Sleepy Tales
Lucid Dreams and Segmented Polyphasic Sleep

“It’s possible to dream what you want to dream!”

I’ve been sleeping an average of 5 hours a night the past few weeks with an nap at in the afternoon and sometimes if I’m still sleepy, another nap early evening. I see this continuing for at least another month (especially with the Euro 2008 matches to watch in June!).

My dreams are more vivid now, and now more than ever, I’m aware of the fact that I’m dreaming and can control my dreams. I recently found the term for this:

Lucid Dream

“A lucid dream, also known as a conscious dream, is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. A lucid dream can begin in one of two ways. A dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD) starts as a normal dream, and the dreamer eventually concludes that he or she is dreaming, while a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD) occurs when the dreamer goes from a normal waking state directly into a dream state with no apparent lapse in consciousness.” Wikipedia

Apparently, you can learn how to achieve lucid dreams. So it’s possible to dream what you want to dream!

Segmented Sleep

I’ve not experienced any adverse effects from the reduced number of sleeping hours apart from feeling very sleepy after lunch (then again, I’ve always been sleepy after lunch with or without enough sleep), and this is relieved by taking a nap.

I was slightly worried about the effects it would have on my body but the article What is a natural sleep pattern? on Scienceblogs is reassuring to a degree:

“In a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night. The natural condition is bimodal – two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.”

Steve Pavlina took segmented sleep a step further by experimenting with Uberman or Polyphasic sleep, dividing his sleep into 6 half-hour segments and sleeping a total of 3 hours a day for nearly half a year. Yikes!

Given a choice, I think I’d still prefer to sleep 7-hour straight at night but at least I can rest in relative comfort now. :)

My Blog Traffic Generation Story
Techniques I Used to Generate and Increase Web Traffic

I started this blog, in the middle of January 2008 and currently have a readership of more than 3000 a month, a decent number for a blog that just turned 4 months last week. I thought, I’d share how I got here:

JANUARY - Setting A Goal

My goal was to have 3000 readers a month by 15th April 2008.

I had a very strong believe that it was an attainable goal. At that time, I didn’t look into actively promoting my website. I just I thought if my writing and drawings were good enough, my blog traffic would come naturally. I was a naive blogger! :P

FEBRUARY – Give Some Feedback (And Get Some Back)

In mid-Feb, Growing Happiness turned 1 month old with 3 visitors a day. It felt kinda lonely writing for myself but consoled myself with that fact that the blog is only a month old.

I had a shift in mindset at the end of month. I used to think no one would really care about what I had to say on their blogs but then I thought, “if I wanna hear people’s opinion on my blog, surely these people would want to know what I had to say too”.

I started commenting on other people’s blog regularly (about 5-10 blogs a day). I didn’t consciously pick blogs within my niche, just blogs that I was reading at any given time. If I had something to say that would add value to the blog I’m reading, I’d leave a comment.

MARCH – Social Networking

By the end of my second month of blogging, I had about 360 readers or about 12 readers a day. At this rate, my goal of 100 a day readership by the next month looked like an arduously uphill task. I decided to be more active in the blogging community in order to make my presence felt.

I joined NaBloPoMo, a community in support of daily blog posting. It was a good way to kick start a daily writing habit. Although I didn’t get a lot of web traffic from there, I did get quite a few visitors coming for my free HTML badges and the WordPress and Blogger tutorials that came with it.

I also became more active in StumbleUpon. I did a lot of stumbling, wrote reviews of sites I enjoyed and made a couple of friends.

APRIL – Traffic Surge

I joined BlogCatalog a social blog directory and was moderately active in the discussion forums. I made a number of good friends there and, despite my initial resistance, started to enjoy this community thing greatly! The friends I made from BlogCatalog are fantastic. They are probably my most loyal readers and active commentors. Thank you guys! :)

As regular comments started coming in, I became a confident blogger. People reacted to what I wrote and I enjoyed the interaction. My blog traffic improved to about 25 visitors a day in the first week of April. Despite this very modest number, I still held strongly to the believe that I could achieve a 100 a day average readership by my third month (ending 15th April).

On 14th April, the eve of Growing Happiness third month, I had… 18 visitors. It seemed nearly impossible that my traffic would increase to 3000 the next day. However, I chose to be a positive blogger.

On 15th April, my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when I checked my stats — I got nearly 7500 unique visitors through StumbleUpon overnight for my post “The Best Cure for Hiccups“!. That was about a 400 times increase in visitors to my blog within a single day! However, the traffic died down quickly. Within four days, it went from thousands to about 30 visitors, proving the volatile, unpredictable and non-committal nature of web traffic driven from social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Technorati.

A week later the same post got featured on Tipnut which saw my blog traffic jump to the hundreds range. But my winning streak didn’t end there. The week after that, the “how to stop hiccup” article got featured in LifeHacker, seeing my blog traffic jump to the thousands again.

MAY – Planning for Future Expansion

While I enjoyed BlogCatalog, it took a huge chunk of my time. I decide to limit my participation there to a few times a week to concentrate on writing articles for my blog (and of course, work!)

