This guest post is by Jon Morrow of Copyblogger.

After all, that’s the dream, right?

Forget the mansions and limousines and other trappings of Hollywood-style wealth. Sure, it would be nice, but for the most part, we bloggers are simpler souls with much kinder dreams.

We want to quit our jobs, spend more time with our families, and finally have time to write. We want the freedom to work when we want, where we want. We want our writing to help people, to inspire them, to change them from the inside out.

It’s a modest dream, a dream that deserves to come true, and yet a part of you might be wondering…

Will it?

Do you really have what it takes to be a professional blogger, or are you just being dumb? Is it realistic to make enough money from this to quit your job, or is that just silly? Can you really expect people to fall in love with what you write, or is that just wishful thinking?

Sure, it’s fun to dream about your blog taking off and changing your life, but sometimes you wonder if it’s just that: a dream. This is the real world, and in the real world, dreams don’t really come true.

Right?

Well, let me tell you a little story…

How I quit my job

In April of 2006, I was hit by a car going 85 miles an hour.

I didn’t see him coming, and I don’t remember much about the accident, but I do remember being pulled out of my minivan with my shirt on fire. The front end of the van was torn off, gasoline was everywhere, and my legs were broken in 14 places.

For the next three months, I had nothing to do but endure the pain and think about my life. I thought about my childhood. I thought about my dreams. I thought about my career.

And overall, I decided I didn’t like the way things were going.

So I quit.

I sold everything I owned. I stopped paying most of my bills. I turned in my letter of resignation, worked my two weeks, and then disappeared without saying goodbye.

Hearing about my insanity, a friend called and asked me, “Well, what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe start a blog.”

And so that’s what I did.

For the next three months, I didn’t just tinker around with blogging. I dedicated myself to it. I started work at 8 AM in the morning, and I kept going until 11 PM at night. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t see my friends. From morning till night, I was writing, reading, and connecting with other bloggers. Nothing else.

Within a month, I had On Moneymaking off the ground, and within two months, it was getting 2,000 visitors a day and Performancing nominated it for the best business/money blog of the year. A couple of months after that, Brian Clark asked me to become the Associate Editor of Copyblogger, and so I sold On Moneymaking for five figures and went to work at one of the most popular blogs at the world.

And amazingly, that’s just the beginning of the story.

How I moved to paradise

Have you ever woken up one day and realized you secretly despise everything about where you live?

The weather is horrible. Your neighbors are jerks. You don’t like inviting anyone to your home, because it’s always a wreck, and you’re ashamed of how it looks.

Well, that’s exactly what happened to me in January of 2009. I was sitting in my pathetic apartment, wrapped up in blankets to keep warm, trying to get some work done on the computer, when it struck me how monumentally stupid it was.

I was a full-time blogger, for God’s sakes. I could do my work from anywhere in the world. Why on Earth was I living in this hellhole?

The only problem was I had no idea where I wanted to go, but a couple of weeks later, the telephone rang, and it was an old friend who had retired to Mazatlan, Mexico. As usual, he was calling to gloat about the weather and the food and the general superiority of the Mexican lifestyle, but instead of just suffering through it this time, I stopped him and said, “No, don’t tell me any more. I’m moving there.”

“What? When?” he stammered.

“I don’t know exactly when,” I told him, “but I’m starting right now.”

Two months later, I took a one-week trip to scout it out and look for places to live. When I got back, I started selling all of my stuff, packing the rest of it into storage, and saying goodbye to friends. Almost one year to the day after our phone call, I hopped in the car and drove just shy of 3,000 miles to my new beachfront condo in the finest resort in Mazatlan.

As I write this, I’m sitting on my balcony with my laptop, watching (no kidding) dolphins jumping out in the Pacific. It’s a sunny day, there’s a nice breeze, and I’m thinking about ordering a piña colada from the restaurant downstairs.

Lucky me, right?

Well, what might surprise you is I left out a piece of the story. It’s the part where I have a fatal disease, I can’t move from the neck down, and yet I essentially get paid to help people. Let’s talk about that part next.

How I get paid to change the world

You know what’s funny?

The worst part about having a disease like SMA isn’t how everyone treats you like a charity case. It’s not the frustration, anger, or depression. It’s not even the inability to reach over and pinch a cute girl’s butt when you want to (although that’s pretty bad).

No, the worst part is the freakin’ bills.  The doctors. The medication. The nurses.

I added it all up, and the total cost of keeping me alive in the US was $127,000 a year. That’s not rent. That’s not food. That’s just medical expenses.

