Today marks the third year anniversary since my first ever post on this blog!

It’s certainly been a weird ride too.   Originally I started out thinking I would be using this blog to chronicle my journey through law school and into the law profession, but unfortunately life has a tendency to poop all over my best laid plans, so instead of writing about adventures in law school and beyond, I found myself rambling about topics of no particular interest to anyone but me.  My blog went for weeks without any updates, and my traffic was virtually nil.  Then I started wrapping myself around the idea that I could turn my blog into a money making machine, getting my hands on whatever material I could find out there that could help me figure out how to turn this site into a magical land of milk and honey, from whence I could quit my job, retire, and live it up as a self made man with a pizza on one hand and a babe on the other.

Then I went from there to wailing about all my health problems, which really put a damper on my blogging spirits for a while.  Then I went on a streak where I raged and ranted about dating sites and women and why they all sucked and disgusted me to no end, and not just them but people too, and they sucked and everybody sucks and the whole world sucks and why doesn’t everyone just explode and DIE????

Come to think of it I think I’m still on that streak. 

Under normal circumstances I probably would have closed this blog by now and moved on.

Only the thing is… this is the first time I’ve ever created a blog that provided a solid income stream for me.  I won’t be retiring or quitting anytime soon of course, but then again, I don’t just throw away something that’s earning me $200 a month, even if I have nothing worth writing about these days.   My feed count also surpassed 200 readers for the first time ever the other day, and it seems apparent that as I keep this site going and keep blogging, my audience and traffic will continue to expand, slowly, but surely.  $200 a month might some day become $300 a month, then $500, and from there, who knows how high it could go.  Love it or hate it, me and my blog, we’re stuck together for the long haul.  And who knows, just because I haven’t been able to earn a living NOW doesn’t mean I can’t earn one down the road, even if that road turns out to be a long, winding one that takes years to cover.  I know of one person who ran a math site since 1997, and it took her over ten years before she finally saw the fruits of her labor and was able to earning a living from her website alone.  From what I learned about search engines like Google, the older your domain gets, the more trusted it becomes, resulting in higher rankings and more traffic.  Some say the tipping point is 4 years, so by this time next year, I could end up seeing a dramatic difference that will boost my earnings potential even more.

In the meantime, this blog is still searching for an identity, a clear purpose, something to help focus my writing and truly make it blossom.  It’s sad that I find myself in my early thirties and even after all these years, I still don’t know who I am or who I was meant to be, if I was meant to be anything at all.  Am I destined to be a drifter, living a small life where I have no impact on anything, or am I meant for something bigger?  Can I overcome my inner demons and become the man God wants me to be, and the man that a future wife could be worthy of, or will I slowly fade away into obscurity and failure?

The story continues…

Tags: anniversary, blog, blogging, dating sites, failure, God, income, income stream, job, journey, land of milk and honey, law school, life, purpose, search engines, traffic, website, writing
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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I’ve been spending the weekend exploring ways to bring more traffic to my site, which took me into the brave new world of domains.  There’s an industry out there built on the notion that if you purchase enough old domains that once amassed a ton of backlinks and redirect these domains back to your website, it will give your site enough juice to bring in serious traffic.

The problem is, this whole domain business smacks of the stock market and gives me a bloody serious headache.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of domains that expire (or are about to expire) every day, and sometimes you have to bid on them if they’re in high demand.  Theoretically though, if you invest enough money into enough valuable domains, the dividends will make it worthwhile over the long run.  So say I spend $1,000 on domains.  If (and that’s a big IF) it brings in enough traffic that I end up making $500 a month in revenues as a result, I will have eventually gotten back what I invested after two months, and then some.

Here’s the thing though: every investment I have ever made in life has been a monumental failure with a capital F.  Whether it was school or life or internet projects or relationships or whatnot, whatever I have purported to do in life has always resulted in ultimate FAIL.

So with that kind of batting average, do I really want to spend thousands of dollars grabbing up all kinds of domain names in the hopes that they will collectively bring me the kind of traffic I’ve been looking for?

See, that would work for other people, but not for me.  Somehow, the laws of physics and economics all stop at my doorstep.  You ever seen the show Lost?  Well consider me the island.  Once you’re on my shores, you can just forget about everything you’ve ever thought you knew about how the universe worked, because it’s all been rendered moot here.  I am a walking wormhole of anomalies, a glitch in the system. 

That’s why I’m kind of hesitant in blowing thousands of bucks on this new experiment, especially when I’m so close to paying off my debts too.  I just want this blog to work out so badly, and the more I think about things and about finding another job or another career, the more I’d rather be out of the workforce altogether and be self-sufficient and self-employed, that way I can live anywhere and go anywhere.  I don’t want to be stuck at one job in one place forever and ever.  I need to MOVE, baby. 

