Category Archives: Blogging

Adsense Blogging Goal Met For The Year!

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My secret Adsense goal for this year was to have my blog earn over $100 in 1 month via Adsense.

Fireworks

Fireworks

I’m happy to announce that I met this goal this past August with just a few cents over $100.  Next month, I probably won’t hit $100, but that’s okay because it wasn’t part of my goal.

This seemed like a stretch goal for me because for the first 5 months after starting my blog (almost 2 years ago), I only made 5 dollars.  To be fair, I didn’t even run Adsense for the first 2 months though.

So to celebration, on the way home from my day job, I got some food at a pulled pork place and bought myself an ice cream cone (mint chocolate) at the ice cream shop next door.  Not a big celebration, but it was nice to celebrate the goal accomplishment in some manner.

My Adsense goal for next year will be to earn $150 in 1 month.  Nothing over the top, but respectable.  Actually I have a financial range for next year.  I really want to hit between $150 to $200 per month.  So at a minimum, I would like to hit $150, but really if by some miracle I passed the $200 mark, that would be a much bigger celebration.

To some these goal might seem trivial and they are right, they are trivial to a certain extent, but I find that little milestones on financial goals work best for me.  I used financial milestones in paying off my mortgage, and to help motivate me to contribute and grow my 401k balance.  Financial milestones/goals really do make a difference!

So am I going to become a full-time blogger next year?  No way, I don’t expect this blog to ever make enough money to stop working my day job.  But as a hobby that provides an alternative money stream, blogging is great!

Would I like to blog or do online businesses full-time some day?  Yes, but that’s a long ways off.

Thanks for joining my in my goal accomplishment for my blog for the year.

Have a great weekend,

MR

 

Blogging At The Local Arabica Coffee House

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For fun and a change of environment, I’ve decided to break from my normal blogging area (the spare bedroom/my office) and instead blog at a local Arabica for a change of pace.  Arabica is kind of out of place in my small little hick town, and it shows!  Across the street is a small family owned tire shop, where all of the tires are used.  If you ever seen the “Dukes of Hazzard” movie, or better yet the TV show “Dukes of Hazzard“, the employees and owner at the shop are totally of a Cooter (the overdone country auto mechanic) type.  The shop is dirt (hey, it’s a used tire shop), and has pictures of all the employees with either a deer or fish that they caught or shot.  It’s quite amazing, and yes, I have bought used tires from them in the past…

I’ve been in this shop for the past 10 minutes and so far the small country coffee shop only had three people come in, and two of them were a couple.  Overall, it’s a quaint little cafe, with eight small two and four seat table in the entire place.  This particular Arabica looks like any other Arabica with the exception of the counter-top.  In particular, the siding on the counter looks like it’s made of stained plywood (I wish I had my cell phone on me, I’d take a picture).  Other than that minor imperfection, it’s like any other Arabica with respect to the decor.

While I worry about the viability of the small shop, it’s the perfect location for blogging!

Why am I here?

After my solo dinner experiment (Dining Out Alone Experiment) while at the Microsoft campus in Mountain Top California, I’ve had the desire to go out solo and try blogging (instead of reading a book) again at a similar place.  While a higher end Chinese restaurant and a coffee shop isn’t exactly the same, it’s close enough.

So you might be wondering what provoked this change in my daily blogging routing?  It’s basically that I want blogging to be a rewarding experience, and slowly drinking a simple latte at local coffee shop is a win-win experience.  For some reason, the latte taste better than usual (perhaps because I’m not rushed), and I get a solid environment to blog at.

I was hoping for some unusual people to enter the Arabic.  That way I could write about them, but so far it’s been 30 minutes since I arrived at the cafe, and nobody else has come into the shop and everybody has left except me.  Still, it has been an enjoyable experience…

I hope this place doesn’t go out of business, perhaps I’ll visit here in the future.

Regards,

MR

Self-Improvement Benefits of Blogging

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My Blog Beginning

Like many others bloggers out there, I started blogging because I wanted to share the techniques that I”ve used to achieve a degree of financial success.  I honestly thought that I was going to write so that the average person would get encouraged by read some of my articles and think “Wow, that would work” and give it a try.

I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that I was perfect, just that I had a better way of approaching finances.  While I still believe I have a lot to share, I never took into the account the self-improvement piece that was involved with blogging.  I was arrogant enough to believe that I was going to be the teacher, and I would be selflessly helping other, and reinforcing what I’ve learned over time.  Lately, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that it’s really a two way street!

The Self-Improvement Surprise

What I didn’t expect was the constant learning and self-improvement aspects of blogging!  I’m going to create a short list of ways that I’ve become both more creative and my self-improvements that have and are happening to me.

