You Know that Feeling Right When the Roller Coaster Reaches the Top of the First Drop?
That's how I feel right now. You reach that top of the first biggest drop, and you feel a rush of excitement, fear, anxiety, impatience. Why is the cart moving so slow? Get over the hump and just freaking drop, already! Ah I want it to drop, but crap...I don't! Don't drop! This is effing scary! No! Ok, drop...just drop. I'm ready, right?
That's how I feel about Pre-clinicals starting.
In the past week I have not touched anything for the blog: social media, blog posts, emails...nothin'...all because of finals for school. I finally finished my last term of redoing those annoying Gen Ed classes I took 10 years ago (with a 4.0!) and pre-clinicals for hygiene start February 13th.
I am wondering how the heck I am ever going to have time to do anything else but school. If Gen Ed classes took up that much time, I can only imagine how much time the actual dental hygiene classes are going to take up!
My class schedule this term is 5 days a week, of course, and I will be in classes for a minimum of 9 hours a day; two days are 10, one day is 12 hours. Outside of class, of course, I will need to review and keep up with stuff as it's taught, be the good student, yada yada, but I also have community hours to complete that I have to do on the weekends.
That doesn't leave much time for the blog and right now...I miss it! I'll have a week break in between terms every 10 weeks, but that isn't acceptable to work on the blog every 10 weeks...no way. The only thing I can think of is to focus at least an hour a day on blog posts, and not so much on my Instagram account for the blog (my personal one has been completely non-existent, haha). It's difficult because the IG for the blog is really growing whenever I put in the time to be active with other accounts, but man does it take up some time!
It also doesn't help my blog posts take me forever to write because I'm so picky about editing grammar, punctuation, and mechanics.
I'm not sure what this post was for, to be honest. I think I just needed a place to talk about a roller coaster? Maybe I just wanna go to a theme park...ride a roller coaster.
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Just take it a bit at a time. Every little helps and it's about accumulating focus of attention over time. There's no rush as this process isn't a quick fix. It allows to to take care of your priorities and they'll always be time when you can do more on the blog and times when you can't. Keep the faith and do what you feel you can when you can. Don't push too much pressure on yourself as that can also affect your motivation.
Hang in there :)
Those might have been the perfect words I needed to hear, haha. I have a tendency to put a lot of pressure on myself in general, but I do forget that this is a process and it isn't going to grow overnight.
Thank you so much! I can't get over how amazing this community has been so far!
Yes, that too, totally agree. Sometimes I have time to write 3 articles for my blog for the week, and sometimes I hardly ever touch it. It depends.
No matter what, don't let your narrow time let you down and demoralize you, the majority of us have work or college so you're not the only one who can't write a blog post every day or two.
Keep it cool and try to keep the mindset of "doing this for the fun THEN the money" and it'll cheer you up almost immediately.
HOWEVER, if you don't see a progress, especially, in ranking, it's wrong to keep quite. Ask, and demand answers, at least some leads and directions so you can make things better.
You're absolutely correct. There are people all over the world with minimal time. My dental hygiene program is one designed to teach the equivalence of a 4 year degree into 18 months, so it's a lot of information and skill to learn very quickly. Most people end up either dropping out or flunking due to the massive amount of shooling jam packed into a short amount of time, so that is where the roller coaster feeling of about to be dropped, meaning the intensity of the program is about to begin, and being terrified but also excited to get started. I didn't mean for it to come off that I believe I am the only one with this sort of issue, so I apologize if that was the case. :)
I like the idea of using a gap of free time to write multiple articles. I can definitely use this week to type some up and have them scheduled to publish later, huh?
This is for fun, and I truly enjoy writing about funny stories I encounter, which seems to be an odd amount for one person haha, and I normally have that mindset. I think the pressure sets in when people ask, "how's your blog going?" It makes me think "ugh, crap, this thing needs to grow" for some reason. Funny how we do that to ourselves?
