Nigerian Entrepreneur

What did you learn from blogging in the year 2008?

It is the eve of the year 2009 and a ripe time to review the activities carried out in the year 2008. I see people around me taking stock, setting new goals for the new year and drawing up plans on how to do better in the year 2009.

As I go about my own review of how I have spent the year 2008, I realize that blogging as Nigerian Entrepreneur, took a considerable chunk of my time. So, I ended up asking myself the following  questions:

What value did blogging add to my life in the year 2008?

Well, not an easy question to answer, but simply put, I can sincerely say that blogging helped to highlight my personal strengths and weaknesses first as a person and secondly as an online entrepreneur. Some hidden traits were discovered and some real bad habits that I need to get rid-off were brought to the surface.

What have I learned from blogging?

I learned several lessons, but I will love to talk about four that I consider very crucial:

I need to make up my mind what I want in life, I need to have an overall goal that I am willing to stick to. How did blogging teach me this? I started the year 2008 blogging on all kinds of topic without any particular focus, but in March, I set a goal, drew plans and stayed focus on a particular niche. Of course that action paid off. Instead of remaining lost in the midst of millions of bloggers, Nigerian Entrepreneur has become a unique blog.

I have to be very specific and write down my goals and objectives in life, that will help me stay focused. Blogging can be fun and sometimes, ideas run like torrents in the head of a blogger. While this is good, sometimes, it becomes a curse as the blogger begins to write about everything and anything. Eventually, because the energy is not focus on a particular goal, irrespective of how hard the blogger works, he achieve poor result and gets discouraged.

I should give priority to people and activities that will help me achieve my goal in life. Online activities can be the greatest time waster! If you don’t know who you need and activities that helps you achieve your goals, you will end up wasting valuable time doing things that adds no value to you. Belonging to all the social media networks and attempting to be famous on all of them will only get you fatigued and discouraged. So, I have learned to  identify and give priority to people and activities that have proven to be the 20% that yields the 80% result (Pareto Principle).

I am responsible for the direction my life takes, not anybody, however, I need God and people to accomplish any worthwhile goal I set for myself. Blogging is a great tool for conducting business experiment online. I studied how regular readers and visitors reacted to changes I made on my blog. Studying their reactions has taught me some valuable lessons on human behavior. I have watched how some decisions I took increased my traffic and comments while some sent the traffic away and made my blog an island!

What did I lose by blogging?

Well, I lost some wonderful moments that I would have spent with friends and family members as I stay glued to my computer.

My overall leisure hours drastically reduced.

Also, I lost some hours of sleep as I read and study what the gurus have to say about issues like Website Traffic, Website Quality Content, Website Promotion, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Promotion, Online Marketing Techniques etc. Some of the lessons helped, while some did not.

At the end of the day, I lost some of the wrong conceptions that I had about making money online (good for me!)

Overall, I am happy and grateful to God and all my wonderful friends online and offline who encouraged me to keep blogging even when I felt like giving up. I wish to thank you all for your support. I wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

So you can look forward to reading better posts and articles from Nigerian Entrepreneur in the year 2009, because I am getting better. I will love to hear from you in the comment section what you learned in the year 2008. Your comments are highly appreciated. Cheers.

Tags: Blogging, Entrepreneurship, New Year

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under Blogging, Entrepreneur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.