You’ve probably noticed new regular contributors recently joined the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com team. A few light design changes were made to the site to highlight the faces of each of these new writers, so you know which article comes from which writer. If you’re reading this through an RSS reader then you can’t see the changes, so make sure you head to www.entrepreneurs-journey.com to meet all the great new authors and see their smiling avatars.
These wonderful people, including Neroli, Mitch, Leslie, Sunil, Leigh, Ilana, Christine and Kerry, have all come on board, not to just write one off guest articles, they are fully fledged columnists and had to demonstrate certain criteria to qualify for the position (you can see the criteria at the Jobs page). A columnist is here to share their own entrepreneurs journey with you, each bringing unique experiences from successful online and offline businesses. They are all committed to contributing their fantastic stories every single week, so my hope is that you will come to enjoy their writing just as much as you have my own.
Bear in mind these new writers are not here to replace me. I’m still writing to this blog because I love it, so what you receive is more of what you’ve come to expect, great advice and case studies from people having real experiences as entrepreneurs. These people are all self starters, so like you and me, began simply with a desire to change their lives and avoid or leave the nine-to-five job trap.
All of the columnists share their writing with you because they want to give back to the online entrepreneur community and to increase exposure for their ideas and name. They are not directly financially remunerated for their writing (they do sometimes receive income from any affiliate product sales made from their articles, but that’s not why they are here). Whenever you enjoy one of their articles I encourage you to retweet or share on Facebook their content and leave a comment, so they know you are reading what they produce.
Knowing people appreciate your work is reward enough. I know this better than most people, it’s one of the main reasons I’m still blogging now for six years straight, so don’t be afraid to reply or share, we really do value your responses.
I’m working on a few more design changes with my design maestro Mick, so keep an eye out for tweaks here and there to the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com layout. Again, you can’t see these changes via RSS, so make sure you visit this site at the source from time to time.
I think you will find the new features interesting, especially if you have your own blog, as I always like to break trends and come up with new ways to integrate different media formats.
The motivation behind the changes is to integrate the new writers, so this blog is moving towards the magazine model rather than focus just on me. Of course I understand the relationship between the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com brand and my own personal brand. I know many people read this site because of me, and like I said, I’m not going anywhere, but I do want to make sure the new writers receive credit for their work, rather than assume it’s all from me.
The other reason for the design changes is to experiment with a few new advertising formats, to give the site a facelift and further simplify the layout. It’s a difficult balance when you want your blog to meet the needs of multiple goals, from convincing people to join your email list, to follow you on Facebook and Twitter, to subscribe to blog updates, visit your sponsor’s sites and of course read the articles too (the main point of a blog let’s not forget!). I’m a fan of minimalist, so as the design changes surface I hope the main difference you notice is an increase in clarity and thus usability.
You’re probably wondering why I invite new columnists to help contribute to this site. That’s a good question and I have multiple motivations, here are some of them…
The main goal is to increase the overall value Entrepreneurs-Journey.com provides, thus resulting in an increase in audience size. When I started this blog I wrote daily, but often my content was very newsy. Eventually I reduced how often I wrote but focused on providing better content, more “pillar articles” as I called them. This proved a great strategy as I was able to maintain and build a solid following and reduce my workload at the same time.Despite this, Entrepreneurs-Journey hasn’t grown at the same rate it did when I first started and I’d like to see it back to where it was on the growth curve. Hence providing more value on top of my own writing, I hope, will ensure this blog continues to expand and reach new audiences without needing to rely entirely on me.My own personal story is just one angle, and clearly there are many aspects to successful business both offline and online. This has become more and more apparent to me as new technology surfaced like Twitter and Facebook, which can be used as fantastic marketing, branding and communication tools. I don’t keep up with all the trends quite the same way as I used to, so bringing on new writers with a fresh perspective, new ideas and different experiences helps keep this blog fresh.In exchange for sharing their stories the new writers receive exposure too, so if this blog grows everybody wins, including me, the writers and you, the reader. Everyone receives more.By having more writers I feel less pressure, which has allowed me to invest writing time on my new project, the 2-Hour Work Day. I’ve spent the last three months writing and editing the report, which will be complete by the end of next week. Then I’ll begin setting up the content sites to launch the training program. As soon as the report is ready to go, I’ll give it away via this blog and my email newsletter, so stay tuned for that.At the end of the day I see this blog becoming more than just my own personal entrepreneurs journey. I’d like it to grow beyond me and develop into a brand of it’s own, though I understand it is what it is today because of what I invested in giving away over the past six years. To make this happen, I have to let it go somewhat and allow other people to help move things forward. Of course, the audience – that’s you – will decide what happens next.
The 2-Hour Work Day is getting closer to completion and I’m looking forward to teaching what I know about lifestyle design. While I’ve been preparing the new training program and report, I’ve had another team working on something else that I’ll be releasing to you very soon as well. This new project I’m very excited about because it’s not an information product, it’s software.
My new service is based on a wordpress plugin, but that’s about all I can tell you now. The last few bugs are being ironed out as I type this and I hope next week to release it to a small beta test group from within my membership and slowly release it to more people from there. Assuming the bugs are cleaned up I hope sometime in the next few weeks to be able to release it from this blog so the general public can have a play too.
That’s it from me for now. Stay tuned over the next few weeks as these two projects get closer to fruition. They are both going to be of great value, especially to readers of this blog, and as always I’m giving away the goods for free.
Yaro Starak
Expanding
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