I was so very naive! This post, along with more to follow, is for anyone still contemplating blogging, or internet marketing, as a stream of income. Don’t kid yourself, there is an amazing amount to learn, especially if you’re starting from scratch, as I did. Hopefully, by sharing my year long journey, some other “newbie” (assuming there are still some left) will avoid mistakes I made along the way.
This whole thing started last year about this time when I saw an interview with Heather Armstrong, known as the “mommy blogger”, on Nightline. She is very talented and entertaining, and hugely successful with her blog, (http://www.dooce.com) to the point that the blog now supports her entire family! So, naive and delusional me thought “well, hell…..I’ll become the granny blogger!” and I launched myself into the blogging world. Keep in mind, prior to that interview, I don’t think I’d ever even heard the term blog before, just to give you some idea how incredibly newbie-ish I was.
The first thing was to decide on a name for my blog, which is important. I ended up with Zanny Rants, but really, if I’d known how impactful your blog’s name is, I probably would not have gone with that name. Until this blog has a huge following (yes, I remain hopeful), no one is going to be searching for the term “zanny”, and only a few for the word “rants”. But with no knowledge of keywords, it sounded good to me. I am Zanny, and yes, I rant.
The next thing was to register the domain name and get hosting. By this time I had found a “mentor” online and went with her recommended hosting company. That didn’t turn out so well, and I now know she earned some $60 when I signed up. Using the hosting company’s c-panel, combined with many, many phone calls to their support team, I managed to get my WordPress blog all set up, installing the theme correctly, and I even managed to get Google AdSense ads placed on my site. So exciting! I felt I’d accomplished something great and of course, couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I went bragging to my friends and neighbors (I know better! Anytime you give yourself a big A+, the universe will find a way to knock you down a peg or three!) about my progress. Well, in case you don’t know this, Google takes things very seriously and when my equally naive friends and neighbors went clicking repeatedly on the Google ads, thinking they were helping me earn a living, Google said “see ya!” and disabled my account for fraudulent activity! It wasn’t meant as fraud, and really, at that time all of maybe 10 people in the world even knew the blog existed. I appealed to Google, explaining the situation. Nothing. I appealed again several months later. Again, nothing. I was very disappointed and discouraged. And to this day, I have no clue how to fix this situation, which is even more frustrating now then it was back when it happened. There are people earning some big bucks with Adsense and if anyone has any idea on resolving this, PLEASE let me know.
In the meantime, I went and purchased the book WordPress for Dummies, but found much of the information in the book no longer pertained to what WordPress is today. I think, because it’s an open source platform, with many contributors improving it, it just changes too often for a publication written several years ago to be very relevant or accurate. It does, however, explain some key basics that were helpful, understanding the foundations and all.
At the same time I set up this blog, I also started two others for my artwork. One focuses on my graphite pencil drawings, the other on my paintings. I even developed the Zanny Rants illustrations, many of which are still on earlier posts. However, I had to abandon the notion of Zanny Rant illustrations in lieu of a drawing a day I do for http://www.graphitegoddess.com. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day. “Graphite Goddess” is a better name because you at least have some idea what the blog is all about from the name, yet it still wasn’t the best choice I could have made. Really, do some research on keywords before you pick a name for your blog. It does matter!
I’ll continue my story later today, as it’s already going on 2 AM. Really gotta get some sleep for now.