I quit my day job to earning a living from bloggin

RSS Feed Homepage

Is Blogging for a Living Better Than Having a Real Job?
2008-01-31 18:22:00
Today I really had it with PayPerPost. Things have gotten so competitive lately with the ratio of PR Zero bloggers to opportunities not requiring PageRank so high that I had gotten into the habit in the last couple of weeks of stalking PPP. By this I mean that I would be constantly logged into PPP and have the page with the list of opportunities open all day. While I was at the computer I began to habitually refresh the opportunities page so that I would see a new opportunity within less than a minute of it going live on PPP. This had made a difference to me. For the first two weeks of this month I made nothing from PPP. For the past two weeks since I have developed my stalking behaviour I have made an average of $20 per week from PPP out of average overall weekly earnings of $47.85. In the good old days (of November last year) I was making $60 per week from PPP. If I had used the same kind of stalking tactics that I now use I could have made more in November but in those days the w...
More About: Living , Blogging , Real

Some People are Just Meant to be Wage Slaves
2008-01-17 15:38:00
When I quit my full-time job in October I was hopeful of creating a new lifestyle for myself. I was going to re-invent myself as a writer. Not exactly a writer of literature but I could always pretend. I set myself the goal of generating a weekly income of $400 from blogging. I was prepared to do a bit of part-time work here and there to supplement my savings while my earnings from blogging got up to scratch. I estimated that my savings would be enough to last me three or four months, at the end of which time I would be able to see whether I really could make a living blogging.For the first month everything went according to plan. The money increased week on week. Within five weeks I reached $150, or 38% of my target. I had every reason to be optimistic. Unfortunately for me though, bigger fish in the pond had different ideas and when Google launched its assault on PayPerPost my over-dependence on writing sponsored posts sent my earnings into a nose-dive.I've now finished my first ...
More About: People , Slaves

End of Month Review
2007-12-18 22:14:00
Having now completed my second month of trying to earn a living from blogging I am starting to get a better picture of the problems facing me. None of these are unexpected but only confirm the problems I suspected I might face.Problem #1This is me! I am hugely disorganised and inefficient with my time. On some of the days when I have been free to dedicate the whole day to blogging I have actually managed to do it. However on most of the days when I didn't have to go out to do a traffic surveying job or do some other chore I have managed to waste the biggest part of the day procastinating, taking naps, watching South Park, checking my stats and my e-mail and taking naps. My productivity has not been good and over the last two weeks I have been such the slacker that, as my own boss, I am forced to give myself a formal verbal warning.Problem #2Over-reliance on one means of making money online: sponsored posting. I haven't developed my affiliates sufficiently and as a result my only s...
More About: Review , Month , Mont

Building Links and Attracting Visitors
2007-12-11 00:11:00
The last few days have been very good to me in generating traffic to my blogs. In fact ever since I started visiting forums last week I have been getting excellent results from people visiting through the links in my signatures.I have found the best way for this to work is to place a link to a couple of specific posts in my signatures. Ones with topical and catchy headlines. This works much better than just placing simple links back to your blog homepage. For example my new general category blog has started to get an average of 56 visitors a day in the past week. Up from five or six. My more established Dublin blog has gone from an average of 25 to 39, also in the past week.Interestingly, there seem to be different cultures on different boards and while a link about x on one board will generate scores or hundreds of visits, an identical link on another board discussing the same topic will generate none, or maybe one or two. I don't know why this is, but some boards seem to have dev...
More About: Building , Links , Visitors

The Ups and Downs of Blogging
2007-12-06 11:06:00
PageRankThere's no doubt about it. The loss of PageRank on my personal blog has had a definite and serious impact on my earnings with PayPerPost. I didn't have much time to blog last week, so the full implications of it didn't really hit me. This week, however, I have had plenty of time to blog and precious few sponsored post opportunities. Without doing a full tot-up, which I'll be doing later on, it would appear that I've earned about $50 to $60 dollars this week from sponsored posts. When my earnings hit $150 a couple of weeks ago I was beginning to think that I would be able to make a living from blogging by writing sponsored posts alone and that that would be the sole method of monetization that I would need. It now very clearly isn't and I see that I need to do some serious work on getting my affiliate links to do more work for me.It's not the end of the world of course and it is still worthwhile to check into PayPerPost a few times a day. For example, between logging i...
More About: Blogging

