Taking advice (45)

July 29th
My head is spinning with the advice of my peers. Take notice world, I am calling them my peers, these famous bloggers who make money doing their creative thing on the internet. Yesterday, I downloaded another ebook, this time a free one, thank goodness, from Bjork of "Food Blogger Pro" fame. He makes quite an impressive income out of blogging and teaching others how to blog. His free ebook is a list of blogging mistakes and how to fix them. And just like "While She Naps" Abby, Bjork offers general advice that makes good sense and should not come as a surprise to anyone who ever considered blogging. (BTW, just a few years ago, the word, blog, and certainly the term, blogging, would have had an angry red line underneath the typed word on the screen. Now Penzu, Google and Word all recognize the term as accepted verbiage. That is very cool. I am trendy.) So in Abby's book, one that I did pay for, I read enough to skim through and not quite finish because I already knew many of her tips. Abby does make a point that blogging continues to be the center of her profitable home-based business and that blogging is therefore not dead. Bjork, the online rich blogging guru who everyone looks up to, recommends wordpress.org and not wordpress.com, and to include personal thoughts in every post. People want to get to know you, the writer. "Useletter" Amy, also making her way at home on her computer in her pajamas, is full of similar ideas and great links to get me excited. Okay, so the advice is there. I take notice.

I have advice coming in from all sorts of directions these days and since I don’t know what to do with myself, I try to take it all in. Barbara advises me to tutor for lots of money, friends and neighbors say I should tutor not just kids but adults too, a tennis friend of Norman wants me to paint cat portraits, dog loving friends of Pat wants dog portraits, my online internet peers encourage me to write a blog, and applause from FB buddies gets my desire going to be a writer. My head is spinning from it all. I keep coming back to my blog. It is the one thing I love to spend hours designing, composing and reading back what I wrote. I used to follow the Food Blogger podcast in the car for many months. Bjork has the loveliest radio voice. He found his calling as a host for sure and he could convince the timidest of them all (such as me) to make a living out of a blog. He makes it seem like a doable thing to monetize your posts, but still, I hesitate. Any time I visit someone's site and the annoying ads pop up, I give up the idea and very likely close the person's site out of impatience. It is just as annoying as those phone calls selling me stuff on my landline. I simply don't answer my phone anymore. Gotta be a better way to do this, Bjork.

Meanwhile, I do have a blog. It is not a wordpress.org and it does not make me money, but I like it. Murray the portrait sits on my easel and I am waiting for paying commissions, so this week I might also focus on Me Being Creative. It is a blog. I have content. I have a dream. (Take notice, world, it is a day for advice, not a day for the number 45.)