Granted, I didn’t actually have to pay all that. I had private insurance, Medicaid, other government aid programs, but all that support comes at a price: they control you. The government allotted me only $700 a month to live on, and I had to spend every single cent above that on medical expenses, or they would cut me off.

So for years, that’s what I did. If I made $5,000 one month, I set aside $700 for living expenses, and I spent the other $4,300 on medical bills. Nothing was left. Ever.

And eventually, I got sick of it.

I wanted to make money without having to worry about losing my healthcare. I wanted to take care of my family, instead of them always having to take care of me. I wanted to actually live somewhere nice, not some ratty little apartment built for folks below the poverty line.

The only problem was, it just wasn’t possible for me in US. No matter how I played with the numbers, I couldn’t make it work. So, I did something crazy:

I quit Medicaid. I moved to Mexico. I stopped worrying about myself at all and started a business based on one simple idea:

Helping people.

I found up-and-coming writers who wanted a mentor, and I trained them. I found businesses who wanted to cash in on social media, and I developed their strategy. I found bloggers who wanted more traffic, and I created a course on how to get it.

In exchange, they paid me what they could. Some folks gave me $50 an hour and others $300 an hour, but I treated them all the same, and I dedicated myself to making their dreams a reality.

The results?

Within two months, I was making so much money so fast PayPal shut down my account under suspicions of fraudulent activity. Today, not only am I making more than enough to take care of myself, but a couple of months ago, I got uppity and bought my father a car.

Do you understand how precious that is? For a guy who can’t move from the neck down to buy his father a car?

And the best part is, I’m not making money doing mindless drudgery. I’m changing people’s lives.

Every day, I get emails from readers who say my posts have changed their thinking. Every day, I get emails from students who say my advice has changed their writing. Every day, I get emails from clients who say my strategies have changed the way they do business.

I can’t really believe it. Normally, a guy like me would be wasting away in a nursing home somewhere, watching television and waiting to die, but here I am speaking into a microphone and essentially getting paid to change the world. If my fingers worked, I’d pinch myself.

And here’s the thing:

I don’t want it for just me. I want it for you too.

The reason I told you this whole story wasn’t just to brag but also to convince you of one incontrovertible point:

YOU CAN DO THIS!

You want to quit your job and become a professional blogger?

You can.

You want to travel around the world, living life to its fullest?

You can.

You want to dedicate your every hour to helping people and making the world a better place?

You can.

Because listen … I know it’s horribly cliché, but if I can quit my job, risk the government carting me off to a nursing home because I can’t afford my own healthcare, convince my poor mother to abandon her career and drive my crippled butt 3,000 miles to a foreign country, and then make enough money to support myself, my mother, my father, and an entire nursing staff using nothing but my voice, then what can you accomplish if you really set your mind to it?

My guess: pretty much anything.

No, it won’t be easy. At some point, I guarantee you’ll want to quit. I guarantee people will treat you like you’re insane. I guarantee you’ll cry yourself to sleep, wondering if you made a horrible mistake.

But never stop believing in yourself. The world is full of naysayers, all of them eager to shout you down at the slightest indication you might transcend mediocrity, but the greatest sin you can commit is to yourself become one of them. Our job isn’t to join that group, but to silence it, to accomplish things so great and unimaginable that its members are too awed to speak.

You can do it.

I believe in you.

So get started.

Right freaking now.

Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger. If you’d like to learn more about what it really takes to become a popular blogger, check out his free videos on guest blogging.

Over the last two weeks I’ve been lucky enough to have some time away with my family in Singapore and Indonesia. With our 3rd child arriving in early July it was our babymoon and a last chance to get away with our two little guys for a bit.

The bulk of our time was spent on Bintan Island (Indonesia) where we stayed at Club Med Bintan (note: the pics in this post are all iPhone shots I took at the resort over the week) – a resort which had been recommended by a couple of friends.

I’ve never been to a resort quite like this one before. We usually try to get a self contained apartment in the locations we visit which we can do day trips from – but with ‘V’ (my wife) pregnant and with two active little boys we thought we’d go for an all included option like Club Med which also had a kids club and plenty of activities on site so that we didn’t have to travel once there.

While I was at the resort to relax and do anything but blog – my mind (as usual) did stray a little from the task at hand and I began to think about what I could learn from the experience on Bintan Island that I could apply to my blogging.

A couple of things stood out – one of which I want to explore today:

A Culture of Welcome

As we were bused down the front drive of the resort the first thing we saw was 10 Club Med Staff in front of the lobby clothed in bright T-shirts waving at us. They knew we were coming and a welcome party was out to great us (and our fellow guests).