I'm an extremely logical thinker 90% of the time and pretty unemotional compared to the norm, but when it comes to achieving goals and succeeding, my parents raised me to always do your absolute best and never quit, never fail. So I have the mindset of always wanting to never do sub-par work...30 years old and my parents still have an impact on me, hahaha. I think this might teach me to keep a cool head and figure out a logical solution to the problem as it arises; just like I do with everything else in life, and in the ER, haha!
Awesome! It also helps that you have a native english skill, wherease me it's even a third language and it normally takes a lot of time to finish one article.
You have an advantage, use that! And I do recommend using grammarly, even the free version, but you don't have to fix everything according to them.
I'd say that 10% of the time I decide to ignore it, but it has saved me a lot of typing and grammar mistakes, so I recommend even for the free version.
I'll let you know about my PPC compaign and whether it's worth it to start your own!!
To be honest, I'm in the same boat as you are.
Instead of college, I have WORK!!! The normal, nausea, annoying 9-5 schedule we all know except for me, it's sometimes 10-5 or even 11-5. It feels like slavery sometime you work hard for long hours, you get back home to eat a little meal, maybe drink something hot and then get back to sleep for next day at work.
What WA teaches here is amazing and really works, but really not for everybody and certainly some niches are WAY HARDER to sell in and draw customers than others. I experienced it all.
However, I'm not ready to surrender my life to the 9-5 workload all my life.
This made me dig deeper into SEO, how can I make it better, faster, and stuff like that, and in the past 2-3 months I was able to learn more than I learned in the first 8 months of my sub here.
To be honest, if the niche is difficult (and I'm assuming that your niche, dogs, is similar in difficulty to my niche, guitars, in terms of selling and ranking because they're both HUGE niches, but we decided to go for them because 1. We like it! 2. We didn't really know how to pick other niches), then I believe we have to do more.
IN MY OPINION, and that is something that I'm just starting to do, so I don't want you to follow my footsteps here but feel free to try yourself! that wisely spending some $$$ for PPC in order to get some leads/emails and build a list, then automate a series of emails every couple of days/3 days with offers AND blog posts, is the best way to really grow faster.
I purchased a course from Udemy about PPC with clickbank, but it works with any other affiliate network because the instructor teaches you how to build a list, create a winning PPC campeign, and get clicks for under 0.05$ !!
I'm gonna try that first with my guitar blog because 10 months from starting the website, I'm still averaging between 20-30 visitors a day (without sharing in social media) who hardly ever convert because of the nature of the niche and other stuff.
We'll see how it goes! If you're interested to learn more you can send me a message and we'll have a discussion.
Good luck :)
That would great! I'll definitely have to check back in with you and see how it's going! The niche is hard, and I've noticed it's been a process for me to find the right balance of "too educational" and being sure to add in some fun stuff that make it so people actually want to read my posts, haha. I'm the person who enjoys reading text books...but I have to remember that the majority of people don't want a text book, they want something fun and easy to read!
So it's been hard with the amount of knowledge I have in the field, and wanting to share that with people, to tone it down a bit and stop writing huge giant articles, haha.
Thanks for the tip, and let me know how it goes! I wish you the best of luck and I bet it'll work!
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Grammarly premium can take care of your grammar. I had underestimated it. Cannot do without now.
My friends were telling me about it, and I got the free version, but it actually tried to make some incorrect adjustments on one of my research papers that I confirmed with my English professor and a few other fellow English nerds. I'm not sure if it was because it was the free version, or maybe the terms related to the topic of the paper were not "normal", everyday terms. But other than that I have heard nothing but positive reviews about it. I have been on the edge about getting it, mostly because I'm a type A personality ;) Hahaha
But it may be just the thing I need right now with the time issues. I think you've made me want to take the plunge into it, haha!
The free version is CRAP. If someone signs up through your link and does not have the free version, both you and your friend will enjoy seven days of the premium edition for free. In fact, the premium version warned me to insert 'the' before 'free' in my first sentence here(missing article)! Free Grammarly does nothing.