As usual I’m a bit behind on the goings on in internet world but better late than never, I guess. A couple blogs that I read on a regular basis have been sold and it seems as though there are plenty of others that have been offloaded recently as well. I’m not really sure what to think about this flurry of blog sales. Part of me is confused, part is annoyed and part is impressed.

• The confused part - I don’t read that many blogs regularly. The more I like what the blogger is doing or has to say or the more interesting I find them, the more likely I am to become a regular reader. Based on this, I wonder why people buy blogs. Sure they’re getting a design that is up and running but they could pay a lot less for a much better custom WP design. True, they’ll be adopting a set of regular readers but how many of them are likely to continue reading? Lots of incoming links is a good thing I guess but that’s not hard to do with some serious commenting. I figure if a blogger is good they should be able to start a blog on their own. If they’re crap then people won’t read the blog anyways so it’s a big waste of money.
• The annoyed part - I think blogging is about building relationships and when the author sells the blog it sort of feels like a very nerdy betrayal. I thought he loved me… I guess I was just another notch on his RSS belt. *sniff*
• The impressed part - I have to give kudos to anyone who can create something from scratch and turn it into a saleable item in a few months. Even though the whole process leaves me feeling used and abused, I can’t help but admire them for it.

Are there are people out there who flip blogs like real estate? It might be an interesting thing to look into if you’re a talented writer and know how to turn a new blog into an established one pretty quickly. I wonder if they’d be able to continue attracting readers to their new blogs after each sale. I would be unlikely to read a blog knowing that the author plans to sell it in a few months.

I wonder how many more blogs will be sold during this mini-frenzy? I would feel strange selling my blog, I think. I would need bucketloads of money to sell any of my websites and I’d have a hard time letting go of them because of the zillions of hours I’ve put, in. I guess everyone has their price though!

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I’m writing this post with a hellish hangover so if parts of it don’t seem coherent it’s because my head is about to explode. It can tend to cause a bit of a distraction, the old head exploding thing.

Well I’ve been blogging now for one month and I though I’d check in with a sort of progress report. I’ve hugely exceeded my expectations! Of course, not having any expectations to begin with sort of helps.

Stats

• Posts - I’ve eeked out 31 posts and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with myself for keeping it up. I find it pretty enjoyable when the topic is something I love talking about.
• Comments - At first I felt a bit like a psycho who was talking to myself but now that I’ve got a wee group of fab readers who’ve contributed 81 comments so far, I don’t feel so crazy anymore.
• Visitors - Lately I’m getting about 30 to 40 visits per day. My best day was last weekend with 93 people wandering over for a read.
• RSS subscribers - This one can fluctuate quite a lot but at the moment it’s at 54 subscribers. I reckon this is a decent number for a month old blog but who knows.
• Technorati - My authority thing is at 20 and my rank is 324,580. I don’t know much about Technorati except that the first number needs to go up and the second needs to go down so here’s hoping that happens.
• Alexa - I think Alexa is a pile o’ poop but for the record my rank is 805,232.

Other Stuff

• Search engines - I get barely any traffic from search engines so that’s something to look forward to. I’ve had a couple of obscure searches point to me though such as “banner ads play music” and “2007 money found this site”. However I don’t think those will be keywords I’ll be targeting.
• Links - I seem to be appearing on a few people’s blogrolls which is sweet. I like how bloggers share links pretty freely. With my websites I’m very careful about who I trade links with and rarely give a link without swapping. It’s nice to throw caution to the wind and send out some link love and it’s even better to see the love coming back my way. There’s a lot of love in the room.
• Contacts - This blog has reminded me that the internet isn’t some big faceless void and making contact with so many people with similar interests has been great. Hopefully I’ll see some of you out on the road working and travelling and we can have beers, get drunk and fall down.

I’ve said it many times that blogs are crap but I’ve changed my heathen ways and am really glad to be a convert on the road to recovery. It’s been good times so far but I’m really looking forward to sharing tips and advice on working on the road. That’s when things will start to get interesting! Bring on January I say.

Just one last thing… without going too much into arse kissing mode, I just wanted to say thanks for reading and commenting, your emails, link love and sharing your ideas and all that good stuff. Arse kissing done.