I joined Doodle Week because doodling is something I enjoy greatly. It was a really fun exercise and I even made a couple of new friends from there.

I also submitted two articles to Blog Carnival, and the post Specify Your Ideal Job Today was selected to be featured on the carnival How To Make Money Doing What You Love at Inspired Moneymaker.

I am on the look out for other ways to expanding my readership so here are some other blog traffic generation methods I may experiment with in the coming months:

Posting Frequency

Damien Riley of Postcard from the Funny Farm (and a friend from BlogCatalog!) suggested, against convention, that posting frequently can result in increased traffic to your blogs.

At the moment, I post about 3 times a week. One of these weeks, when I’m not too busy, I might try posting a few times a day and let you guys know the result. :)

Twitter

Ades of Adesblog mentioned in his post “Twitter is increasingly becoming one of the top sources of web traffic to many people’s blogs”

Since I will be embarking on an exciting project that would require me to be away from the computer for long periods of time, I’m very keen to explore other ways to keep my readers updated and Twitter seems to be the answer.

Conclusion

What conclusions about blog traffic generation can I draw from my blogging experience so far?

It takes work – Promote yourself and accept that you need the community.
Being part of a community or network such as BlogCatalog is a great way to make new friends and expand your readership. I’m thankful to have so many friends from the web!

Always be grateful.
Only 3 readers? Those 3 readers are your best friends and cheerleaders. There are millions of blogs out there and they choose to read YOUR blog! That’s a great honour!

A post that addresses a need or attempts to solve a common problem appeals to the masses. The popularity of my “how to stop hiccups” post was due to its timeless, universal appeal — everyone has hiccups now and then and would like to know the easiest, fastest way to stop it. The more timeless, useful posts you have, the more blog traffic you will get. Which is why so many professional bloggers promote the writing of “pillar posts” (See “What are Pillar Articles?” below for explanation).

You need to have patience.
Unless you have a large marketing budget or count a blogging celebrity as your drinking buddy, you have to start from scratch. And it takes time to build something from scratch.

Never underestimate the importance of having goals and the power of positive thinking.
As my experience outlined here show, it is important to have clear goals and remain positive. You’d never know what can happen overnight!

All the best!

What are Pillar Articles?

Pillar articles are not your average blog post. They are comprehensive posts which offer great value to readers and are timeless in nature. The posts are usually longer with well-researched and original content.

Resources
Pillar Posts Definition and Tips on Adesblog
Characteristics of Pillar Articles on Daily Blog Tips

Specify Your Ideal Job Today

My internet connection has been, to put it mildly, crazy the past 5 days (still is). I’d be typing a long and carefully thought out comment on someone’s blog and then in the middle of posting, have it disappear into the dark cyberspace, never to be found again. The whole of my Monday was spent trying to rectify this problem. Alas, according to the service provider there’s nothing wrong with the connection, and the technician who checked the modem found no fault with it either (the problem was intermittent – he waited nearly 40 minutes for the connection to drop but NOTHING happened! Grrr! ) so I’ve been taking a lot of my work offline.

Speaking of work, I can’t help but be thankful for the fact that, being my own boss, I can choose my working (and blogging) hours. I’m typing this on a word processor, at 2:30am (I’d probably post this at a random time later, when the connection is up). Yes, I’ve never been so busy in my life — as I approach deadlines, I’d be sleeping just 6 hours a day ( the past week, I averaged 5 hours a night) — but I never had so much fun and joy doing work either.

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Getting Work Started
A Tip for Procrastinators

Good Monday everyone!

For most of us, it is the start of another week day. The procrastinator in some of us may still cling on the hems of Sunday’s lazy, comfortable sheets but listen, no matter how adept you are at putting off work, you have to do work eventually because that is what you are being paid to do. But a tiny voice in your head says, “but the deadline is still 2 days away!” Listen to this little guy and before you knew it’s Wednesday and you haven’t done a thing.

Yes, there are deadlines for work. But there’s also a deadline for when to start work. The difference is – you get to define it. The problem? Most of us do not clearly define our “start work deadline”.

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Tutorial: Creating Dotted Shapes Using Photoshop

I have to admit, I don’t usually create my dotted or dashed lines in Photoshop, I do them in Illustrator because it gives me more control over strokes. But fret not, you can create nice dotted shapes in Photoshop too. Today we’re gonna learn how to create dotted shapes. You can apply this method to any shape. In today’s example, I’ll walk you through the steps in creating a dotted circle. There are 5 images in this tutorial (not including the example above)

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NaBloPoMo Badges – April 2008

Although I am not on the blogroll for April (the theme is “Letters”), I have made some badges for the month anyway!

Download away!

Note:
Feel free to use them on your blog but please download and save them to your server first (do not hotlink from this website). If you’ve used these badges, do link back to NaBloPoMo website, I’m sure Eden will appreciate it. See instructions and other badges at the NaBloPoMo site.

You don’t have to link back to me (although I’d greatly appreciate it ♥) but I’d love to see these being used on your blog, so drop me a comment if you do, and I’ll pay your site a visit. :)

Tutorials
Adding Badges using Blogger
Adding Badges using WordPress