Thoughts on Blogging

When I started this blog almost three years ago, I had big dreams. Especially, when it soared to become one of the top 100 personal finance blogs within a few short months. A position, it held by reader count until late last year, when it lost some of that share. My hope during the height of that time, was that the blog would become one of the top 100 of all blogs.

Like Daniel Lyons, in his article in the current issue of Newsweek, I soon realized that it just wasn't going to happen.

For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 to 20 times a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my blackberry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I'd kept secret. On that day more then 500,000 people hit my site-by far the biggest day I'd ever had-and through Google's Adsense program I earned about a hundred bucks.
- Daniel Lyons, Techtonic Shifts, Newsweek (Feb. 16, 2009)

For me, I guess the epiphany was when I was writing for the local dailies online paper in their blog section. It was during this time I noticed that my reader count was going down. Not only that, I even lost some of my Google PR (page rank) ranking during this time. Something that was very disappointing to me.

I also realized that the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, LA Times or any other major paper was going to call little ole me in Topeka, KS. Heck, I would be happy with just 500,000 visitors in a week or even a single month, let alone a day. The most visitors, that I got in a single day was, if memory serves me right, between 300-400. Why the surge? I had seen a story on HGTV about a woman who was living in an 84 square foot house. I went to my computer, found the video and wrote up a blog post on it. Apparently several people seen the same story, because the next 2-3 days I had people coming in from the search engines with such search results as "84 sq ft home," "84 sq ft house," and similar renditions of the search.

Still, even though, I am not going to replace my job with this blog, it would be nice to see twice as many daily visitors and/or to see more comments.

Still, I will hang in there. I will post about my personal struggles and my successes in my world of personal finance. I will also continue to post make comments about articles from mainstream media and other bloggers that I find interesting.

I will use the hotel business center and post about my trip to New York, from the big apple. Perhaps, I can even get an interview with the folks of Fox Business' (FBN) "Happy Hour." That could be an interesting story to write up for my you my readers. It would also be nice to meet and talk to former President Clinton and see if he can help me with the political fight I have been fighting for some 18-years. Although, I am sure that is just a pipe dream. It is nice to dream. Isn't it?

Overall, I enjoy blogging, and even though, I am not able to blog as much as I once did, will continue keeping you up to date and hopefully, just hopefully encourage you in your effort to become debt-free as well.



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go ahead share your thoughts with me now.