What’s your second act story?

Besides running the Blogathon, I work as a writer, editor and blogger, and am a regular contributor to SecondAct.com, a news website for people over 40.

Donna Wares, SecondAct’s managing editor, is a big fan of the Blogathon, and has offered me an opportunity to promote the event.

Donna is inviting Blogathon bloggers in their 40s and 50s to share your second act stories – or the second acts you aspire to – in posts on your respective blogs on Wednesday, May 16, and she’ll use some of them in a follow-up story on SecondAct.

Your second act story

Your mid-life second act could be starting a business, going back to school, switching careers, leaving a corporate position for a nonprofit organization, or even starting a blog to share your passion.

Posts don’t have to be about a second act you’ve already accomplished. If you’re in the process of figuring out “What’s next?” write about that. Readers are just as interested in understand the journey to reinvention that other people are taking as they are stories about the result.

Donna and I will look through all the posts and choose some highlights to include in a SecondAct story, along with links back to each blogger’s post, which could result in a nice traffic boost.

What this means for you: if you’ve got an idea for a second act or life reinvention post, write about it on May 16 – consider it a bonus theme day. If the subject isn’t relevant to you or your blog, proceed with whatever you’d planned to write that day.

In case you’re not familiar with it, SecondAct is owned by Entrepreneur Media, publisher of Entrepreneur Magazine and Entrepreneur.com.

Here’s the email Donna sent me to share with all of you:

Michelle,

Congratulations on the launch of the 2012 Blogathon. What an impressive, eclectic group of contributors! Many seem to be blogging as part of a career makeover, which is a subject we explore daily at SecondAct.com.

I’d like to invite your contributors to write posts sharing their own midlife reinvention stories on Wednesday, May 16. Tell the world: What is your second act? Or what do you aspire to do as your second act? SecondAct.com will follow up with a roundup featuring those reinvention stories (along with a link to the original posts).

Thanks so much for all you do to help others stop procrastinating and start writing every day.

Best regards,

Donna

Donna Wares, Managing Editor Online

Entrepreneur Media

Visit: http://www.secondact.com/

Tweet: @secondact

Mail: dwares@secondact.com

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Seal Beach Daily – Take two former reporters, add Web design and blogging skills and you’ve got the Seal Beach Daily, a virtual daily newspapers covering the neighborhoods in and around Seal Beach, a beach town that straddles the border of Orange and Los Angeles counties. The site is one of the latest examples of community microblogging – a new fangled word for the old fashioned community journalism you used to find in the metro section of daily newspapers or the neighborhood papers you could pick up in the grocery store or gym. The Seal Beach Daily is the work of author and former newspaper reporter and editor Donna Wares and partner Kate Cohen a long-time graphic designer and Web maven. Wares and Cohen are also the brains behind CaliforniaAuthors.com, “News and notes from America’s biggest book market.”

The power of blogging with a long term view – Blogging is not a get rich quick proposition. It’s a long, slow slog. At least that’s Duncan Riley’s take on the revenue-generating prospects of blogging, in a guest post he wrote on ProBlogger.com. Riley, founder and editor of The Inquisitr, basically a news & culture Website, writes:

Take it as a given up front that you will not get rich overnight from blogging. But how long does it take? I’ve always subscribed to the view that any blog needs a good 6-9 months to establish itself based on my experience in previous blogs and blog networks. The Inquisitr ended up being true to form, and it was our 7 month that things really took off in terms of traffic and actually making a profit. Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo and the founder of the Weblogs Inc blog network though thinks its longer, and commented recently that he puts the number at 2 years. The semantics may be a case of how “established” you would term a blog to be. I’m not about to spend Christmas on the Caymans from The Inquisitr, but in 2 years time…well, you never know that.

My own experience with this blog bears this out. Daily traffic to this blog doubled when I hit the 9 month mark in September and has doubled again since then. What’s most interesting to me, though, is how many posts visitors to WordCount read – on any given day it’s between 35 to 45. That means approximately 20 percent of the content on the site is being looked at every day. Some of my most popular posts are months old – definitely a long-tail phenomenon.