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“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“I don’t much are where —” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“— so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland…….

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I love that quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In fact, I have probably lived that quote far too many times in my life. Movement became the benchmark through which I gauged progress in my life – as long as I was moving forward, I was getting somewhere and making progress, or at least that is what I used to think.

Then I started learning about life purpose and how to find my life purpose – that quality or passion that I wanted to center my life around. That ‘thing’ that I wanted to build a career on, or spend time studying, or spend time doing. That ‘thing’ would make me feel like I was accomplishing something with my life and not just going somewhere; anywhere!

OK, so I’m not the only person that is seeking to identify their life’s purpose. Seems that there are a few other baby boomers, and Gen Y’ers that are currently searching to define their life’s purpose.

There are numerous techniques that people use to explore and identify their life’s purpose. Many techniques involve answering questions, like the one’s below.

10 Questions That Can Help You Discover Your Life’s Purpose:

source: florindasdesigns Flickr, Cretive Commons

1. What do you love to do, whether in your spare time or at work?
2. What parts of your present job or life activities do you thoroughly enjoy?
3. What do you naturally do well?
4. What are your ten greatest successes to date (in your eyes)?
5. Is there a cause about which you feel passionate?
6. What are the ten most important lessons you have learned in your life?
7. Are there some issues or perceived problems that have occurred over and over again?
8. What do you daydream about doing?
9. Imagine you are writing your epitaph? What things do you want to be remembered for at the end of your life?
10. What would you do if you know you could not fail? What would it take to achieve that?

There is another technique that I really enjoy using to identify topics that I am interested in, but that could be because I am more than just a little bit book obsessed. Try spending some time wandering around a large book store. What topics are attracting your attention? History? Architecture? Travel? Look for a pattern in what book topics attract your attention.

You can also look at the books you own. What topics have interested you enough that you have actually bought books about the topic – and spent time reading them?

And you can look at what magazines you subscribe to. What are the topics of the articles that caught your attention and you enjoyed reading?

Once you have all of this information collected, see what patterns you can identify, what topics keep popping up. These common interests and patterns will point towards your life’s purpose and will help you set life goals, help you design your lifestyle, or help you maneuver through a major life transition.

With your life’s purpose, a goal and a plan in hand, you can begin building your best life. Or at least that is what I plan on doing

TTFN

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This article was originally published on my other blog Ageless Explorer, on July 17th, 2009, under the title Would You Tell Me Please, Which Way I Ought To Go From Here

Completed So Far:

I now have a list of powerful keywords that I will be effectively scattering through my website. However, as effective as keywords are, every successful blog/website needs quality content. Two characteristics of quality content is that the content is both useful and unique. So, the next task is to start developing some useful and unique content.
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New Developments:

Regardless of what other search engine optimization techniques you use,  having quality content on  your blog is an absolute ‘must have’.

Although quality content generally consists of content that is well written (with correct spelling and grammar), it is, in fact, much more than that. Think of the websites and blogs that you regularly visit. Why do you keep going back to those sites? Usually visitors keep returning to sites, or sign up for subscriptions to the site’s email newsletter or RSS feed, because they find the information on the site useful to them, in one way or another. For example, the site entertains them, or it solves a problem they have, or it helps them learn how to do something, etc.

The other factor that most, if not all, successful sites have is that they are unique – the personality of the author shines through. So, if you have a natural laid-back attitude, let it come through in your site’s content, but if you don’t, then don’t force it. If you have a great sense of humor, let the content of your site reflect that, but, again, if you don’t then don’t force it. Write your content in the style that reflects how you would naturally hold a conversation.