The Week I Didn't Blog
2007-12-03 22:32:00
Last week was the week I didn't blog. Part of the problem was that I didn't have the energy to do it. My temporary job traffic surveying, which I took to supplement my savings while I made my first steps in blogging for money took over my whole week. The work I did last week was physically tiring as well as long hours so that when I did get home I was simply exhausted.On top of that I ran into technical problems which I already mentioned in a previous post and had to get a new laptop to replace my old pc. The laptop was the cheapest available but still put a little dent into my savings which I could have done without at the moment. What free time I did have to blog last week was crippled by the problems of having lost all of my bookmarks and many of my files and also the use of lots of my software.What about some good news? Well the good news is that despite all of these problems I still came out of last week with $72.15. While this is half of the previous weeks earnings, I consol...
More About: Blog , Week

Changing priorities
2007-11-26 21:29:00
After last weeks sponsored post binge I've slowed down a bit so far this week. Last weeks orgy, which saw me earning $150, was partly forced onto me anyway by the short deadlines and the large amount of posts that PayU2Blog had given me to do. If it wasn't for those deadlines I might have taken things a bit easier last week.So far this week I have taken things a good bit easier on the sponsored post front. Apart from doing posts which I had already been given to do I have mainly been trying to improve my ratio of non-sponsored to sponsored posts on my personal blogs. I am still keeping an eye out for any especially well paying posts such as the $29 one I got from PayPerPost recently. Things had gotten a little bit crazy over the last week so I felt it was time to do some more genuine blogging on my private blog and give the earning a break for a change.When I think about it, it really is incredible that my personal blog, which up until the last few weeks had earned me nothing, has...
More About: Changing

One-Five-O! 150 Reasons to Give Thanks
2007-11-22 20:57:00
I had a surprisingly easy day today. I should be only getting home from my last day of the bus survey at this stage. Instead what happened was that too many people turned up for work outside the office this morning at 6am. I was quite happy to volunteer to go home. After going back to bed for a while I got up full of vim and vigour ready to spend the day doing some productive blogging! And then . . . well then one of the laws of nature kicked in: The more time you have, the less you’ll get done.Actually I think I deserved to take it easy today. I added up my weeks earnings for my make money online weekly update and for the fifth week in a row I have increased my earnings! This week I made just over $150, which tops last weeks by $50. That means I achieved 38.21% of the earnings I would need to achieve in order to be able to earn a living blogging.I may not be facing into the coming week in the correct frame of mind but I really doubt that I will be able to top that amount next wee...
More About: Reasons , Give , Hank

If you want to see what I’m prepared to do for $29 then keep reading . .
2007-11-21 23:44:00
Yesterday was a pretty grim day at work for me. I started off the day traffic surveying on the north quays in Dublin watching traffic go into town. This suited me pretty well because I was close enough to be able to go home on my breaks. But just as my first break was within site a supervisor came and asked me to move to another job they were a person short on. It was miles away but I agreed.Apart from being miles away it was also a longer day. I didn’t get finished until 8pm inside of 7pm, making it a 13 hour day. I didn’t get home and fed until 9.30pm. By this stage I was completely worn out. I had been up since 5.30am and had only gotten four hours sleep the night before. I also had to be up again at 5.30 the following morning.This is all to illustrate how I felt as I sat down to blog last night. It was the first time that it actually felt like work. In fact if it weren’t for the sponsored posts I wouldn’t have bothered at all last night. If I was still at the stage of be...
More About: Reading , Then , Pare , Prep

I’ve started Twittering
2007-11-19 22:20:00
I got a bit done today. I had a three hour traffic surveying job this morning from 7am to 10am. The site is just 15 minutes from my flat so that was almost like a lie-in to me after the 5.30am starts last week!As it turned out I didn’t take advantage of the lie in. I woke up at 4am and couldn’t sleep any longer. One thing I have noticed in the month since I quit my job to blog is that my sleeping patterns are getting more complicated. In fact, if there is a pattern at all it’s starting to look like one of those magic eye drawings.Since I couldn't sleep any more I got up and had a go at the computer. I did something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of days now. I signed up for Twitter. To be honest I only heard about Twitter a couple of weeks ago. Caroline Middlebrook is another person who quit her job to blog. She's taken a different approach to me and is concentrating on building up the number of visitors to her site to a substantial number before she tries monetizin...
More About: Erin