Woohoo, my hangover is gone!

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Most of us bloggers don’t make the kind of coin that makes it possible to do this full time. We have to trek into work every day to be able to pay the bills and, as a result, blogging becomes a part time gig done in our spare time. Well rejoice because it doesn’t have to be this way! If you you can manage to land a cushy office job for yourself then you will be able to blog at work on the sly with these super sneaky strategies:

• Use your time wisely - Save your work (the stuff you’re paid for) for when your boss and co-workers are in the office and and try to do your blogging when nobody is around. You’ll be able to relax a bit and won’t have to constantly be on your toes.
• Blog under cover - If being on the internet becomes too obvious, do your blogging in Word or Outlook and then copy and paste the text over at a more opportune moment. Working this way gives the added bonus of a spelling and grammar check.
• Make office-type noises - Sitting in silence for too long can cause suspicion so if you’re doing a lot of reading and things are starting to get a bit quiet, make sure you hammer at your keyboard a bit or rustle some papers around every now and then. Asking your boss if there’s anything they need done is good for added effect.
• Make lots of tea/coffee - Keep your boss sweet by offering to make tea. Bringing in donuts or cookies occasionally is also recommended. Be careful not to kiss too much ass so as to not raise suspicion.
• ALT -TAB switcheroo - Bosses can be known to spring on you with little or no warning. To counter surprise attacks, open up another screen (preferably something important looking like a spreadsheet) and follow these instructions: Hold down ALT… that’s right, do it with me now… and then press TAB and let go. Watch that screen change in an instant! Saves you from frantically clicking on the minimise button as your boss approaches. Super sneaky and an essential strategy for blogging at work so make sure you practice.
• Keep on top of your work - As much as I’d like to burn all of my filing and ‘accidentally’ misplace all of my data entry stuff, I can’t. Being able to get away with murder means being good at your job and get things done on time.
• Get a corner computer - If you’ve got a prime spot in the office so that nobody can see your screen then you’re in luck. If not, try to swap your way to the deepest, darkest corner of the office to be able to have a blogging free for all. Continuing to rustle papers every now and is still important, you don’t want to get too confident. If a secluded screen isn’t possible, make friends with the people who can see it so they don’t raise the alarm. See the point above on cookies and donuts.

Being a part-time blogger need not mean you have to lock yourself in your room on evenings and weekends tapping away frantically. Use these strategies and you’ll be blogging at work in no time! It also helps if you don’t have any work ethic and aren’t the guilty type.

WARNING: Do not, I repeat, do NOT under any circumstances go out for drinks with your boss and co-workers, get ridiculously trashed and drunkenly admit your evil plan to one and all. Very bad.

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I’ve been going pretty hard with the whole blogging thing for the past few weeks and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that posting 7 days a week will be the death of me. So in the interest of staying alive, I’ve decided that I’m going to spend my Sundays recovering from hangovers, eating takeaway curries and lounging around.

While there won’t be anymore Sunday posts I’ll still be chained to the computer working hard on my websites. Except for today though… I’m off to the pub to watch Canada destroy Wales at rugby. I am an eternal optimist, after all!

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I’m into my second week as a blogger extraordinaire and I’m really enjoying it so far. I’ve been writing every day and it hasn’t been as much of a chore and I thought it would be. Of course I’m only around 15 posts in so ask me again when I’m floating around post 200 and trying desperately to think up something to write. If you start to see posts detailing how many socks I have of each colour or listing my all time favourite TV shows from the 80s then you can bet that I’m out of ideas, but for now things are going well.

I often have amazingly wonderful ideas for posts pop into my head only to see them fall victim to my dreadful memory and vanish into thin air. I always expect to remember them, but that never happens. This is probably really nerdy but I’ve started carrying a notepad around with me to jot my ideas into. Not one of those fancy electronic things either, I’m talking old school pen and paper.

If I come up with even a vague idea for a post or even just a title, I’ll jot it down. I’ve been doing this for a week and end up with half written posts, unfinished lists and little pieces of paper with blog post titles scribbled everywhere. Then every few days I consult my notepad of amazingly wonderful ideas and type everything that doesn’t suck into my blog as draft posts.