Below are 10 tips that can help you create useful and unique content:

1. use your own ‘voice’ – make your blog unique by letting your personality through, don’t try to copy someone else’s blog
2. know your audience – know what their interest’s are, what problems they are trying to solve, what they are trying to learn more about, etc.
3. be entertaining – people won’t read dry, academic materials
4. be educational – create how-to articles and posts
5. be informative – provide useful information on a topic
6. be practical – provide interviews, case studies, and profiles
7. provide breaking news – keep people up-to-date with what’s going on in your area of expertise
8. create a sense of community – ask questions, solicit feedback, generate comments
9. be inspirational
10. be controversial

When you create quality content, a great idea is to use both your posts and your pages in tandem to generate the kind of content that keeps people coming back to your site, not just reading your posts on from their email. This is particularly useful if you have affiliate connections on your site, or are selling your own e-books or information packages from your site.

One way of doing this is to create posts that are relatively short, between 250 and 500 words or so. These posts could contain, for example, a brief introduction to an idea or a topic that is more fully discussed in an article that you have published on one of your site’s pages. You could then link the post to the article on one of your site’s page. (Search engine bots and spiders like internal links – more on this in a later post.) The article could be either a static page, or a Word document or .pdf file that you have published on a page. This way, too, the static pages remain ‘evergreen’ - they are easily available as stand alone content that keeps readers coming back to your site to read, while the dynamic posts can be more topical or controversial in nature.

If you are interested in exploring the type of content that can be found on very successful sites, then check out the Technorati website at: http://www.technorati.com, for a list of the Top 100 blogs (based on popularity). Interesting that most of these blogs are informative, useful and unique blogs.
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Next Step:

The structure and format used when writing for the Web is quite different than the structure and format used when writing for other media. The next post, to be published on Monday, will list some of these unique structure and formatting features that writing for blogs and websites require.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog from the beginning by going to the Introduction post.

Completed So Far:

My Blog is now live with a proper URL, I have planned what content I want to put on it over the next few months, and I am now at the point where I want to start developing the content.

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New Developments:

Before I could start working full-tilt on writing and preparing content, I needed to know a bit about Search Engine Optimization, and how to use SEO techniques to help draw visitors to this blog.

It is important to relax when you are learning new skills, particularly when they are as frustrating to learn as developing a blog

The reason to learn about and use search engine optimization is so that search engine spiders and bots can find, evaluate and rank your website or blog.

When someone does a online search, say on Google or Yahoo!, they usually end up with pages of results listing masses of websites, but only clicking on links to websites they find posted on the first 10 or so results pages. The more optimized your site is, the higher it will be ranked by search engines. This means that your site is more likely to end up on the first couple pages of the search engine’s results when someone searches on the keywords you have used to optimize your site with.

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Resources:

The resources I used for learning about Search Engine Optimization include:

• the SEO Copywriting Success program from the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), located at http://www.awaionline.com. This program’s format includes a set of DVD’s, a workbook and a textbook. The program goes into copywriting a little bit, but the bulk of the information is about SEO skills and techniques. The information is easy to understand and use – even for an absolute beginner.
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• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, by Darren Rowse & Chris Garrett. This book continues to amaze me with the amount of excellent information it provides.
• I also used the Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (3rd edition) book, written by Peter Kent, and have Google-searched for information I wasn’t sure of. Both of these resources are also excellent.

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Basically, there are four basic aspects to SEO-ing that bloggers should be aware of, and make good use of:

1. keywords and keyphrases
   • selecting keywords and keyphrases
   • using keywords and keyphrases
2. developing excellent content
   • useful and unique content
   • making your content scannable
3. links, links, and more links
   • internal links
   • outgoing links, and
   • incoming links
4. advanced keyword and keyphrase strategies
   • inserting keywords into meta-tags

Clicking on any of the highlighted sub-titles will take you directly to that post.

These four topics involve a lot of information, so to prevent you, dear readers, from getting a headache, I am going to further split these four topics into a couple of sections each, and post them individually on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays over the next couple of weeks.

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Next Step:

The first post in this series will be on Friday will focus on selecting the keywords and keyphrases that will start to bring traffic to your blog.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!