I’d rather have money than PageRank
2007-11-18 19:09:00
I’ve been spending more time at work-work the last couple of weeks than I would have liked. The good news is that I only have one more week of the traffic survey to go. The bad news is that that may be just about it. I’ll have another couple of days of paid employment after that but it’s basically down to my savings and how long they last from then on. I figure I have enough money until March.More good news. My ability to make money online is increasing week on week. Last week was my fourth week of blogging for a living. The progress towards my goal of earning $400 per week is very interesting to watch:Week 1 - 1.78% ($7.13)Week 2 - 8.86% ($35.44)Week 3 - 20.49% ($81.97)Week 4 - 25.74% ($102.94)When I average this out over a month I see that this month I have earned 14.22% of the amount that I need in order to earn a full-time income from blogging. My progress is onwards and upwards at the moment. I wrote my first posts for PayU2Blog.com today. I applied to join this program a...
More About: Money , Pagerank , Ager , Gera

Guy Fawkes and excellent customer support
2007-11-14 23:36:00
There’s no doubt but working twelve-hour days does get in the way of your blogging! It also kind of undermines my claim to have quit my job to blog. But I do still have to think about topping up my savings a bit so the work is a necessary evil at the moment. This is my second week of the three twelve hour days and I have one week to go after this. When I got home from work last night I turned on my computer and started to check on my statistics as I often do. I had a few posts in mind that I had thought about in work. I hadn’t gone very far though before the computer froze on me. It’s a home-made computer and it sometimes does this. Usually it works again after I switch it off for a while.While the computer was resting, so did I and I lay down on the bed. The tiredness from the days exertions got to me and I was asleep within a few minutes. I woke up later on just for long enough to get into bed but that was the end of my blogging yesterday.While I was asleep yesterday evening...
More About: Customer , Support , Customer Support , Fawkes , Lent

Taking it easy. Everything's going fine
2007-11-12 20:53:00
Today was mainly about enjoying not being a wage slave. I had already almost matched last weeks earnings of $81 so today I didn’t try too hard to earn money blogging. When I got up in the morning I started off by writing one $5 sponsored post for PayPerPost just so I would have something to show for the day. Apart from that the other posts I wrote this morning were just purely out of personal interest.Just to give you an idea on my interests they were a review of the full Irish breakfast I’d had that morning in Clarkes Café, the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Communist Party and the importance of sleep. Variety is good, no?After I’d written my posts I took a trip into town. This is where I’m still really appreciating my freedom from wage slavery at the moment: just being able to decide to leave your work and head into town whenever you feel like it. It is very liberating. I got the bus into town, listening to AC/DC and Nick Cave on my MP3 player, just enjoying the fact ...
More About: Easy , Fine , Taking , Going , Goin

Back to Blogging
2007-11-09 21:40:00
I didn’t have any other work today so I had the day to devote to blogging. As usual I achieved less than I’d like to but I still got a bit done.I slept until 9am this morning. When I did get up I was still stiff and lethargic after my exertions of the last three days. I had been working 12-hour days since Tuesday doing traffic surveying. While it’s not physical work it is tiring because it involves a lot of standing around out in the cold. I also did a lot of walking yesterday as well, so with everything, I was still pretty jaded when I got up this morning.Despite this, or maybe even because I couldn’t move very much, I got off to a good start with my blogging.I updated my bonsai blog with a couple of posts about a new tree that I’ve bought and other recent developments.Then I moved on to my Dublin Blog. Altogether I published five posts on it today. Of these two were sponsored posts and three were my own. Five posts is pretty much near the maximum that I could post on any...
More About: Blogging , Back

Achieving 20% of my goal
2007-11-09 00:42:00
It may be getting a bit repetitive for me to say this, but this week was my best week blogging for money ever! Last week - my previous best week - finished up on a total score of $35.44. This week I earned $81.97, completely blowing my previous best out of the water! I have a breakdown on it on my make money online weekly update, although to be honest there isn’t much to break-down. I got almost everything from sponsored posts sites. The best earner was PayPerPost but I also earned money from Smorty and Sponsored Reviews.My weekly internet earnings of $81.97 represents 20.49% of my target weekly earnings of $400 in order to make a living blogging. Last week I only achieved 8.86% of my target so in percentage terms as well as in real terms I made some actual progress this week.Apart from the money this week was also the occasion of my first really, really successful social media submission. My post about Guy Fawkes on November 5 on the anniversary of the gunpowder plot of 1605 got...
More About: Goal