At the moment I have about 30 draft posts on the go. Some are feeble efforts that may never see the light of day and some are mammoth essays that I might be able to break up into a handful of posts. Whenever I get a spare second at work (or decide that I want to avoid work for several hours) I’ll fire up the blog and delve into my drafts, adding to each a bit at a time.

So far this has worked really well for me and I haven’t forgotten too many ideas lately. At least I don’t think I have, I don’t really remember.

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It looks like I’ve finally done it. I’ve accepted that my current system of building websites with Notepad, HTML and some very crappy CSS just isn’t gonna cut it in the fickle Web 2.0 world. People want gadgets and gizmos and content that’s updated 3 times an hour and RSS feeds and all the bells and whistles that, until a couple weeks ago, I had pretty much zero knowledge of.

Why I am a Blogging Convert:

• Community - This is by far the major advantage to starting a blog. They’re interactive and you will be almost instantly connected to a community of like-minded people. Bloggers are a lot less anal about sharing a bit of link love and following people’s blogrolls is a great way to find other people who are into the same things as you.
• Instant Feedback - No matter how great the content on my static websites is, it’s very unlikely that I’ll get any feedback on it. Sure, I can see how popular a page is in the stats, but it can’t compare to getting a comment with feedback on what you’ve written. I know I can set this sort of thing up on my sites but I’m too lazy to figure out how to do it and using Wordpress makes the whole process painless.
• Loads of Templates - I hadn’t realised how many websites there are out there with free Wordpress themes for me to get my greedy paws on. Even if customisation is beyond the blogger, the availability of templates means that we’re not subjected to loads of sites that are clones of one another.
• Customisation Easier Than I Thought - When I made my first few head exploding attempts at customising my Wordpress theme I was downloading and uploading everything with a separate FTP program. I hadn’t realised I could do all the customisation in the admin area and this discovery has made everything a lot less confusing.
• Widgets - Why didn’t anyone tell me about the wonderful world of dragging and dropping plugins? Now that I’ve discovered the mighty widget, all is clear. It’s great being able to add cool features to the sidebar without having to wrestle with coding I don’t understand.
• Can Be Up and Running in Minutes - There really isn’t much to getting a blog up and running and that’s a totally new thing to me. Most of the sites I design from scratch take a month or two before they’re alive and kicking. Setting up a blog gets things going quickly and if I want to add static pages to teh site later I still have that option. Things move fast in the online world and wasting a month tweaking a design really isn’t the best use of my time.
• Non Techie People Have Things to Say Too - Ok snobbery aside, I suppose I can share the net with people who might be a bit HTML challenged. There are pleny of people out there who have stuff to say but might be a bit techie challenged and I still want to be able to read their ramblings. Blogs have opened up the internet to one and all and for every crappy blog out there I’m sure there are a few that I’m glad I’ve found.

So I have been mostly converted to the powers of the blog but still have a few reservations. I’m still a bit dubious about a few things like the long layout of the intro page (although I know this can be tweaked) and I think static website have an advantage with search engines (this isn’t based on anything really… just my own experiences) but I love the interactivity and sense of community and that outweighs any negatives.

Once I start working on my mighty web empire full time I might experiment with moving a static site over to Wordpress. Travoholic.com is in shambles so I think this site might be a good candidate. I always seem pretty resistant to change (I still use Notepad to build my sites!) but I think I’m sold on the merits of blogging and Wordpress as a content management system.

Is anyone else an anti-blog convert?

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I’ve never been a fan of blogs and I tried to fight the power but it seems like if I want to keep up with the Jones’ then I’ve really got no choice but to hop on the bandwagon and start one. Since my web host offers a one-click installer thing for Wordpress, Wordpress it would be! But it was not without much reluctance on my part.

