Don’t you?  Blogging at work is quickly becoming a national past-time, right there behind “reading blogs at work.” People blog at work to procrastinate, to improve their company’s exposure, or as a cornerstone of their business.  For an increasing number of people, blogging IS their work.  Personally, I blog at work because I think it is a sound business strategy.  That strategy is to create a high traffic, entrepreneur-targeted website where I can discuss my ideas and launch projects, giving them instant exposure.  Besides, blogging is fun, and who doesn’t want to have fun at work?

But it wasn’t always like that.  When I started this blog back in November 2005, I still held a regular job at a biotech company.  I started the blog because I knew that I would be moving (and hence quitting) soon, and the feeling that I wanted to be more than a cubicle monkey was growing stronger.  At that point, I was blogging at my work because I wanted to procrastinate.  My job was not that exciting or engrossing to begin with, and blogging was a welcome distraction.  This is the case for thousands of bloggers out there.  For them, blogging is a fun, creative activity while work is dull and dissatisfying.  Plus, they goof off half the time anyway, so why not put that goof time to good use and create something?

That’s exactly what I did.  Armed with lots of down time at work and a kick in the pants from Steve Pavlina’s site I jumped right into the blogging world.  I would blog in the mornings during my supposed “email time,” around and during the lunch break, and any other time that the muse struck.  At the time it was very helpful to me because it helped me to develop my ideas and to see opportunities for income that had nothing to do with a regular job.

There is also a whole other class of bloggers, however, that are encouraged to blog at work.  These are cases where the company is seeking more exposure in the market, or wants to demonstrate transparency to its customers.  Good examples are the Google blog, and the myriad blogs by employees of Microsoft, Sun, and other software companies.  The Google blog is a collaborative effort written by Google employees and it gives Google a more human and likable face, while at the same time giving the public some useful tidbits.  Companies like Microsoft and Sun encourage their employees to blog because it is a good marketing strategy, and it makes them less of a “big black box.” Users of their software can now read what the developers are thinking and working on, and even provide feedback and suggestions.  If these interactions were to coherently find their way into the software, it could only mean good things for the company.

As far as blogging at work goes, that is a great place to be for a satisfied employee.  In fact, if you like your work but want a little more variety or a creative outlet, why not ask your boss about letting you blog?  Explain to her that it would be an investment that returns increased and targeted traffic to your company’s website, and hence more interest in your products and services.  Furthermore, it would open up a more casual line of communication and feedback with your customers and target audience.  All good things.

And then, there are the blogging-preneurs.  This group runs the gamut from entrepreneurs such as Darren Rowse of ProBlogger who make a very significant income from blogging to entrepreneurs in completely unrelated fields who blog for fun.  Blogging is a rewarding experience for both budding and seasoned entrepreneurs, because it helps to build their reputation and presence, and demonstrates their competence communicating in a written medium.  For a seasoned entrepreneur, a blog is a valuable communication and evangelizing tool.  They can express their opinions, obtain feedback, explain business decisions, and provide guidance.  For budding entrepreneurs, the exposure, contacts, and reputation that can be gleaned through a good blog are invaluable.  It is a badge they can wear and one more demonstration of traction.  For the budding & broke entrepreneur, a good blog is even an avenue towards income, whether it be from advertising on their site or from prospective customers found through it.  It is also an expression of personality and style, and can elicit attention from people who might otherwise not have given them the time of day.  So blog on, and here’s to hoping that Steve Jobs drops by soon with that big fat check.

I’ve been trying to learn a little more about niche content sites, and as usually happens when I delve into a new topic online, I found a whole sub-culture dedicated to niche content on the internet.  It’s always fascinating to get a glimpse into these sub-cultures because they have their own lingo, their own star players, and their own quirks, rules, and guidelines.  It’s similar to what I found when I started looking into domain portfolios and parking.

Nonetheless, there is a thriving culture built around niche income sites and their development, though their trade takes on many names.  AIS, which stand for Automatic Income Site, was the one I liked best because of its simplicity and because it emphasizes the Automatic Income bit.  But other applicable terms were Content Niche Sites, or Niche Income Sites, Niche Sites, and so on.

One problem that I often have when I first jump into something new is that I find out that most of the ideas I had about the topic are not new and there are already experts out there in this field.  I get the feeling that I’m arriving too late, that this particular opportunity is already saturated, and I get discouraged.  This happens often, which means a lot of my projects don’t make it out of the planning and nascent phases.  It’s certainly happening right now with niche sites and automatic income.

