Photo by Tina Keller

“I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school
Or steal my Daddy’s cue and make a living out of playing pool
Or find myself a rock and roll band that needs a helping hand
Oh Maggie I wish I’d never seen your face”

- Rod Stewart, in a moment of career confusion

This is a follow-up to I Am Problogger, Hear Me Roar, where I announced that I was going on a mini-retirement to become a full time blogger.

I went back to work nearly two months ago (didn’t realize it had been that long), so my mini-retirement lasted nearly 5 months. I’ve been meaning to post an update about the full time blogging experiment: what worked, what didn’t, and where to go from here.

The overall outcome

Looking at the total effect on my quality of life, the mini-retirement was a fantastic success. Being in control of my life (you know, like an adult) was like breathing for the first time. Just ending my sleep deprivation alone made a world of difference. There’s nothing like being able to do what you want, when you want. I ate better, exercised more, had better health, more energy, a better social life, and more time for both work and fun. Not that everything was perfect all the time, but it was a day and night difference.

In the beginning, I was actually a little bit concerned that I might become bored. I didn’t really think so, but so many retirees have said they couldn’t figure out what to do with their newfound freedom, and they had to get a job just to have something to do. Now I can say I have no idea what’s wrong with those freaks. Equating freedom with boredom is the lie of the lie of the 4-hour workweek. If you get bored, something is seriously wrong with you. You might consider consulting with a neurosurgeon to see if you can get a chip implanted in your brain that would endow you with imagination, curiosity, and a sense of purpose.

I don’t know, maybe I was supposed to be European. I’ve never accepted work as a substitute for life. I don’t even think I’m lazy, just highly resistant to devoting my life to something that isn’t really my thing. But what is my thing?

Good question. I quickly found out that I don’t want to do something just to make money. Like if I was doing something that let me work from home on my own schedule, but it was something that I didn’t really care about, would that really be any better than having a job? No, it would probably just be far more work for far less money.

Knowing that allowed me to rule out a lot of options. A lot of the time, I’d consider something and think, “Well, I’d do it if it paid a lot from day one. But is it interesting enough to be worth putting in tons of effort, not knowing if it would ever pay a decent income?” And if the answer was no, I had to pass.

So far, the only thing for which the answer has been yes is blogging, and that’s why I’ve focused on it. (I use the term “blogging” in a very broad sense. Ebooks, affiliate marketing, even consulting or services that result from my blog–anything that turns my ideas into money–it’s all “blogging” to me. No need being picky about the delivery mechanism.)

So how did that work out?

The blogging results

Looking at my mini-retirement purely from a blogging perspective, it was an absolute disaster. In five months, my subscriber count increased by about 40%. In the five months prior to that, when I was blogging part time, my subscriber count increased by about 130%.

That’s right, I got more than triple the results when I was blogging part time!

And I’ve got to tell you, this was very disappointing. If I had maintained my previous growth rate, I’d have ended up with 1,400 subscribers. If I had doubled my growth rate, which would be reasonable since I was doing it full time, I’d have gotten to 2,200 subscribers. But why would my growth rate plummet?

I got this in an email from a new reader, who wanted to remain anonymous:

“From what I’ve seen, the quality of your posts truly stands out. How is it possible that you only have 800 subscribers? I mean, that’s a lot in its own right. But I think your stuff should demand a larger following.”

Why thank you reader, and I agree with you! But while my results were disappointing, they’re also encouraging in a way. I now have confirmation that blogging results have little to no correlation with how much time you put in. Which means you don’t have to work yourself to death. In fact, working too much can not only be unhelpful, but counterproductive (and when you consider the effect on your quality of life, it hurts you far more).

I don’t like things that appear random. Everything has a reason, and I want to know it. I know it’s not just a matter of “less work = better results.” I think the conclusion is that doing the right things is far more important than doing a lot of things. But what are the right things?

One thing I think I’m doing right is having a unique voice. There will always be people who don’t like it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be accused of being a copy of someone else. One reason I wanted to start a blog is because I was so frustrated that out of all the people I saw talking online, nobody was really saying anything. I eventually found people who would go beyond rehashing the same old stuff, but the really good blogs are a tiny percentage of the total. Even if your feed reader is full of blogs you love, remember how long it took to find those needles in a haystack.

