades away into the "archives". Anything older than a month gets archived.

Traffic built slowly but I had to keep unraveling the roll of paper and writing more to keep it "fresh". I found out that people like to visit blogs that have new content added daily or at least several times a week. They didn't visit to read what was written last week or month. That is when I discovered another trap of the online world.

What was the point of all the pages of my book being scattered through my blog archives if no one was going to go to the trouble of digging through to find the gems? Most visitors wanted to see the "latest news". I had to keep posting links to older blog posts to get visitors to see them. Then there was the psychological barrier of having "Posted by Geoff - 23rd May 2007" emblazoned on the top of one of my better blog posts. Who wants to read something from years ago?. A lot of what is online is that old or older but blogs have a way of making things seem so much more out of date.

Don't get me wrong, blogs are great for a range of purposes. I visit several each week to keep up to date with a few colleagues, but I was starting to realise that I was burying my book in a pile of archived blog posts. Blogs are not really suitable for publishing a series of chapters that are all interlinking, growing and changing over time.

I had spent almost two years on the journey so far but I am glad that I kept moving. I kept in the back of my mind that only a moving ship can be steered. I kept moving and slowly realised that I needed to change course again. Vanity publishing and blogs are great and I might end up using one or both techniques later but at this stage neither was going to help me achieve my goal of successfully publishing online.

I decided that I would have to put all my ideas into a standard website format. It was the only online structure that would allow me to interlink chapters and pages and be able to deliver a consistent experience to every visitor.

It is not as easy initially as setting up a blog but it has such greater potential in the long term that I am truly glad for having made the decision to go with a standard website format.

Total Self Improvement is the end result. In a sense, it is an electronic version of my book. The beauty of it is I can keep writing pages and chapters and the site keeps changing each time I upload. If you return in a week there will be something different to explore. And there is no archive!!! It is all fresh and available, all the time.

Creating a blog is real easy - creating a profitable website that gets lots of traffic that continues to build every month is very difficult if you've never done it before.

I ended up choosing a company called SiteSell to host my site. I started out first hosting my own site with my own template but I was struggling to get people to visit, to make it look real and a whole lot of other start-up things. I wrote a post on my old blog about the new site and my regular blog visitors (all twelve of them) dropped by and had a look, then went back to their own blogs.

After a few more months of research I stumbled upon what appeared to be a pattern in several of the sites I was visiting. It appeared that they were well written and getting significantly more traffic than me. Some of them had been operating for only months too. The difference was SBI - Site Build It - a method, more like a philosophy, of successful online publishing.

My journey has not been easy but it has been rewarding. I have been able to write when and how it suits my other personal commitments. I have not had to write a post "every other day" to keep the content fresh and, with the help of some cool tools offered by SBI as part of my hosting package, I am able to get the jump on a large number of other sites (and blogs) that have been started with similar goals to mine.

The difference is I am getting the traffic to my site that I never thought possible. My blog peaked at about 12 visitors per day, immediately after each now post then it went down until the next post. This website is getting around 200 visitors per day at the moment (Jan 2010). Refer to the Alexa image below for the current ranking. The rank is out of over approximately 17 million sites worldwide.

This is where the story stops for now. The journey continues and I will be updating this story from time-to-time.

So, what changed my mind about believing online self improvement advice? I read somewhere about overcoming an addiction to caffeine, decided to take action there and then, and the rest is history - some of which is summarised above.

After taking small steps to begin with, the key was that I put that advice into action. I had to develop some self-discipline along the way. But ...

... we all hold the power to make our own decisions and
chose our next actions ...

What I have discovered is that my choices have opened up for me an unexpected bonus. Not only have I been able to enjoy the satisfaction of knowing I have found the ideal system to publish my book - and I am still writing it, that's the beauty of doing it online - I have started to make money from this project before it is anywhere near finished.

I have turned my passion into revenue.

If that is something that appeals to you then I urge you to visit this page and read more about SBI.

Find your way around using the menu to find the right self improvement advice. There are other links throughout articles and scattered around various pages. Use the Find-Read-Use three step process or pick a link from a few popular pages listed below.

Building Self Confidence - 5 part article revealing powerful self help tips to boost all aspects of your self confidence.

Self Help Books - my recommendations.

Setting Goals - powerful yet simple steps to set and achieve personal goals.

Motivational Quotations - be prepared to be inspired by reading these uplifting and sometimes philosophical quotations.