blogchild

The story of a blog, from birth to...?

Friday, January 12, 2007

Another blog-monetizing resource

Problogger.net looks like a pretty professional site. I'll see what I can find there that's helpful.

But I'm still feeling the sting of Guy Kawasaki's recent revelation that he made less than $4K last year from his blog, which is at about number 45 in Technorati.

Friday, December 15, 2006

More blogging guidance

Thanks to my friend Bureka Boy for his suggestion to look at Blog Bloke for more blogging hints. (Bureka Boy's blog looks much nicer, to be honest...) Anything to keep this one going; I'm still looking for that magic formula for hundreds, thousands of dollars a month in passive income. I'll keep buying an occasional Powerball ticket as well.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'm also working my behind off on The Antidote. Passive income? What's that? Oh, maybe that's the problem - I'm working TOO hard, and I should be more passive.

By the way, the first thing I read at Blog Bloke was a list of the top 15 ways to waste time on the Internet (other than blogging, apparently). I'm only familiar with two of them, YouTube and craiglist. Gotta get busy...

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Is it just me, or...

is gmail down for the whole world?

How did I let myself get so dependent on it?

Sigh.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

oh well...

Here I am, sunk in NaNoWriMo hell (to be honest, today went a little better), and now I find about NaBloPoMo.

(What's she talking about, anyway? you ask.)

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 crappy first draft of a novel in, yes, 30 days (I've got the crappy part down, for sure). No prizes, no competition; if you finish, you win... well, you win a sense of accomplishment, and then you have a draft to edit.

NaBloPoMo, which I just read about on someone else's blog, is National Blog Posting Month, the goal of which is to post to your blog every day in November. The difference (other than being, I imagine, less of a masochistic pursuit) is that this contest has prizes, which go to randomly drawn winners.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Over the top blog advertising strategy

I clicked on writingspark.com just now and heard a highly annoying buzzing sound; I figured there was a problem with the code somewhere. But no joke - there really was a bug: an ad with a buzzing mosquito, which you were supposed to slap (i.e., click on the ad) in order to win a free laptop (yeah, right - once you've given away all your family secrets and financial information). Sure enough, there was no way to make the thing shut up without actually clicking on the ad (or migrating away from the page).

Sigh. No one ever clicks on my ads...

Why jobless is better

It's an outrage, I know; I haven't posted here in almost a month. Technorati doesn't seem to be recognizing my posts in the new beta Blogger anyway, so maybe no one will see this, but I have something to share here.

It's a recent post by Steve Pavlina, who convinced me a few months ago that I could make money from blogging. I did almost all the things he told me to do and, well, the last time I checked I'd made $9.84 from Google AdSense. So maybe he's a complete snake-oil salesman after all. Still, the aforelinked post is a pretty compelling rationalization for not having a job, which I can appreciate right about now.


Why jobless is better

It's an outrage, I know; I haven't posted here in almost a month. Technorati doesn't seem to be recognizing my posts in the new beta Blogger anyway, so maybe no one will see this, but I have something to share here.

It's a recent post by Steve Pavlina, who convinced me a few months ago that I could make money from blogging. I did almost all the things he told me to do and, well, the last time I checked I'd made $9.84 from Google AdSense. So maybe he's a complete snake-oil salesman after all. Still, the aforelinked post is a pretty compelling rationalization for not having a job, which I can appreciate right about now.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

more on lifehacking

43folders.com is another lifehack site (read: personal productivity), and I think I like it better than lifehacker.com. Clearly they're direct competitors; lifehacker.com has a lot of cute webby stuff and some highly annoying glib health recommendations, one of I mentioned in my health blog today. As a web effort overall, I like what they're doing at lifehacker.com, as well as the fact that the principles are women, but 43folders.com has more in-depth, better written (if a little raunchy and guy-oriented) articles, and this GTD ("Getting Things Done") stuff looks like... well, the stuff.

I have to say, after reading all this stuff about productivity, I can see why there are suddenly so many life-coaches about. You don't actually have to DO this stuff yourself, but it should be really easy to take people's money by TEACHING it! You just need to get your act together enough to put up a website. The market has got to be huge - capitalism makes us all feel inadequate about what we accomplish. I'm not saying there aren't good life-coaches out there, but the temptation of making a living by teaching other people how to make a living seems almost irresistible.


Saturday, October 14, 2006

must-read site

A 43T friend has recommended the blog Lifehacker to me twice now, and I have to say, it's just an all-around great resource for keeping up with new and cool web stuff. Here are a few posts relevant to blogging: a comparison of blogging software and how to start a blog.

The posts mostly have links to other people's sites. In other words, it's something like this blog would be were it ever to grow up, and then some. Another cool thing is that the editor and one of the two associate editors are women. I see that editor Gina Trapani is a freelance writer and web programmer. I think she's my new hero, and I hope she's well compensated for Lifehacker.com!