Blogging For Fun and Profit

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Where am I? How did I get here? Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

How blogging reached out and enchanted me and how you can come under its spell too.

Pixabay / Lumenbrite

The Start of the Adventure

I’ve been writing since I was a kid. Stage plays for my friends. Cough…cough…..fan fic featuring … um … The Hardy Boys (hey, I was a teenager … don’t judge). I even wrote up a newspaper called The Daily Zot for a science fiction writing project English class in the 5th grade. I started and neglected countless diaries and journals over the years; countless short stories and articles; and countless poems, book outlines, and portions of novels.

I participated in NANOWRIMO – National Novel Writing Month in 2014 but didn’t finish the book. In 2015, I again participated and this time I finished a novel that travels through time and space. It’s on the hard drive of my computer. All it needs is a few years of intensive proofreading and it’ll be ready to publish. Procrastination is one of my special gifts.

Blogging is really hard…

… or so I thought I guess I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the rapid changes going on in the blogging world. Even though I’m a computer geek at work and I was a systems administrator at one time in my life. To me, blogging seemed like something that only people who are tech-savvy are capable of doing. I saw friends creating their blogs/websites with Unix and HTML or going to school to get degrees in database and web design. I just looked at blogging or having a website as being way over my head.

Even though I wasn’t paying much attention to hows of the blogging world, I was reading several on a weekly basis: Messy Nessy Chic, Living Well Spending Less, and the Frugal Fanatic. I also had favorites that Google would throw randomly at me like Bored Panda, Buzzfeed, and Mashable. There are dozens of other that I’ve dipped into randomly.

Big Surprise! Blogging is not difficult at all!

My mother-in-law retired and found that she wanted something to do to supplement her income. She signed up for a few alarming scams because she didn’t realize how many really awful things there are on the internet. So I started looking for and finding truly legitimate work from home websites such as The Work At Home Woman and Real Ways to Earn Money Online. Both are stellar resources!

Surveys seemed to fit the bill for her and to make sure she was getting the safest pages, I spent a month filling out dozens of surveys on numerous sites. There are very pleasant and safe ways to make money on the internet. Filling out surveys and doing tasks for pay allow her to work when and how much she wants.

Over and over, while I was exploring the work from home sites, I saw instructions and testimonials about blogging, how easy they are to set up and how fun they are to work with. So I started researching and found some really good resources and a lot of wonderful advice! It took two months of digging through resources and signing up for various free “How to Blog” such as Blogging Made Simple, which I highly recommend, that made me feel brave enough to get started. The enchantment comes from knowing you’re a part of a close-knit community of people who are passionate about blogging and helping people. I have never been so closely involved with a community that will drop everything to help a newbie along the way.

Enter The Elite Blog Academy

While I was searching on how to get my blog off the ground, I stumbled on The Elite Blog Academy run by Ruth Soukup of Living Well Spending Less. Though it definitely is an investment, it’s one of the few classes that will hold your hand from the very beginnings of building your blog all the way through to creating a full-time successful business.