Journaling Ideas

Journaling Ideas Revisited

A friend sent me a link the other day with an offer of some journaling Private Label Rights (PLR) articles.  This got me thinking again about journaling ideas drawn from investing success and applied to my own internet marketing

The pitch was interesting – here is some free PLR from my friend with no sales pitch at all. Normally one is not allowed to give away PLR – you can give away the material but not the PLR. Two journaling ideas came to my head when I read the email.

1. My Journaling Success

I have had great success writing up my investing journal. As of August 30, 2019, I have written and published 462 investing blogs over at Steemit.com. You can find the link right here on this blog under the Investing Blogs menu item above. There is a story in there too – I went to have a look at the feed page when I started on this train of thought and it crashed my website. I got that WordPress white screen of death (WSOD) – took a while to fix that. It seems that the plugin that was pulling the posts from Steemit was deprecated and it crashed the whole site. That took me down a whole rabbit hole of technical stuff to fix it – now it is fed as an RSS feed.

I digress. I started trading forex some years ago now. The trainers always told us to write a trading journal.

• What the trade was.
• What you saw.
• What was in your mind.
• How were your emotions.

I paid lip service to that really. No worries: I will remember what I did. In forex trading, that can work as trades do not run for every long. In investing, it is not as easy to remember what was going on a few months or years later. So I started to write a journal every day that I make trades. I describe the trade. I lay out the logic. Over time, my journal has become a lot more structured – Bought – Sold – Shorts – Expiring Options – Income Trades – Cryptocurrency – Currency Trades is what it covers now. When I close down a trade I do the same thing and I go back to what I wrote at the start. That is where the power is – I learn from success and failure. I seldom make the same mistake twice.  The big benefit is that the site is fully searchable – I can search within my own blog posts and find anything I want = good for going back to study what I did.

Now I do publish that journal on Steemit.com. Steemit is a blogging platform with an associated cryptocurrency. We get paid for writing and curating content. The more people read and like your content, the better the rewards are. Of course, the cryptocurrency is hostage to the way the market values it. That has been a roller
coaster ride with my holding worth a lot less now than it once was. That is a side benefit really. You can see my wallet on the linked page I sent you – that tells you how much I have made.

2. Internet Marketing Challenges

My Internet Marketing has been a bit hit and miss. It is not working the way I would like with only occasional success – certainly not a steady flow.  I get going well on a path and then somehow lose direction and momentum OR the conditions change. My investing is not hit and miss – it is mostly working even given the recent volatility in markets.

My mentor, Dean Holland, keeps reminding us that success comes from Consistent and Focused effort. My investing coach always used to remind us to

keep doing what is working and stop doing what is not.

That triggered the 2nd train of thought. How about using journaling to combine the two themes? Write a journal every day that I do Internet Marketing stuff and keep track of what is working and what is not. I have written about this before and was doing quite well for a spell – then I stopped. Falling off the Twitter Ads horse was the trigger – going back to my investing coach – stop doing what is not working was in my head. Nah. Not really!! I went back to one of my psychology traits = low frustration threshold. I just gave up because I got a kick in the pants and lost faith.

Testing Journaling ideas

Stepping back then to why journaling might work. A quote from the journaling PLR I just got (for free)

Journaling can help you achieve your goals because it will force you to think about them, consider the why and how, and delve deeper into the situation so that you can examine all sides of it.

So there is step one to successful journaling . Write down your goals. I have never really been a goals persons. I just got on with life and it worked just fine. Dean Holland did push us all that time ago to write down the number that described what we wanted to achieve. For me, it was to make my finances somewhat less dependent on the state of investing markets – I did convert it into a hard crunchy number. That is goal enough and written down.

The next step is to write down the why and how. How are you going to achieve your goal? The business process we are following at Internet Profits is quite simple. The how for us is to deliver qualified prospects to the sales funnels. All the effort should be focused in on doing exactly that. Build a traffic engine and foster relationships with every person that arrives in the prospect pipeline. Quite an easy enough to understand HOW.

Now that HOW is a pretty big topic. It needs to be a little more specific. When I trained as a management consultant we always used to talk about “what we would do
differently on Monday morning”. Step 3 is to turn the HOW into specific action steps = feels like a to do list for me.

My investing journal is a little different – it is not really a HOW thing. It records the actions that I take. It does translate into new ideas every now and then BUT it does not really flow into a TO DO list. Maybe I can jack things up quite a bit there. I rely a lot on memory and scrolling through my portfolios as I listen to business and investing TV. The weekly and monthly reviews  and daily scrolling gives me the results – the market is continually revaluing my portfolios – that process is giving feedback about the effectiveness of what I do. It feels like the journaling is only taking me so far. There is a lot more to do.

So that is Step 4 – measure the results and use the journal entries to drive accountability. You set out to achieve X. You said your were going to take actions A,
B and C. You were aiming for Result P and Q. What happened?

I can see very clearly where my processes have fallen down. I do not have a concrete lists of steps to follow. I have a vague list in my head. The worst thing is I have slid into that hole – thanks Twitter. A few months ago I was writing up a list of actions for every week and reporting on them in a weekly blog post.

It is time to step back to follow the guidelines I just got from the journaling PLR. I have borrowed an idea I found on BuzzFeed about Bullet Journals and building on what I wrote above – Goals – Why – How -> Action Steps = To Do List.

Here is a bullet point summary of the first PLR article I got. Time for Action.

How Journaling Can Help with Achieving Your Goals

1. Write down your goals
2. Write down why and how of your goals
3. Crystallise what could get in the way and what could help (opportunities and threats)
4. Lay out the steps needed to fill in the details of HOW
5. Measure the results and make improvements
6. Build accountability – outside help or publishing helps with this. Honesty too
7. Keep a permanent record – even better if it is searchable
8. Share it – it might well inspire someone else. I know my investing and cycling journals do.

Resources

Grab your copy of the journaling PLR here – it’s a free resource.

Buzzfeed article on how to start a Bullet Journal