Why I hated blogs:

• Everybody and Their Dog Has a Blog - Anyone who knows how to turn on a computer and get online can sign up for Blogger or Wordpress and get a site up and running in no time. I have to admit to being a web development snob and I don’t like this! I spent ridiculous amounts of time learning HTML, FTP, CSS, Photoshop and all the other tools of the trade and so should everybody else dammit. Where were all these time saving tools when I needed them?!
• Cookie Cutter Type Sites - I’m a bit of a design junkie and, while I have had it drilled into my head many times that content is king, I’m still a sucker for a well designed website. More people seem to be customising their themes now but it still irks me when I see a site using that has been used a zillion times. I can handle a theme being used a billion times, but a zillion is just pushing things too far.
• Super Long Pages - Am I the only person who thinks the main page of a blog is generally ridiculously long? My index finger would cramp up after 2 minutes with all that scrolling. Coming up with a good navigation system is always a major focus for me when I build a new site and having to scroll down for 4 years is not good navigation in my most humble, blog hating opinion.
• Posts Displaying Most Recent First - I read a lot of travel blogs and I really don’t think displaying the most recent post first cuts it. It makes more sense to me to be able to start at the beginning and some travel blogs make it difficult to actually get to the first post. Caused endless frustration. Endless I tell you!
• Wordpress Made My Head Explode - I had a few cracks at getting Wordpress blogs up and running and the whole experience left me with a splitting headache. Being the design freak that I am I wanted to tweak seemingly small things here and there that would end up turning into a 4 hour session of hair pulling and keyboard abuse.

I was gonna do this as one long post but since I’ve said I hate long main pages I think I’ll break it up. So tomorrow I’ll tell you why I have seen the light - AMEN! - and have accepted blogging into my life.

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Hi, welcome to my blog.

So… ya. The first post. It’s a pretty big event. Firecrackers just went off behind me and the Mayor is about to cut a ribbon and smash a bottle of Champagne over my monitor. Or is that just for boats? Hopefully it’s just for boats since I’m at work at the moment and I don’t think my boss would appreciate the mess. He’s already suspicious about why the mayor is here.

About Me

I’ve been guest blogging over at Working Nomad since September 2006 but have since decided that the internet needs one more blog so have jumped ship and started this baby. The guy that runs that site has been travelling around the world working on his websites from anywhere and raking in some serious cash in the process. I figure that sounds like a damn fine way to spend my time so I’m attempting the same thing.

I’m from Canada but have lived in London, UK for 5 years. I’ve done working holidays in Oz, NZ and Ireland and have an itchy feet thing happening at the moment and plan to hit the road again in January 2008, this time with my laptop in tow.

My Websites

While new to blogging, I’ve been a net nerd since 2000 when I started Travoholic.com, a semi-neglected website about backpacking mainly in Europe and Australia. I didn’t do much with it until 2005 when I discovered Google Adsense.

In the early days I was only earning pennies a day and when I hit the $1/day mark I was probably a bit too excited judging by the looks people gave me when I told them of my new found ‘riches’. But I got to thinking… if I grew Travoholic then I could earn more. Or even better, build more sites and watch the money roll on in… slowly.

I’ll go into my sites and earnings in more detail other posts but the gist of the operation is that I’m currently earning an average of about $700/month for 2007 from 3 main sites and a couple of smaller, niche sites.

The Plan

I’ve given my boss plenty of warning and my last day of work is December 13th. The plan is to head home to Canada for a few weeks, visit the friends and rellies, and spend a lot of time getting my sites up to scratch. Then I’m off to Asia one way with laptop. No plans, no deadline, and no budget! Ok that’s a lie, but it sounds good. My only plan is to be in Beijing for the Olympics and my budget will be dictated by what I’m earning. So if I bring in $700, that’s what I’ll try to live on during the following month. If I earn more than I need to survive as a meager backpacker then I’ll whack it into my savings account.

So… what’s the blog about?

I’ll be posting my earnings, tips on making money online, the cost of living in places I go to, how much I spend and various other things that sound very uninteresting as I type this but will be filled with wonder and amazement and will change your life for the better! Ok maybe not that but hopefully you’ll find a few nuggets of interesting blurbs now and then.

That’s all. Wow, the first blog post. Bit longer than I expected. I wonder if anyone will read it? Who knows. Ah crap, now I’m talking to myself… probably a good time to sign off.

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