What next?

No, I'm not going on holiday, but it's always nice to have a pretty picture at the start of a post..he he....

Starting with the problem

Towards the end of last year I took a break from blogging and a step back to try and re-evaluate what I was doing and where I was going. Prior to that I was putting more and more time into my blog but watching my page views and income drop at the same time. Something wasn't working.

The first half of 2014

This year (2014) I've tried some new things and had a vague idea and plan about what to do, but things still haven't been super clear.

My 'vague' plan was to 'use what I've got' to try and work towards my goals of earning an income from home doing what I enjoy.

Wordpress

I decided to try hard with my fitness wordpress blog. I got free hosting for a year and decided after several years working with blogger blogs that I should try out wordpress.

I learned lots but ultimately when it came to renew the hosting and actually pay, it wasn't worth it financially.  So I transferred the main posts onto a blogger blog I set up for free! 

(A Fitter and Healthier Me). I like having a place to share what I do and learn in terms of fitness and health, but having a free blog for this makes more sense to me than paying $100 for a platform to do this.

Freelance Writing

I also started looking for freelance writing work this year. I figured since I was writing lots for my own blogs, I could try and get paid for writing for others.  In just over 4 months, I've made $500 doing this. Some jobs I've enjoyed, some I haven't. I've found a lot of people paying very little and expecting huge amounts of work. I've gained lots of experience through doing this, and I've added it to my other small part time income sources, like mystery shopping. But overall, it's reiterated in my mind quite how much I want to build my own business, so that I can benefit from all my efforts and work, not someone else.

Where am I going?

I've been feeling recently that I'm a bit 'lost' with my direction and lacking full motivation.

A few weeks ago, I found something called 100 Happy Days. To join in this, all you had to do was post a picture on social media each day for 100 days with the hashtag #100happydays. Apparently most people fail to complete this, but I thought I'd give it a  go. I'm good at sticking at things, good at motivating myself and am generally a very optimistic and happy person..

Sadly, I lapsed after a few days and then stopped completely.

Something is definitely not right, and so SOMETHING has to change!

What am I going to do?

Create a new plan of course.  It's been slowly formulating in my head over the past few weeks, and I need to make it very specific, achievable, purposeful and most of all fun and interesting for me to do.

This week as I've spring cleaned and decluttered my house, I've refined and polished my plan and I'm ready to go. No slipping, no slacking and definitely no giving up.

SO tomorrow I will be posting my new plan of action and on Monday it all begins!