Money blogs, fact or fiction?

I created my first pin today.  It didn't take long, just a few minutes.   Of course, I have no idea if it is findable on Pinterest or not.  But I did it.    I tried reading some blogs to figure out how to do it, but they were talking more about the design of the Pin instead of how to actually do it, so I just went straight to Pinterest and followed the steps on creating a pin. My next move will be to study how to actually use Pinterest to bring viewers (and money, yay!) to my site. I'll keep you posted. Money earned: $0 Money spent: $64

I will be honest, today (Friday) is the very first day in the past 2 weeks that I have spent any time on my blog.   I was slammed with life and it just didn't get done. This is my biggest fear. When life gets in the way, what happens to the blog?   I can start with all the best intentions, but life inevitably always gets in the way. I feel really, really guilty spending 2+ hours on the computer everyday while my kids are doing...who knows what!  I've already worked 7.5, they have been in school all day, and now it is our time, yet I'm on the computer for most of it.   It really hurts my mom heart.   Then there's the house in general.  If I'm not on top of things, it literally falls apart around me.  Dishes pile up, the laundry gets out of control, and let's not even talk about the clutter.  Oh the clutter. I know, I know, I've heard it all:  If you don't carve out the time, then it won't happen.  Get up earlie...

After the hour long webinar, I spent the rest of the day working on my site.  I think I spent about 3 hours building different pages, making a You Tube channel -which I added to the site as well- and just played around with it.  Unfortunately I did NOT add any blogs, so I am at a total of 3 (very short ones) so far.  My plan is to have 10-12 blogs up, as well as the site totally built before announcing it to the public.  This will take some time I realize.   I've already put in about 10 hours total, but will probably need another 10 before I'm ready to "make it known" if you will, to friends and family. I do enjoy this aspect of blogging, but it take way longer than it should in my opinion.  No wonder people fizzle out before they ever really get off the ground.   I'm not even trying to be that picky.  I keep thinking: "Just do the bare minimum, you can always change it later."  But the bare minimum is still pretty time cons...

I found this webinar (or rather, it found me) through an email I received from Freedom with Writing.  It is a great little company that sends me notifications about ways to make money by writing.  I have found some great writing contests with them, as well as tons of publications accepting submissions for different articles or stories.   If you like to write, I recommend checking them out.  I missed the live webinar, but was able to listen to it a couple hours later.  The first thing the webinar said was that the best way to make money with blogging is to NOT have your own blog, but rather write guest blogs for other websites.   Great.  Not what I wanted to hear.  I almost turned it off, but I decided to keep it on in the background as I worked on other things.  I'm glad I did because I actually got some good tips. Overall they were plugging their 3 week long course on blogging, but I was surprised by how much information th...

I've just spent the past 4 hours trying to fix my blog. Good news is, I figured it out. It only took 2 hours of frustration, reading tutorials, trial and error and then about 10 minutes of doing a live chat.  I should have started with the live chat, I just hate showing up to those things looking absolutely clueless.  I was only a tiny bit clueless. I guess with Siteground, if you use the sitebuilder tool to set up your website (which is the recommendation for beginners), it will most likely take you to Weebly to do so.  If you use the manage tool under domain, it will take you to Wordpress.  You cannot use both, since that just confuses everything. Luckily the friendly chat guy, Alexander I., was able to disable one of the two so they wouldn't fight each other anymore.   I decided to disable Wordpress. I know, I know, Wordpress is supposedly the best, but after spending over an hour on the Wordpress tutorial and not being able to make much sense ...

I never had the chance to work on my blog yesterday evening.  Between bicycling to swim lessons (car is in the shop), cooking dinner (salmon and veggies, it was good), and general cleaning, homework and after school activities, it just didn't happen.    I didn't think much of it, I mean, I could always work on it at work during my breaks.  Well, it ends up that is a no go. Apparently my work blocked my website due to threat levels.  So now, I cannot work on it during the time of day when I have the most time on the computer.   I am not sure how this will affect the overall growth of the blog, but it is definitely a set back. Perhaps I can pay for the security clearance that Siteground offered?  I didn't know what that was when they originally offered it, but it looks like it may be something I should invest in, since if I can't view it on my work's network, how many other people will not be able to view it because of their security settings as...

Remember how I told you I completed my first post and then spent 2 hours on my About Me page?  Yeah.  All of that is gone. Apparently I wasn't supposed to be using Weebly to edit my site, but rather Wordpress.  As a result, everything I worked on is gone.  I did find it temporarily and managed to copy and past that first post into the Wordpress format, but now I'm directed to Wordpress only and all that work I did on Weebly is ancient history. I know, I know, Wordpress is far better than Weebly,(at least that's what I'm told) but I was used to Weebly.  I knew how it worked.  I was able to manage my posts and make them look like how I wanted.  Now I have to learn yet another format.  Wordpress is not as easy to navigate as other sites I've been to, so it has been a very frustrating morning.  Especially since every time I publish something, when I go to view it on my website it says: page cannot be found.   I'm totally lost and fe...

I am not kidding when I tell you that I've been researching which domain is the best for hosting your website for a loooonnng time (like a year).   And all I have to show for it is: Hun?   I still don't get it. If you were to condense everything I've read in the past year into one thought, it is this: Wordpress (or something similar) is the way to go.  The paid subscription is the best because it allows you to add widgets so you can add things to your webpage like a link to your podcast.  Also, you can get rid of the wordpress in your domain name and actually own your name.  So instead of dailydisneyliving.wordpress.com, it is just dailydisneyliving.com. With all that said.  I did not go with wordpress.  Well, I don't think I did.  I still don't know!  What I did do was follow the step-by-step instructions from this website: How to start a blog  which claims you can start a blog in 20 minutes.  The author of this blo...

Here's what I know about what you need to make money with a blog: You need a good idea that interest people. You need to get a lot of people to view your blog (Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram are key for getting viewers). You can make money through advertising and affiliate marketing.  You can also create a course or sell a product, two things I am not interested in doing. Now that the footprint is laid, it's time to fill in the details. Probably the hardest part for me was deciding what to write a blog about.  On one hand, everyone says "find your niche" find something you're passionate about and something that you're knowledgeable about. On the other hand, I've read the most profitable blogs are about money, health, or beauty, but I'm not an expert on any of those things.   Lifestyle blogs came in fourth as a semi-profitable category, mainly because "lifestyle" is super vague and can be just about anything.  But, I do have a...

Hi.   So...what is this blog exactly?   This is my journey to see if someone (mainly me) can actually make money by writing a blog. Let's be clear.  I've had a personal blog for the past 7 years, so I have experience writing a blog, but I've never tried to make money from it.  In fact, it's private, so money was never a factor when starting that blog.  But now...well, I need money.  Also, I have been writing professionally for years so it's not like I'm just out of the blue deciding to write and try to get paid for it.  I do have some experience, although it is a mixed bag.  I've had millions of views from my articles published through familyshare.com, but my novel published late last year never took off.  If you're interested in it, you can check it out here .  Between my blogging and writing experience, I thought, maybe I should write a public blog and make some extra dough that way.  Actually, I've thought abou...