Based on the success of this blogging experience, I intend to devote an entire category of posts to how to create a blog. More importantly, I’ll write about how to actually make it thrive using what you know. Now, I haven’t gotten to that point yet, so like most things in my life, I experiment on myself before I advise anyone else to take action.
Background
For a long time I’ve wanted to get into writing online. I’m not a great writer. I used to be, but then I joined the military, and being around a bunch of like-minded neanderthals who want to blow things up tends to take its toll on my writing style. If you’re a literature or english major, you might want to stop reading, lest you go insane with all of my grammatical mistakes, switching between present and past tenses, and so on.
Here’s the rub, though. In the world of online blogging, it pays to be grammatically correct. It pays to write with a certain style and finesse, not just so it’s easier to read, but so it’s easier to index by search engines. Search engines, especially the most prominent ones, index things a lot like people might. They look for readability, structure, and content.
So in starting this blog, I’ve renewed my personal desire to become better at writing. I think by improving my writing style and general command of the english language (again), I’ll see more success as far as the blog goes.
Why “Take this Job and Shove It?”
A lot goes into a blog name. Once you’ve got visitors and a following, be prepared to let that name stick. Up until that point, you can experiment a little bit with relevant titles. But unless you’re getting strictly into niche marketing, blog titles like “Top10Dishwashers.com” don’t mean much.
With TakeThisJobandShove.It, I wanted to emphasize my focus on my goals of becoming financially independent. I’m assuming most readers who come here over the life of this blog, will be equally interested in this. After all, who doesn’t want to stop working and live their dream life?
I also chose this particular blog title because I loved the movie Office Space and there’s a song in it called “Shove This Jay Oh Bee” by Canibus, which is actually somewhat of a cover of this song, by Johnny Paycheck. I saw Office Space when I was pretty young, but it truly struck a cord with me.
A lot of people looked at the movie satirically. What would really happen to anyone who did what Peter Gibbons did? 99.999% of the time it wouldn’t work out, or they’d end up in prison. That’s why it’s Hollywood. But the lifestyle undertones it brought up were important to me.
We only get one life on this earth. I’m an Atheist (gasp!), and believe that when I’m done here, I become worm food and nothing more. To that end, I wholeheartedly agree that humans were not meant to spend their lives miserable and in a cubicle. Maybe we weren’t really meant to do anything, come to think of it. But I know I wasn’t meant to do that.
Rule Number One: Don’t read this blog and then tell your boss to go f*ck himself
So TakeThisJobAndShove.It, is not my way of saying people shouldn’t work. If no one worked — ever — society would crumble. We can’t all be in it for ourselves 100% of the time. But at some point, the work should be done; our contributions to the world should be enough, and we should be allowed to live in peace. The standard formula says this occurs at retirement age in our 60s. A lot of us don’t even make it that far.
I don’t want to stick it to the man, either. “The man” has helped me get where I am today. A lot of my success is attributable to an employer who compensated me well enough for my work. I don’t believe in overcompensation, nor do I believe in undercompensation. Some jobs pay more, and some skills are harder to come by. That’s just life.
“The man” needs to exist. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. But for all intents and purposes, we want to be the man, and not the other way around.
Blog Progress
My first step in starting this blog was decide on the theme. I had lots of things I could write about. I don’t consider myself an expert in any one thing, but I do consider myself above average at a lot of things, though. I’d read a lot about niche site building, and the truth is, I think it would get boring to write about. I understand the premise of targeted advertising and monetization, but it just didn’t seem for me.
So instead of creating a blog specifically about “how to quit your job in 365 days,” I wanted to write about my life. It just so happened that a lot of my goals and efforts go towards being able to leave my job and live the same or better lifestyle than I have now, for the rest of my days.
The decision was made, and I decided this should be a lifestyle blog about my trials and pursuits and progress in becoming financially independent.
Challenges of Lifestyle Blogging
Being a Man in a Woman’s World…
Not to sound stereotypical, but this is a competitive niche in and of itself. The majority of male bloggers that I’ve found are very focused on niches. Either they are paleo chefs, financial advisors, or fitness enthusiasts for the most part. I think it’s hard to get a strong following in one of the few worlds that is dominated mostly by young female writers.
I think in general we all like to read about and hear from women. Maybe it’s because they are underrepresented in a lot of other areas? I’m not sure why. But there must be a reason all virtual assistants (Google Home, Amazon Echo, etc.) come default with a female voice.
Since I don’t have that bubbly, giggly, strong, independent female vibe (that’s not a jab, it’s a complement to any of you reading), I’ve accepted that one of the biggest challenges I’ll have is making this blog universally appealing and useful. I don’t see myself in competition with other bloggers, because I think the community is largely self-supporting. But I think it’s hard to get whitelisted in this community without a base of followers and good content… especially as a guy in his 30s without a major niche to target.
Life is Boring Sometimes…
Another challenge is that life can be pretty damn boring at times. Especially when you are trapped in the rat race. That’s why I’m hoping one benefit of blogging will be a form of self-encouragement to get out there and make my life more interesting.
This goes hand-in-hand with writing quality. I made some great steaks last night (probably the best I’ve ever made), but unless that can be put down on paper in an interesting way, no one will give a shit. Speaking of which, maybe I’ll make a blog category of good food recipes I come up with or make.
Being independent is a lot of things to different people. Financial independence could mean one thing to one person and another thing to someone else. For someone used to making $1,500 a month, financial independence looks a lot different than for someone making six figures.
