When I first started out in the wonderful world of blogging a little over a year ago, I had two things that I wanted to accomplish. First, I wanted to have a web presence where I could share my interests, thoughts, etc. with others. Second, I wanted to see if I could make a little money. Let me tell you now, that in MY experience, these two things were mutually exclusive.

After having read up on affiliate marketing, SEO, search engine ratings, etc., and then staring at my empty website, I realized that if I was going to attract enough people to my website, I was going to have to get some content – and fast. So I began scouring the Internet for topics that I was interested in and then I would copy and paste to posts on my website (always giving credit to the original author). Before long, my website was filled with interesting content, but none of it written by myself, and all of it available in dozens of other places on the Web. I also began placing feeds into my site from other sites in order to provide even more content. After that, I placed ads on Craigslist in order to attract people to my content (all legitimate and honest ads, mind you). Soon, I was making some money with affiliate advertising. I was not, however, giving anything at all to the World Wide community that I had hoped to interact with in a meaningful way.

I began spending all of my time checking my earnings, updating my themes to improve the appearance of my sites, getting frustrated with my web hosting provider for the often slow-loading times of my sites, getting upset with Google Adsense for occasional low payouts per click, and fighting with Craigslist’s frustrating arbitrary account policies. Meanwhile I gave no time or effort to creating useful, unique and personal content.

I’m finished with all of that now. I have decided to cancel my web hosting, give up my domains, and I have moved over to WordPress.Com’s free and ads-free blog hosting. I am now going to start concentrating on my writing and, hopefully, produce some unique content that others will find interesting and useful.

So…welcome to my new ads-free blog! I hope you will enjoy it – if you do, please bookmark this site and come back often!