  • The Calm:  Since I practically create a blog post every day, I’ve learned that if I slow down and remain calm, I can get a decent post created.  Sometime going slower is really moving faster…
  • Organization:  I now have organization skills thanks to blogging.  In my prior life, I would just fly by the seat of my pants… no more!  Blogging has done wonders for the way I organize and track things.
  • Communication:  Compared to where I started, my communication skills now rock, not just in written form either!  Since I started blogging, both my written and oral forms of communication has improved.  This has been a very welcome and needed surprise in my life!
  • Continuous Learning:  Since I read other blogs and do research on topics, I learn something everyday.  Sometimes its earth shattering, but some times it’s small but interesting (it’s all good).  The point is that I’m not longer stagnant and just doing my time in life until I retire.
  • Virtual Friends:  I now have friends in remote location that I’ve never seen, but that I care about and who I’m rooting for.  We can all rise in the blogosphere!
  • Engaging in Conversation:  Commenting on so many other blog sites has enabled me to engage in verbal conversation in my real life more easily.  Whereas I’ve been an introvert for a good part of my life, now I’ll reach out and start the conversation instead of waiting for people to speak to me first.  I’ve since learned that prior to blogging, some people thought I was stuck up (to use a high school phrase), but this has never been so!  Now that I’m more sociable, they now see my true friendly colors.
  • Improved Writing Skills:  This is obvious, with practice comes perfection.  While I still have a long way to go to achieve perfection, at least I’m heading down the road instead of parking on the side of it.
  • Subtle Confidence:  While I don’t walk around saying that “I’m the man“, I do have a certain degree of increased confidence knowing that I’ve improved myself because of all the bullet points above.  It’s a great feeling!

 Why I Recommend Everybody Trying It

Obviously, I recommend it because of the benefits that I listed above! 

If you are going the serious route, consider going with a hosted service (hostgator.com, bluehost.com, etc), but if you just want to improve yourself and have don’t have a goal of creating side income from it, then consider one of the free sites like blogger.com or wordpress.org.

Surprisingly, I do make a little bit of money from blogging on the side.  While I didn’t start out with that as a goal, it has been a very welcome and pleasant surprise. 

Not sure if you want to try blogging or not?  Check out some of my previous articles on blogging called: Pros and Cons of Blogging, and the 15 Advantages of Blogging.

Good luck, if you decide to take the blogging plunge!

MR

My Blogging History Part 1

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During college, I had a computer science professor that told his students to go out and purchase domain names (and I think he said to buy a range of IP addresses too) because they were cheap and being bought up quickly (at least the good ones). 

I didn’t because I was in starving, frugal student mode at that time.  A few years later after getting a decent job, I heeded his advise and bought 2 domain name.

I played around hosting websites on my home workstation for years.  It purely was a hobby for me, and I had fun.  I created my first blog over 10 years ago, but I wasn’t using blogging software and the posts were directly into html code.  I knew I could write something that could make the process easier for me but I didn’t have time.  Eventually, I let my first website slid into the nonexistence.

In October of 2009, I discovered wordpress and thought I would give it a try.  So I downloaded a virtualization software package called “VirtualBox” and created a virtual machine that ran an “Ubuntu” linux server on my Windows Vista workstation.

A Major Problem, Dynamic IP Addresses

So basically I was self-hosting my blog at home, but a problem that I had was that my ip address wasn’t static and would occasionally change on me.  This would create an outage because people trying to get to my site would go to a wrong ip address until I change the ip address in my dns provider (Zoneedit.com).

After spending a week looking for a silver bullet to my problem, I discovered the Linux scheduler “CRON” and a Linux command that would change my dns configuration automatically!  Yeah, I would still have an average of 15 minutes of downtime ever time my ip address change, but it beat my previous record of 10 hours of a wrong ip address while I was at work.  And what if it changed while I was on vacation!  It wasn’t that bad though, my ip address only change about every 2 weeks or so since my workstation was always on.

Why I moved to a hosted solution

I was tickled that my total cost for my hobby was only costing me about $10 per year!  It seemed like a great deal!

But then my ISP (Internet Service Provider) started going out on me!  My ISP is a local cable company that was providing my site internet access and unfortunately, they were running at capacity!  Fellow buddy bloggers at site “EverydayTipsandThoughts.com” and the “FinancialSamurai.com” and would occasionally shoot me an email telling that my site was down or very very slow.

At this point, I was making a little bit of money via google adsense and even had a few advertisers onboard.  So after reading a few articles and books on blogging, at the beginning of October 2010 I decided to switch to a hosted solution via a hosting company (hostgator, bluehost, etc).

After the move to a hosted solution, my traffic increased 50% in one month and doubled in three months.  Apparently google prefers a faster site…

If I Could Do It All Over Again

If I were to do it again, I would still use wordpress, but I would definitely start out with an hosting company instead of self hosting my site the way I did (in a Virutal Server on a Windows Vista machine).

-MR

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