2,200 Visitors: My first ‘viral’ post
2007-11-07 00:52:00
I’ve had some good social media submissions previously. At least I thought they were good. Last night I got all excited when I broke the 600 unique visitors barrier in one day. Imagine my surprise therefore when I came home this evening after a twelve-hour shift at work to find that more than 2,000 visitors had been in to see my Dublin Blog today!The final result for yesterday up until midnight after my submission to StumbleUpon of my post about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot came to 843 unique visitors. When I got home this evening there had been a further 2,225 unique visitors. This was almost exclusively due to my 200 word factual account of the history of the Gunpowder Plot incident of 1605.At this stage I was already too late to extend the viral effects of the post as it had already died away. The submission of my post this evening about the death of Catherine the Great attracted a further 70 unique visitors. On other days I would have been prepared to consider this a resu...
More About: Post , Visitors

The day I got 400 500 606 visitors
2007-11-05 20:47:00
Another interesting day blogging. I got up this morning and as usual checked my stats and my e-mail. There was nothing remarkable in either, just the usual some visitors to all of my sites and just the usual e-mails with earnest requests to help me increase my penis size.I already had my first post in mind when I got up. It really is just a standard make money blogging post which lists all the different affiliates that I have tried in my efforts to make money blogging. Needless to say I have a few of my affiliate links in there. I realize that this has been done thousands of times already but I still find it helpful to read how other people are doing and how they are doing it, so I’m sure some people will find it helpful to read mine. For example it was through reading a similar post on another web-site last week that I heard about smorty.com, which is a sponsored post site. As a result of reading that post I signed up with them and I have made an extra $18 this week.It may not ha...
More About: Visitors

My best earnings day yet!
2007-11-02 22:40:00
I came close to hitting my daily target of $57 today. I made it as far as $42.50. Now considering that for the whole of last week I only made $35, and that that was my best week to date I am very happy about this as you might imagine!The first $30 was just by luck. It was waiting for me when I logged into PayPerPost this morning to see if my blog was accepted yet. I’m still waiting to be accepted but two people had signed up using my referral link. When they are accepted into PayPerPost and get paid for their first paid review, then so will I! They get paid the full value of their work but I get an extra bonus for referring them. After that cheery start to my morning I made the trip to the shop for my croissants. I find myself drinking a lot of coffee and eating a lot of croissants the last couple of weeks. Somehow in my mind I associate them with taking it easy and living the good life.Anyway I was thinking about starting up some new blogs to take off the pressure that all of the...
More About: Earnings , S Day , Earning

My first $100
2007-11-01 22:52:00
I had an interesting day blogging. I didn’t have any part-time work to do so I had the whole day to devote to blogging. I started off by rising at 8.30am which surprised me too. Back when I was a sullen teenager I would think nothing of staying in bed until 12 noon. In fact for years that was my preferred rising time when circumstances permitted.The first thing I did when I got up was I turned on the computer and checked my e-mails and my statcounter stats. I was hoping that some more sponsored reviews would have been accepted but there was no news on them. My stats were ok. They showed that at least some people had visited all of my blogs. I checked my feedburner stats next. I was pleased to see that subscribers to this blog had gone from 10 to 12 overnight. I also got 8 new subscribers to my blog about blogging - bringing the total to 8! I’m guessing the reason for the surge in the aboutblogging.info subscribers is to do with the free page peel script post yesterday. It didnâ€...

Go-Slow Wednesday
2007-10-31 21:53:00
Today may have been something of a case of the more time you have, the more time you have to waste. I feel as if I have often gotten more blogging done when I was just doing it part time.The day wasn’t a complete waste however. First of all the good news.- I earned $8 overnight on Commission Junction. Added to the $19.50 I ended up making in total from Sponsored Reviews last night it hasn’t been such a bad week for me.- I submitted an article based on my original post about quitting my job to blog for a living to two articles directories, ezinearticles.com and goarticle.net. It was published immediately on GoArticle but on EZineArticles it has first of all to be approved which they say can take up to a week.So far I haven’t gotten any indication that the press release I sent to PRleap.com had any effect. The only response I’ve had to the press release to date was from a spammer who harvested my e-mail address from it. Hopefully my article submissions will have more luck.The ...
More About: Slow , Wednesday

Actual signs of progress!
2007-10-30 20:42:00
My first week blogging ended on Thursday last. On Friday I went away to Donegal for the bank holiday weekend and I completely forgot about blogging. Despite my neglect, when I came back last night I checked out all my statistics and everything was good news.My earnings last week aren’t worth dwelling on too much. The total earnings as at Thursday were $7.13. This was composed of Adsense $5.57, Irish Opinions $1.42 and Helium $0.14. My goal is to earn $400 per week so last week I achieved 1.78% of my goal!I took plenty of comfort from my other statistics though when I checked on them last night. The traffic on my blogs still tends to be low, apart from the occasional spike when I submit a suitable post to a social media site. Nevertheless progress is in the right direction. This was reflected in the changes to my PageRank and Alexa ranking over the weekend.This is my newest blog. When I left here on Thursday I had only just gotten an Alexa ranking of somewhere around 8,000,000. Tha...
More About: Signs , Progress