Life independence is really the goal in that respect. For me this means enjoying experiences as I see fit to enjoy them. Being able to take advantage of opportunities when they are presented, rather than having to place them on the back burner due to prior obligations or the fear of losing present day stability.
My daughter is almost a year old as of writing this, and I want her to have the most fulfilling life possible. My family gave me a great foundation. I squandered some of that foundation in my youth (and my family allowed it, because some of the best lessons learned are the hardest), and rebuilt/built upon a lot of it as well.
I hope to make my life interesting and independent enough, with encouragement through this blog, to give her the life she deserves.
Startup Costs and Overhead
Now that I’ve got a pretty good, although very general theme of what I want to write about, I had to start writing. I came up with some basic posts for the blog. A simple About Me section.
And then I just started writing as things came up.
Registering the Domain
The startup costs at this point were minimal. I registered the domain through GoDaddy. There are lots of other (and possibly better) registrars out there. I have loyalty to GoDaddy because I have multiple domains through them from years ago and prefer to have everything in one place. I’m not particularly fond of their hosting interface, or of a lot of their package pricing. Because I have a unique domain name (.it) there were a couple other regulatory costs involved with the registration as well. In total, I spent less than $40 getting the domain set up.
Setting up the Hosting
Hosting is probably the most important technical aspect behind getting a successful blog. I had started hosting on GoDaddy’s platform and hated it. Their user interface was painfully slow and convoluted. Making simple changes to name servers, and other things seemed to take forever.
It didn’t take me long to seek hosting elsewhere.
In the past I had shelled out money for dedicated hosting from Blue Host for a few other web sites I had created. These sites got very little traffic, and even though Blue Host would be my preferred hosting partner, I could not justify the expense without being able to better monetize my sites. If you have a profitable idea, though, and you’re ready to get some real traffic to your site without any hiccups, then I strongly recommend them.
The cheap middle man
I wanted to get a reliable shared host, with enough storage space and bandwidth, for a competitive price. Why a shared host? At this point, without an abundance of traffic, paying for a dedicated host and pipe are unnecessary. The speed of a shared host is good enough (depending on who you register with) for small blogs.
As this blog gains a following, I’ll upgrade, and probably switch back over to Blue Host.
In the meantime, I found Host Gator to be the easiest and most trouble free up to this point. Their hosting interface is light years ahead of GoDaddy’s in terms of usability. They allow domain registering directly, although I don’t use them for that. And they have multiple cheap hosting packages. Domains and accounts can be easily customized as well.
Another benefit is they still offer some of the “premium” services that GoDaddy and other providers offer. In particular, they have one-click-installations of different software packages, including WordPress and e-mail. Although it’s pretty easy to install WordPress manually, it can be time consuming to place files where you need them and create all the relevant settings.
I’ve had great success with Host Gator’s simple WordPress installation. In fact, it’s what I used to create this blog to get it up and running. As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll improve and adapt to fit the need, and I’m convinced Host Gator will allow me to do that until I’m grown up enough to move on to a dedicated hosting provider.
In total, to get this blog up to this point, It’s cost about $60 in startup feeds, and then about $5/month in dirt cheap hosting fees.
Unforeseen Costs
Some of the costs I anticipate in the future will be in relation to content generation. I’ll probably end up buying a nicer camera to get better photos. I have an older version of Photoshop, which I might pay to upgrade so I can make the pictures even better. I can doctor iPhone and Samsung photos well enough that they look good, but it’s easier to just have a good camera and start off with a better foundation.
The time savings may be worth the expense.
Speaking of time.
I spend a lot of time writing these articles. At this point I don’t spend much time planning them. You may read them and think “Wow, this sounds like this dude just sat down and started vomiting words onto the screen.” In many cases, that’s not too far from the truth.
Planning, revising and structuring posts for indexing is very important with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Right now my goal is to get words on paper. I think the indexing will ultimately take care of itself as I get better at writing, and as my site is categorized by search engines.
The reason I don’t spend a lot of time planning and optimizing is because I’ve tried niche blogging in the past with poor results. I think the reason for this is that when you’re writing for profit, you tend to lose your muse. I spent so much time worrying about keywords, sentence structure and all this other B.S., that I lost track of my purpose.
I’d rather have moderately entertaining and useful content and less than stellar structure, than excellent structure and useless content.
Right now the blog’s goal is to write. At some point that will change to make money, but that time is not now.
My time is more important to me than most tangibles are. My time is part of my financial and lifestyle independence goals. Free time enables me to spend more quality time watching my daughter grow up and having fun with my wife. The time spent optimizing page copy for search engines is just not time well spent at this point.
I’ve probably punched a lot of you SEO experts in the face by saying that. And I’m sure you’ll be quick to think that it’s no wonder I’m not making money on this blog. Just remember what my goals are right now.
I don’t want to give in to mission creep and lose track of what I really want.
Statistics
Even though I don’t spend much time on SEO anymore, I still like to track statistics. I use Sumo to log clicks and page views, as well as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how people are finding my site and interacting with it.
This is all anonymous information, but it gives me some basics to work with without making me feel exhausted by SEO trash.
Currently I’m getting about 1 or 2 visitors per day. Amazing, right?! My bounce rate is also pretty high, meaning these are either bots, they’re people who found me by mistake, or they’re people who think my content is straight up garbage (hey maybe they’re right!).
I’m hoping that improves over time.
I’ll join these blog reports with my Finance Reports as it becomes appropriate. But right now, since I’m not making money on the blog, there’s no point in tying these reports with the financial independence aspect.
Stay tuned for the next update… I’ll try to make them weekly.