Today Is My First Day As A Full-Time Blogger!!

It’s been 4.5 years in the making but I handed my notice in at work three months ago and my last day of service was Friday, and after returning from a long weekend break in Madrid with my wife, I now find myself a full-time ‘blogger’.  I use the term blogger losely as I don’t really consider myself a blogger in the truest sense; I just happen to use blogging software like WordPress to power some of my sites.

Nevertheless, I now find myself totally reliant on the income generated from this site and others like Windows 7 News. Even though I’ve created budgets and rechecked them probably a million times over the last 6 months and I know I should have enough money to live off, it’s still quite scary that the paycheque I will receive tomorrow could be my last ever.   Things that I took for granted that came with my work package such as a guaranteed salary, company car, pensions, life insurance, critical illness insurance, health insurance etc have now taken on a totally different meaning now that I have to source them myself.  Also, a bad quarter now no longer means my firm loses money and the share price goes down, with no real impact on me… it now means I can’t support my family!

It’s a great feeling though to be my own boss, and I no longer have to worry about members of my team calling me, pleasing my boss or dragging myself to work on days when I’m just not in the mood.  No more getting upset with office politics for me, or bitching when someone else gets a promotion, or blaming someone else when a project goes wrong.  Now if things go right I can take all the credit, and if things go wrong I’ll have no-one to blame but myself.  This is the main reason I’ve taken the plunge and decided to work for myself full-time; because how successful I am from now on will be mainly down to me and my own efforts.

It’s been a long road for me to get to this point and I’d like to thank all the people who helped me get here.  First of all I’d like to thank Loic Le Meur for convincing me to meet him back in 2005 so that he could talk to me about what a new blogging service could do for my ISP.  At the time I’d heard of  ’blogs’ but I just couldn’t get my head around what they were.  Loic did a very good job in convincing me that my ISP users might be interested in setting up blogs, and he setup a free test typepad blog for me which eventually became this site, Connected Internet.

I’d also like to thank Darren Rowse for making me realise that it was possible to make money from blogging.  The first network I tried was Google Adsense and thankfully I can access my historical data which really made my afternoon.  In March 2005 I made the princely sum of $0.56 from Google Adsense, then in April 2005 I significantly improved my Adsense income to $3.13.  May 2005 brought home $5.05 and June 2005 $7.05.  I didn’t run any ads again until November 2005 where I made a huge $60.79.

December 2005 was the month that really changed things, where I took home $750.73 just from Google Adsense.  I couldn’t believe at the time that something I was doing up until then just for fun part-time could actually generate income!  Without reading Problogger, I would have given up on trying to make money online and I never would have considered targeting making $100 a day from Adsense or a six-figure blogger, marks that I hit back in August 2007.

Other people I would like to thank are Martin and Mikael who I shared and still share learnings, tips and tweaks that I’ve discovered along the way.  My informal partnership with Martin in particular has grown significantly this year and we now own a number of sites 50:50, including Otaku Gadgets and Windows 7 News. They both went full-time a while ago, and I hope that my sites improve as much as theirs have since.

I’d like to thank the various guys who have kept Connected Internet going during the months where I’ve been too busy to post, or when I’d just lost my blogging mojo and had no interest in churning out posts late at night.  Michael and Joey in particular have been there from day one, and for over 2 years have faithfully turned out great posts every week.

Lastly though I’d like to thank you my readers for giving me this opportunity.  Even if it weren’t because of the income generated from blogging, I’d still be blogging as I still get a buzz from being able to reach out to tens of thousands of people each day.  I hope that you’ll stay with me as I enter the next phase of my online journey!

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