Ron Hitson (no URL given) feels the same way. In a comment spliced together with an email he gave me permission to quote, he said:

“Hunter, your blog is the only blog I follow. You actually add value and a good perspective. IMO bloggers only offer opinions of things that have already occurred…I like your blog because you’re somewhat of a ‘thought leader’ (like Steve Pavlina). You guys bring fresh thinking to ‘the game.’ Most other bloggers have the same stuff, it’s just repackaged.”

OK, “thought leader” is totally going into my personal branding statement! But here’s the point: if there are even a handful of people saying things like this, I’m going to choose to listen to what they’re saying (keep going) instead of what the stats are saying (give up).

The new 3-step plan

Still, I was putting in too much effort for too little results, so something had to change. I’ve been trying a new strategy, and while it’s too soon to judge the results, it feels like a good idea. Here are the 3 parts.

1. Post less.

When I went full time, I increased my posting frequency from about twice a week to about four times a week. I didn’t want to increase it too much because it didn’t seem like it would help. A lot of people say you need to post every day to keep people coming back to your blog, but why? If someone’s subscribed, they’re subscribed. Why does it matter how often they visit?

In fact, I thought posting too much could hurt me. Giving tons of posts to people who are already subscribed won’t make them subscribe twice. But it might make them unsubscribe if they have too much to read. Actually, is that what happened? After all, I must have done something different that slashed my growth rate, and I don’t know what else it could have been.

I don’t want to overload my readers. I want to take care of them, but then spend as much time as possible going after new readers. That’s how you grow.

Writing posts like the 5,336 word Lightworkers, Darkworkers, And The Other Kind was taking a toll on me. (That one took 3 days to write; I don’t know how many hours.) And now I just don’t have the time.

I’m still going to be posting regularly, just not as much. And maybe with more short posts (which for me means less than 1,000 words). And maybe being a little less thorough (I actually rented the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies as research for The Inductive Oracle, The Deductive Merovingian).

2. Stop reading blogs.

This was a really tough decision to make, but it had to be done. I was spending about 40 hours a week just reading and commenting on blogs. Then I’d think about how there were so many more blogs I wanted to read. I was living in reaction mode, with a never-ending to do list. At times I felt like I was going to snap. (I talked about this in detail in Why We’re Failing The 4-Hour Workweek.)

When I first started reading blogs, I soon learned that you could subscribe to a blog to make sure you didn’t miss any posts. And I remember thinking that no blog could possibly be good enough to subscribe to. While I’ve changed my thinking on that, I still don’t want to try to keep up with everything.

I’ve tried cutting back several times, but somehow I’d just get back in the habit every time. I had to quit cold turkey.

When I get home from work, I just have a few hours before I have to go to bed. With all the different ways I could spend my time, how many of those hours do I really want to spend reading blogs, as good as they might be?

(And in reality, I’m still reading blogs. Just fewer of them, with much more skimming and much less commenting. I don’t want to quit entirely. But if I tell myself that I’ve stopped reading blogs, my conscious mind will act accordingly. I think I can keep my blog reading to less than an hour a day.)

3. Use Twitter more.

But there’s a problem here. If I’m not commenting on many blogs, how will people find me? That’s where Twitter comes in.

I see Twitter as being very similar to commenting, only you don’t have to read a post first. I can send out tweets a lot faster than I can leave comments, and they can potentially be seen by far more people when I have enough followers.

This is an experiment for now, but hopefully it will prove to be effective.

Going forward

Some people took Blogger’s Paradise a bit more autobiographically than I had intended. I get frustrated sometimes, but I can’t imagine quitting blogging. I’m still getting warmed up.

As @stevepavlina tweeted, “The first million words of content are usually the hardest. ” I guess this can be considered the blogging version of the 10,000 hour rule. You have to pay your dues before you collect the rewards. I estimate that I’ve written a quarter of a million words on my blog. Make it a third of a million if you count my ebooks. Make it 335,333 if you count this post. It’s a start.

But I still continue to consider different options. Some people suggested that I get in on the iPhone app gold rush. And while that’s a reasonable idea, I’m already involved in one gold rush. If I’m going to do something else, it would have to be a better option than blogging.

But dare I say it, I actually seem to be connecting well with the new job. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be able to write a non-sarcastic version of Top 10 Reasons To Have A Job.

BTW, it’s come to my attention that comments aren’t working, at least for some people. I’ll try to get that working as soon as I can.