How my own ads made me a blogger
November 14th, 2006
Over the course of the last 6 months I have deployed about two dozen ad campaigns, ranging from reminding myself about things I want, to behavior changes, to really large long-term goals. Nine of them have definitely worked. A few were duds and others are still in process, but there have been some really impressive successes. Let me give you an example of a success. I have been interested in the idea of blogging about this the whole time, so I introduced several images and messages to reinforce that goal. I wasn’t sure how to convey an abstract concept like blogging, so I experimented a lot. I will explain how to do all of the techniques I used to deliver these messages in later posts.
- I took a picture of myself in my home office, happy and relaxed, to remind myself of what I imagined my life would be like as a blogger.
- I registered the domain name takebackyourbrain.com and flashed that text to myself several times a day
- I made several different versions of a logo and made sure they were placed where I could see them.
- I downloaded a picture of a cartoon brain I really like and displayed that image several times a day.
- I made an image of a large check from Google Adsense and showed it to myself several times a day.
- I changed one of my passwords to imablogger
Each of these ads reminded me that sharing this idea is something that is important to me - something that that I really want to do. Keeping that in mind has motivated me to take copious notes, to write the stubs for over 75 articles, and to download and learn WordPress.
One of my mentors in the process has been Steve Pavlina. Steve has written several great articles about blogging over at stevepavlina.com and he is where I would like to be - influencing over a million people a month with his ideas and making a good living from his blog. One day I got the idea to download a photo of Steve from his website and add it to my blogging campaign. That was on September 18th. From then on I have seen that image a few times a day on most days.
A month later, on October 16th, Steve posted a notice on his blog that he would be giving an all-day workshop in Las Vegas about blogging. He mentioned that it would be a very rare event, since his main focus is personal development, but that he wanted to share detailed information about how he has done it to his local speaking group. He posted it on the blog because others were welcome to attend.
Now, I’m in Seattle and I hate to travel - REALLY hate to travel, especially by plane. Trust me, whisking myself to Las Vegas for a one-day workshop is definitely not something I would normally do. But my internal reaction when I read that invitation was, “I have to be there.” Something inside of me had shifted just enough to take each action that was necessary to register for the event and get me to Las Vegas. The workshop was wonderful. You are reading the result.
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