But my new approach to this problem is to look at it as a learning experience.  I’m going to get something out there even if I’m just a newbie and even if what I’m doing has been done before.  That’s what I did with Domaining - I’ve kept growing my domain portfolio even though I am completely a neophyte and just learning how things work.  And I’ve seen a little result, a little less than $1 a month from my Sedo parked sites.  Who’s to say that I couldn’t learn to turn that into a much higher income stream.

So I’m going to approach Automatic Income Sites the same way.  I want to launch a good dozen AIS sites and learn from the experience.  I’m going to look into the tools, although my budget is low for now, and develop my own system so that I can produce such sites more quickly and easily.  This could run the gamut from simple templates, to writing scripts that build sites automatically from keywords.  (Such scripts already exist out there, and they go for $500)

I’ve even thought of a way that niche sites could become a way for me to make contract work income.  I have a decent knowledge of website development and I’m becoming more adept at content development, so my idea is to provide a website design service aimed at Domainers.  Those people buy domains all the time that don’t get type-in traffic, but could be developed into decent automatic income sites.  They’re so busy buying domains though that they don’t have time to develop sites around them, so they just post them on Sedo for convenience.  I would offer them a custom-built content-rich website designed around their domain and keywords for a flat fee.  What do you think?  Did I miss the boat already?

Finally!  I’ve had this blog up for almost three months, but was still hesitating to put any kind of monetization feature on it.  Partly, it was because I didn’t know how putting up ads would affect my search rankings, and I suspected the effect would be negative.  Nonsense, even if the effect was negative, it has to be minor.  Partly, it was because I hadn’t set apart a block of time for signing up, setting up, and getting it to work with Wordpress.  This was surprisingly quick and easy.  But mostly, it was because of my low traffic numbers.  Even with AdSense up I’m sure it will be a while before I see any real income from it.  The real task at hand, as Erik points out, is building a decent amount of traffic.  Everything else follows from there.  The initial push to achieve this is through networking and search engine traffic.

But I digress.  In the few short months that I’ve been learning about blogs, web 2.0, and income opportunities, I’ve seen quite a few different opinions on Google AdSense.  Some people swear by it, it’s their primary monetization source for their blog.  And the range of people that swear by it is diverse.  Everything some newbies and non-techies to seasoned veterans and experts.  Many of these people create large, sustainable incomes using AdSense on their sites; incomes that they can comfortably live off.  Even more people create small to medium incomes; perhaps enough to pay off their hosting expenses, or enough to have a nice meal every month, or even enough to support their addiction to new gadgets.  Regardless, one thing that AdSense users have going for them is ease of use.  They sign up, they paste the code, and presto, they’re earning an income.  No finding advertisers and negotiating contracts.  No stockpiling of products or package stuffing.  No mess.  It’s easy, and if you have the right kind and/or volume of traffic, it’s rewarding.

There is a contingent of bloggers out there though, that think using AdSense to monetize your blog means you’re selling yourself short.  According to them, not only could you be making more from you site, but putting up Google AdSense ads indicates “low site-esteem.” You’re saying that you don’t really care what is being advertised on your site.  Furthermore, you don’t know what share of the income Google is keeping, or if the advertisers they’re displaying on your site are the best suited and the ones who pay the most for your traffic.  They advocate being more proactive in your monetization efforts.  Broker deals with worthy advertisers, refer people via reputable affiliate links, and think of creative ways to create income from your site.  This is all assuming, of course, that you have a site of high content value with a large and steady stream of visitors.

But for me, it is still trial-and-error time.  And the first on the list to try is Google AdSense.  It should do just fine during the traffic building stages of my blog development, and once I have a decent amount of traffic I can once again focus on monetization techniques.  More importantly, having even a little income from my blog is likely to motivate me to keep developing it; that’s likely to be the biggest benefit.

