For a person who has a hard time keeping her blog updated, I did fairly well in January… with 17 blog posts. My goal was to post something daily – well, that didn’t happen – but there was a vast improvement over December’s showing of absolutely no blog posts whatsoever.It all started with my decision to create some goals for 2012. There’s no perfection yet but progress is encouraging!
A focused blog is more useful to potential readers, and my blog is sort of focused on the writing life, as it was always my intention to use this blog to let people know about my writing progress – particularly if they read my novels and enjoy them. One thing I’ve learned is that my learning curve for novel writing has been lengthy and challenging. Ten years later, I’m still struggling to get my first book published, and that’s after deciding last year that self-publishing is a good thing to do. That publisher vs. publishing rock was a hard one to get past! Ten entire years spent pondering, and now 1/2 year striving to learn the self-publishing business.
In the meantime I’ve become an actual income-producing working writer thanks to online content writing. I’m making a lot more with content writing than I could expect to ever earn from selling novels to publishers. Seriously… and this last month was outstanding not only because my income increased but because my primary income source changed. To do this, I can’t rely only on this blog, however. I have quite a few blogs to maintain and some of them are more financially profitable than this blog. However – this blog is my main work of heart… my writing blog… so it is the blog I want to post daily posts on. That’s so hard for me to do! But if I try for daily posts and only manage to post seventeen times in a month, I feel I’m doing pretty good.
The rest of my blogs and Squidoo lenses and other online writing activities are divided into six niches. They are: business, creativity, domesticity, law, regional and nature, and spirituality. I guess you could say I’ve got diverse interests. About four of the blogs are steady income producers. If I work on them consistently I make more money. One of these is Country Kitchen Pantry. I started that site in 2005 when I tried to sell Watkins products. I wasn’t good at selling or multi-level marketing so that ended after my first year was up… but the site transformed into a blog which has produced steady and increasing traffic over the years.
Another blog that is the result of a failed business venture is How To Start a Web Design Business – this was the site for my webdesign business, Klamath Design. After a few years I decided I got too stressed by having to work with clients on their sites. I decided to try writing on my own sites for money instead, and that’s what I’m now doing and what’s successful for me. It makes me happy! However there’s still lots of budding webdesign business owners who love to read suggestions on how to set up their businesses. I try to write there about the things that mystified me when I was working through my own webdesign business. This blog also has steady traffic and income. Hooray for that! Small bits of money added together help pay my bills, and I’m very grateful for that.
I expect to continue working like this for the rest of my life – or at least as long as I can continue typing. Social Security income is not all that exciting in comparison. So long as I love to write, this is what I should be doing. I write on blogs and at Squidoo mostly, and both are good income streams.
My blogs and other online endeavors are divided, as I said, into six niches. I work on one niche for each day of the week, taking Sunday off, or using it for novel writing, or for catching up. The schedule works and so far this week has been especially successful in terms of work produced.
So those are my blog issues. I still intend to try to be here at this blog daily or nearly daily. I know I have some out-of-town trips coming up soon, and that will interfere with productivity. All I can do is try… and keep trying.
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