In February, I spent a rather inordinate amount of time developing the very blog you are reading.  I started from scratch utilizing pieces of CSS code that I gleaned from the brilliance of others and began building the layout for this site.  Since I was impressed with the type of following Darren Rowse had built at ProBlogger.net, I thought I would give it a shot, and thus The Executive Apprentice theme was created and I began writing frantically to keep up with the rest of the blogging world.

It became very tiring very quickly and there was little reward.  My focus was all wrong.  I was too interested in developing some sort of mastermind marketing plan to generate passive advertising income overnight that I forgot that offering value to the reader was the key to keeping people interested.  I then realized that the only thing that could successfully keep my writing up to par would be real life experience.

If you think you can sit down and write about nothing hoping someone will read it and find value in it, and your focus is one thing and one thing only (money) then you may be doomed to fail.  You really have to have something of value to offer your prospective readers.

One of the attempts I made at cashing in on blogging (granted, I know I didn’t really give it enough time and the reason for that was unemployment) was hooking myself up to entrecard and project wonderful.  Not so wonderful.  Entrecard turned out to be a group of sad bloggers trying to click their way to stardom through credits they’d earned simply by visiting thousands of sites over and over again.  That turned out to be a complete waste of time.  Project wonderful was implement way too quickly to be effective.  The time committment needed just to manage the advertiser content was way too intense.  I also implemented some google advertising, but the results consistently offered competing products and services to mine and my inexperience has proven to be detrimental to the development of a solid advertising campaign on my site.

So, I thought I’d give away something for free to generate traffic.  I offered an Ides of March 19″ Flat Panel display thinking it would generate a boat load of traffic.  After all, who wouldn’t want a free computer monitor?  I had plenty of stock at the time, and I thought giving one away would be good publicity for the site.  Basically it backfired when I found out that I would no longer be working where I was working and I suddenly had no income.  I had to abandon the contest and sell the monitor to recover my losses.  To those of you who entered the contest, I offer my sincerest apologies.  There were only a handful of people who even took notice.

So, onward and upward…