So, I don’t know.  I think I’m just gonna leave this alone for now, and once all my debts have been squared off, I’ll come back to this and maybe think about making smaller investments instead of going all out, and see if it goes anywhere.  I’m just so sick and tired of my 5 visits a day traffic that I’m just chomping at the bit to get SOMETHING going.  Gaaaah. 

Tags: backlinks, blog, debt, domain, domain names, domains, experiment, FAIL, failure, internet, investment, job, life, money, traffic, website, workforce
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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I’ve been using Hostgator to host my blog for a little over a year now, and I think it’s finally safe to say they’ve proven to be a reliable shared hosting service, so much that I decided to become one of their affiliates. Although I’ve never received hordes of traffic to see how well it could hold up under heavy load, I’ve never had trouble with my site during those times it’s gotten stumbled either (where it’s received hundreds of visitors within a short period of time). My highest peak was when I had about 130 active visitors to my blog at once (and still the server merely yawned). Tickets to help support for one reason or another have always been promptly answered, but my best experience had to be when I was having trouble logging into my WordPress admin one day. I first spoke to someone via live support, who tried his best to resolve the issue on his own before having me open up a ticket so a sysadmin could look into the problem. In the space of about 20 minutes, a systems administrator named David had me up and running after learning that a problem with my Akismet plugin was causing my blog to lag. After I deactivated Akismet and replaced it with a newer version, I was up and running again.

Customer support that’s responsive and knowledgeable, a shared server that remains fast and suffers virtually no downtime, all for an easy 10 bucks a month. I really can’t ask for anything more. They also offer a semi-dedicated solution that’s still shared but where you’ll only share a server with 3 other users, but for some reason they don’t offer any VPS solutions (yet). Regardless, they offer excellent packages for your hosting needs, and in fact mine recently enjoyed a free upgrade (due to Hostgator adding new hard drives to the server I was using).

Word to the wise though: the web hosting industry has had a history of embellishing the bandwidth they claim to offer to potential clients, but what many people don’t know is that such bandwidth will be limited by the server’s CPU and memory resources. Unless you have a vanilla site, you’ll likely never be able to reach the high bandwidth ceiling many hosting services provide because your site will be shut down long before then, due to using too much of the server’s resources. How much you can actually use will depend on the service, and such info is usually buried somewhere in the terms of agreement. Read Hostgator’s Terms of Service and then compare it to other hosting companies for a better idea of how much freedom you’ll have when purchasing a shared hosting account. Regardless, based on the report of other customers, even people who have been slashdotted or dugg have never had a problem with taxing too much of the server. Just make sure you build a good site that’s optimized well (with caching abilities if possible) and you’ll likely never have a problem with Hostgator.

Sign up for a Hostgator account today!

Tags: affiliate, akismet, bandwidth, blog, customer support, downtime, guide, hard drives, hostgator, hosting, hosting service, period of time, review, server, short period, sysadmin, systems administrator, traffic, website, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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So… you took a recent look at my blog and decided I was unworthy of your attention and love by reducing my PageRank to a mere “2.” And why? Because I don’t blog 50 posts a day? Because I’m not spending every waking minute keeping my site fresh with new content so your finicky little bots can all have a little something tasty to chomp on? Well screw you.

Lemme tell you something Big Boy: maybe I was a little busy a’ight? Maybe I wanted to take a short hiatus while I focused on real life before I got back to blogging. Did you ever think of that, huh?? Noooooo, all you care about is what’s HIP and happening, and if I ain’t all that with some brand new bling bling you ain’t never seen before, then you won’t even look at me cross eyed.

You think you alllllllll that, just cuz everyone loooooves to Google, and no one can find nuttin’ unless you tells them where to look. Well I got news for you buddy boy! I don’t need your stinking love. I can spread the word about my home on the web other ways. I got connections, bro. People in high places. You can’t keep me down forever, cause I am OUT THERE and there is no putting me back. Deal with THAT, you skanky ho bag excuse for a search engine. I am DONE with you.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to go check my Gmail.

Tags: bling bling, blog, blogging, blogs, chomp, excuse, gmail, google, hiatus, love, pagerank, screw, search engine, seo, site, weblogs, website
Categories: Blog Fog, Comic Relief
 
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Rather than join the herd (and the scum sucking bottom feeders) at MySpace, I developed my own personalized space by formatting the “About Me” page in a MySpace style.

MySpace truly is… MY SPACE.

Tags: about, fight, format, herd, myspace, page, power, the, website
Categories: Blog Fog, Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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