Public Accountability Journal

I got this idea from ThinkTraffic.com they are working on a website that will make a million dollars over it's life, they are calling it the Million Dollar Blog Project.

So they are shooting for $100,000 a year for 10 years, and they are going to show how it is done starting with a new blog they create. They did admit that they do have an advantage that they already have a large audience and these people will be exposed to it from the start.

I guess the only thing they could really do is go create a blog and not tell anyone about it from any of their other sites, then see how it does. But this would probably be really hard for them to do.

The idea behind the public accountability journal is that you put down your goals someplace public where other people can see and that will help motivate you to stick to it.

The steps they have outlined are:

1. Identify your group or join a community.
2. Figure out your reporting periods. - every week, 2 weeks, once a month.
3. Say what you did and what you learned.
4. Optional - set a penalty for not following through.

1. So I am going assume that at least a handful of people stumble across this site each month and a couple of them may read this, so that is going to be my accountability group. (if your reading this, then thank you for doing your part).

2. Reporting periods. I am thinking it will probably work best for me to do it once a week, trying to do every other week would be too hard for me to keep track of, and after a month I probably would have completely forgotten about it. After this post I will use the weekends to get caught up and put out my accounting posts.

3. To start I have probably learned that my whole life I have never had a problem with motivation, or much of a problem with time management. I guess I have always been pretty good and focusing on what I wanted and then just working on it until I got there. For example, I just decided one day I was going to build a house, no plan, no planning, no list of things to do. I just started and built a house, the hardest part for me was getting the county to do the inspections and approve everything. Other than that I just did what ever needed to be done to get a house built. But the last few years I have noticed I have really had trouble focusing and getting things done. So to try and get back on track I am going to try this public accountability journal.

4. I am not sure about the penalty, I am not very big on the concept of penalizing. I guess about the closest I have come to penalizing someone would be to just stop communicating with them if things are not working out. That I suppose could be viewed by some as a penalty. Not really sure how I would apply that to myself though? I guess I am just going to skip the penalty part since it did say it was optional.

Five requirements to participate:

I didn't really pay attention to this the first couple times I read through the article, but it looks like there are 5 requirements

1. Your site needs to be a blog.
2. New or old blog, it just needs to not have earned any money.
3. You have to install Clicky analytics on your blog and Google Feedburner (both free services).
   
4. Must keep an accountability journal.
   
5. Must tell ThinkTraffic some details about your blog

• Blog name and url
• Author name
• monthly visitors
• subscribers
• total revenue
• progress log link
  

So I guess this is my first accountability entry, and the things I need to do are:

1. check out those two services that I need to sign up for.
2. then I need to set up a one blog or two - I have two sites I am thinking about doing, I might even try both of them just to see how it goes, and maybe give myself an out in case one of them crashes and burns.
3. post the information on the ThinkTraffic blog to get entered in their Million Dollar Blog Project.

For more details on the accountability journal idea, this is where I got it from:

http://thinktraffic.net/the-art-of-public-accountability-journals#more-6442

Public Accountability Journal