As we were helped off the bus (while the resort’s theme song played and staff clapped) we were then ushered into the lobby where we were given cold towels and a cup of tea to drink while the manager of the resort welcomed us and told us what to expect over the coming week. Her welcome speech was interrupted only by the staff around her breaking into applause and cheering at numerous points.

OK – so it was slightly cheesy and over the top – but right from the very first moment it was clear that we’d been noticed and were being valued and integrated into the resort.

This continued for the coming 7 days that we were guests. It started with a personal tour of the resort and continued every time we walked past one of the many staff in the resort – on every single occasion they greeted us with a ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’ or ‘good evening’ and on many occasions they engaged us (particularly our children) in conversation.

Staff joined us for meals, they went out of their way to learn our kids names and integrate them into the children’s programs and at the end of the week a ‘farewell’ party again gathered to make sure we and our luggage found our way onto the bus and were thanked for staying (and our kids were given personal certificates for graduating kids club).

Our last view of the resort was 10 or so brightly clothed staff standing in front of the lobby waving until our Bus turned a corner off the driveway.

I’ll be honest and say at first I found the personal attention a little over the top (I’m an introvert and went expecting some ‘cave time’) but what I noticed over the week was that the intentional welcomes and attention that staff gave seemed to ‘infect’ those who were staying there. I’ve never been to a hotel or resort where guests interacted as much or where the ‘vibe’ of the place was so positive.

The experience was in stark contrast to our last hotel in Singapore (one which we paid more per night than the resort in Bintan) where there was a real absence of any kind of personal attention, where check in took half an hour and where we spent half our time on the phone to reception trying to rectify mistakes with our booking.

As bloggers – what can we learn from this culture of welcome?

People don’t go online simply get information any more – they want to belong. I discovered this early in my own blogging (in fact it’s part of what attracted me to the medium) so the more you can do to welcome and integrate people into the community of your blog and into relationship with you the better.

While it’s not possible to greet every single new reader at the door in a bright T-shirt with a wave – there are ways to make sure people feel noticed and welcomed when they arrive.

• Writing in a personal tone about real problems and issues that your readers face
• Inviting comments in your posts
• Using ‘Gravatars’ in your comments so people have the opportunity to see their own face on your blog when they do interact
• Responding to comment
• Inviting readers to contribute with guest posts
• Interacting with readers in a personal way on Twitter, Facebook, Ustream or other social media

The list could go on.

This is all particularly important in the early days of a blog. When YOU yourself take the lead in this community building/welcoming what then happens is that your readers begin to pick up on it and interact on the same way.

YOU have the opportunity to ‘infect’ your blog’s readers with a culture of inclusiveness and welcome. What happens when you do this is that you start to see readers taking initiative in welcoming other readers and creating community on your blog.

How do You Create a Culture of Welcome on Your Blog

By no means do I feel like I’m the best at creating this culture of welcome on my blogs. I try but if there’s an area that I constantly feel I could do more in it’s this.

The challenge with growing a blog past the early stages is to find ways to give that personal attention to larger numbers of people.

So I’d love to hear how others do it? How do YOU build a culture of welcome on your blogs (big and small)? I’m keen to learn from you!

Today I thought I’d compile a definitive list of must follow rules for bloggers that all successful blogs follow:

I was going to stop at ten, but 11 has a much nicer ring to it, don’t you think? Plus point number 11 brings them all together nicely.

This post was inspired by a variety of comments, tweets, and blog posts of late that suggested I or other well-known blogging “experts” teach “rules” or “systems” of blogging.

The reality is that there are no rules. While ProBlogger obviously contains a lot of teaching about blogging, I’d never want to suggest that all blogs need to subscribe to a single philosophy of blogging. Rather, this blog is a place where I hope to share what I do, as well as sharing what has and hasn’t work for me (and similarly, to let guest bloggers share their own experiences).

The reason I take this approach is that of the numerous blogs that I’ve been involved with over the last nine years, no two blogs have been identical in terms of what has and hasn’t worked. There are some principles that have worked for me, but transfer those ideas to other blogs, and there are no guarantees of success.

There are also a few strategies that I personally avoid in blogging that I’ve had little or no success with; however, they’ve worked for others.

If anything, the only “rule” of blogging that I’d be brave enough to preach is: find your own way.

Most of the successful blogs that I’ve come across have something unique about them. It might be the personality or voice of the blogger, the topic, the design, the fact that they were first, that they’re funny, that they’re comprehensive and thoughtful, that they post 100 times a day, or that they post once a month… But each of them is unique somehow.

Successful bloggers tend to forge their own path. Many of them are aware of what works for others and learn by observing, but they also take what they learn, experiment with it for themselves, and let it evolve in a way that fits with them and their audience.