A year ago I embarked on a fool-hardy adventure in blogopolis and I’ve come back to update the tale.
It all started when I left work to stay home and look after the kids, while my wife went back to full-time employment.
In my wisdom I decided that I was going to turn to the Internet to make some additional money to help support our lifestyle.
I spent weeks planning and building a website and getting hosted with my specially selected domain name. A name I thought would bring a lot of traffic because everyone wants to ‘teach their children’ something and I figured thousands of people would be typing this phrase in to Google every minute of the day.
WRONG!
So anyway, I got the site going and put up what I thought was great content.
I was very precious about it. I worked on some of my posts for hours and hours getting them just right before hitting ‘publish’, because that’s what I thought I had to do. I felt my writing needed to be as perfect as I could make it, and that no-one would take me seriously if I didn’t.
It wasn’t easy. For starters I’m not a writer, not by a long shot – and also I had to juggle looking after the kids and running the household while trying to write ‘quality content’. HA!
To be fair, I was really lucky in the beginning. I had a few people who jumped in and supported me right away, and laregely because of that, I had anywhere between thirty and fifty comments on my blog posts in a very short space of time
Very early on I wrote a post that drew in thousands of people from StumbleUpon and thought, if I can do it once, I can do it again.
Honestly, at that point I thought it was only a matter of time before I hit the big time and sponsors would be breaking my door down to throw money at me.
Sadly it never happened but I pushed on regardless.
I coped fairly well until problems started to befall me. My site broke after a gremlin struck with the hosting, it took me ages to fix and I lost all the comments. To cut a long story short I became disheartened, ended up writing infrequently and begrudgingly and it all became too much of a chore.
The stress of feeling (erroneously) that I was just about to break through, and feeling that I had to keep pushing forward, leaked over into my role at home. I damaged my relationships and I ended up quitting the blog.
It wasn’t too long though before I started to miss blogging and so I set up a site called Selfish Blogger. It was supposed to be a light hearted quick and easy way to stay online and stay connected to all the friends I’d made.
It turns out that I couldn’t really sustain my commitment to that blog either.
Why?
Well, it’s simple. Time is money. Or more accurately when it comes to social blogging, time is not money – it’s just time, and lots of it.
Social blogging is great fun, but when I’m pushing my kids away just so that I can write fluff and crap for social purposes only, it’s not on.
I had to walk away from Selfish too.
But now I’m back. Again!
I’ve come back to try another approach.
I’ve come back to make money.
I’ve never actually given up on the idea that I can make blogging work for me. I’ve always believed it’s possible to earn a decent income from the Internet, but clearly I just didn’t know how. So instead of flogging a dead horse and keeping two sites going for the sake of it, I got on with learning what I needed to learn.
The basic plan is I’m going to use this site to experiment – to put the theory to the test and make some damn money.
I make no apologies for that either.
I don’t mind investing the time and making sacrifices but there has to be an end result. I have to know that the hours I spend online are not just to pass the time of day, chatting with lovely people – and as nice as that is (and it is), that time investment has to lead to something more. It has to.
If it doesn’t… I’ll drop it again and go back to the drawing board.
So, you may see some strange things happening here. You may wonder why I’m writing posts about glue or underwired bras or duct tape or dishcloths or space hoppers or anything else that takes my fancy – but you needn’t worry, I haven’t lost the plot.
Basically I’ve got to the stage where I want to write about what I want to write about even if no one else likes it. I know that sounds bizarre, but honestly, I’ve dropped the idea of building a readership or a following. If it happens then that’s nice, if it doesn’t that’s OK too. Neither of those outcomes should affect my ability to make money from this blog. Sounds cold I know but I don’t mean it to come across that way I’ll explain in more detail at some point.
And on the subject of being a selfish ass…I also have plans for Selfish Blogger. I think I’ve found a way to keep it alive while making it useful to my bloggy friends – but more about some other time.
OK, so, I’m still alive, I’m still married, I still have lots of children, I’m still a stay-at-home dad.
And I’m still smiling!
In case you’re wondering why I’ve written this long assed blog post, it’s really only for the benefit of the people who still have this site in their reader. I appreciate all the support you gave me in the beginning and I felt I owed you an explanation.
Take care.
See you soon.
Dave
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