Stumbleupon, work and play
2007-10-25 20:31:00
Stumbleupon.com was mainly responsible for one of my two successful social media submissions on the week I launched Blogumnist. When I submitted my post about how I quit my day job to blog it brought me a huge reaction on the first day of my new blog.My second successful media submission this week was from my personal blog. It was a submission of a post I did a couple of weeks ago about my personal reaction to driving conditions in County Donegal, Ireland. That submission included a photoshopped image of a road sign with a sheep asleep on it. I tried to make another submission today about my page on the Nofollow tag. This stumble did not lift off. I suppose it’s just been done too many times before. While I was at it though, I stumbled across lots of different pages for a while. As well as being a potential great source of traffic it is also a great source of web-sites and just random stuff that interests me. In the course of my stumbling I came across a love song that made me thi...
More About: Play , Work , Stumbleupon , Bleu

Building links to my blog
2007-10-24 20:58:00
I got a little bit more done today than yesterday although this time I started badly and finished better. I got up and made it in time to the traffic surveying site again this morning. It was colder than yesterday and between that and listening to the radio I didn’t think of any blogging ideas this morning. After I did my three hours work for the morning I went off to my friends to do the bit of desktop publishing I’m doing for them. As with yesterday it took longer than I expected and I wasn’t finished until three o’clock. But at least this time I did get it finished so that means my day is clear tomorrow after my morning work. It just remains to be seen what I will do with it. When I got home I started to get down to a bit of work: First of all I started a post about my Alexa ranking which I finished up later on this evening and posted on AboutBlog ging.Info. My posting is still at a diary stage on AboutBlogging. I can state what my experiences have been but I’m not in a ...
More About: Building , Links

Working for yourself isn't easy
2007-10-23 22:22:00
I didn’t do much to promote my blogging today. I did my first bit of part-time work this morning. I got up at 6:30am and walked the half-hour distance to be on site for 7am. The job is traffic surveying which is probably one of the simplest jobs in the world.My assignment at the moment is a bicycle survey. All it involves me doing is counting the number of bicycles that pass by me in both directions at a particular spot and write down the results every 15 minutes.I do this from 7am to 10am for three mornings this week and two next week. Hopefully there’ll be another assignment for me to do after that.The little bit of extra money is handy because it’ll be a while yet before I’m making any or much money from this and I don’t want to drain my savings too quickly.The traffic surveying is literally about watching the world go by and is zero stress compared to what I often had to go through before.It doesn’t get in the way of my blogging either. While I was standing there I t...
More About: Easy , Working , Workin

My first day blogging for a living
2007-10-22 19:03:00
Yesterday was my first real day as a full-time blogger. I set up this site on Saturday. On Sunday morning I submitted my first post to Stumbleupon. The results were fantastic! Within an hour I had gotten 132 page views from 83 unique visitors. I wrote a post about my observations of the Stumble on Aboutblogging.info.I also submitted the post to Digg.com, Stirrdup.com and Reddit.com. Of those three I got the best result from Reddit, which I have still been getting visits from today. My total hits for the day yesterday were 199 page views from 146 unique visitors. In addition five people signed up for my feed My earnings for the day were $5. All in all, I was happy with the day.I didn’t get very much done today. I went out to a TV show last night and ended up drinking after that and I have been nursing a horrible headache all day today, so I really haven’t been able to concentrate very much on anything. Obviously I can’t be doing this every day. I’m just glad I didn’t have t...
More About: Living , Blogging

I quit my day job to blog
2007-10-20 22:10:00
Yesterday was my last day at work. I quit the job because the levels of noise and stress were far too much at times, to the extent that I felt it just wasn’t worth the money anymore.At other times, when it was quiet it was almost at if I had this arrangement where they would let me come in and use the Internet and then pay me at the end of the week. It was like the best internet café ever! Overall though, I remember it for the noise and the stress and the bad tempers.I have been working in call-centres and in taxi bases for about five years now. This place was definitely the loudest, but it was also the smallest. It was largely down to the lay-out of the room, where the base controller was sitting directly behind me shouting into a radio. The couriers would come into the room and stand directly in front of me to talk to the controller, who would be giving them jobs to do and directions to get there while I would be answering a phone call to someone sitting in a nice, quiet office...
More About: Blog , Quit