Well, I said I would be honest from the start so I’ll say it. I didn’t get up at 5am.
I was awake at 5am, but three hours prior I was heading out of the house to go and buy medicine for a sick friend and knew I would get nothing at all accomplished at 5am.
I did rise at 7am, and absolutely killed it today, so while I ‘failed’ my challenge, I don’t personally think I failed. I could lie about it but again, I would rather be honest here.
A few months before I started this challenge I was listening to a recording by Zig Ziglar, who wakes up at – I believe – 5:30am He said one day he had just returned home at 1 or 2 am and was dreading waking up at 5:30 am the next day because of how little sleep he was going to get.
Yet he praised himself for doing it, even though he admitted his day was a total write-off, because if he had skipped that day he would skip future days as well.
I only slept an extra two hours so don’t think I did too badly, and my article has now progressed to 1,700 words (mostly formatted and including all relevant images) so I’m proud of what I’ve done today so far. I certainly would not have made so much progress if I had forced myself to wake up at 5am.
I actually feel quite fresh, and I’m heading to the gym again as soon as I hit publish on this update.
[As a sidenote, I’ve just spent the last 30 minutes pitching something to a ton of editors around the world. I noticed that countries which block websites now have that blocking ‘bypassed’ by Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Pages. This is a pretty big deal as the data is now loaded from Google, the URL and IP blocks that countries have in place no longer work.]
Going back to the article, as I mentioned yesterday, once I have headings written out then the rest of the process is fairly easy. At least filling out each heading is very easy.
At it’s looking now I’ll probably reach around 3,000 words of content before I’m mostly done.
What I tend to do with articles like this is totally ignore what’s out there on the web until I’m finished my own post. Then I’ll search for something like “Advanced link building tactics” (the topic I’m writing about) and see if there are any great ideas I can include. I’ll try to add something the original author hasn’t covered but will always link back where it is necessary.
There are an additional thousand words I can include from a topic I’ve already written about in draft but I’m not too sure how it will tie in to the overall blog post.
Basically I want to cover link building tactics and not get into too much detail on how to write content can attract links. That’s what those extra thousand words would be about.
I’ll write up the post without those extra details and see how it looks then.
Right now it’s looking to be a lot shorter than I expected but I only really need one or two extra headlines to come to mind and that could be an extra few thousand words.
Of course I won’t make it longer just for the sake of it, and I’m very happy with my progress so far.