Google AdSense and Wordpress

Now for a few specifics on installing Google AdSense into Wordpress.  Your first prerequisite is that you must have your own website, preferably something with a decent amount of content on it.  Then, signing up for AdSense is a cinch, but you will have to wait a couple of days during the approval period - Google actually takes a quick look at your site to make sure everything is in order. The next step is to download and install the AdSense Deluxe Plugin from Acme Technologies.  This is as simple as dropping the main file into your wp-plugins directory and then activating it in Wordpress admin panel.  The plugin gives you more flexibility regarding where you put your ads.  You can add them right to a post using an HTML comment, or more generally to a template file using PHP.  All this is explained pretty well in their README file.  Finally, you log into AdSense, create an ad block that matches your site look and feel, and copy the resulting HTML block into the AdSense Deluxe plugin.  Now you’re ready to drop that ad block into any spot on your website using a simple comment or a line of code in your template.  Erik has a good explanation of how you can get your content to wrap around Google AdSense using a div tag.

As my domain portfolio grows and I get a better sense of the traffic each domain draws, I can see that few domains are likely to draw much type in traffic.  In fact, even my most trafficked domain only draws about 1 hit per day.  On top of that, I’ve been reading a lot about websites designed around content niches as a way to create passive income, so I thought I would try my hand at it too.

The basic idea behind a content niche site is that there are many topics about which there is not enough information on the internet.  These are narrow topics, but there are still people who search for this information on the internet and don’t come up with any good results.  So a content niche site provides the content and information to fill a particular niche, and thereby draws that search traffic.  Because that traffic is so targeted and specific, it is possible to monetize it throught advetisements and affiliate links, and presto, you have a passive stream of income.

Of course, I suspect that like with most things, making money from content niche sites is not that simple.  Creativity, quality, and execution are going to play a big role.  Also, you have to manage the effort you put into it.  If a site takes you 100 hours to develop, but then only brings in a couple of dollar a month, then it probably wasn’t worth it.  But since I’m just getting started and my plan is to learn how to play this game, I have time to spare.  The value to me is in what I learn through the development, and so I figured that I would just go for it.

The first site I’ve developed is Buy an iPod Video.  After I chose it and began to develop it I realized that strictly speaking it wasn’t a niche content site because it’s not an underserved or narrow topic. It’s a product, or more specifically, an incorrect moniker for a product.  That’s because “iPod Video” is not what Apple is actually calling the new iPod, it’s simply called the “iPod.” Oh well, at least “ipod video” is still an under-served search string, and hopefully I will be able to draw some traffic with it.  Like I said, this is just my first site in a series of experiments on content niche sites.

I think it was sometime during high school when I stopped making New Year’s resolutions.  They just never stuck.  I remember the years before that I would think hard about what I wanted for the upcoming year, come up with reasonable resolutions, write them down, and then follow them for three weeks.  I found it so demoralizing to keep breaking commitments to myself that I decided it was better not to make them in the first place, at least not in such a formal written manner.  So I stopped.

Looking back I can see that the real problem wasn’t with me breaking commitments.  It’s just that the goals I set were vague and often complicated, and the standards that I held myself to were too high.  The problem with that was that any little slip caused me to declare myself a failure, and I would just give up.

I think this has been a theme in my life in the intervening years.  Fear of failure.  I was scared of not being as good as I wanted to be, so I just didn’t set goals or expectations for myself.  In school assignments and then work tasks I would subconsciously sabotage myself by procrastinating.  This way, the end product wouldn’t be a representation of my best work because I had to work in a rush.  I could always hide behind that, and let myself think that if I really put in the time and effort then the result would be extraordinary.

Of late, I’ve been awakening to the patterns in my life.  Partly because of the transitions, partly through all the reading, and partly because of the time I spend thinking, I’m starting to see the wasteful and self-destructive patterns in my life, and beginning to understand them.  In some cases, I’ve even started to change them.  I try to not expect so much of myself anymore.  It’s ok if I fail because of what I learn along the way.  If this blog, or that website, or some project doesn’t go well, it’s ok because the expectation is no longer wild success, but just to learn something along the way.  This means that I’m slowly giving up on procrastination, emphasis on the slowly part.  I’m definitely becoming more productive as time passes, but I can still feel the resistance to starting something because I want the end result to be perfect.  One key to overcoming this is to focus on just starting something, and not on what the end result should be like.  It works.

All this being said, I think I’m ready to start setting New Year’s resolutions again.  And this time, they don’t have to be the complicated, or unattainable resolutions of the past.  More importantly, I’m not going to declare failure if I slip up here and there.  One approach that I really liked was the one mentioned by Steve Pavlina.  It involves making commitments to do simple, measurable actions every day.  For example, doing 25 minutes of aerobic exercise every day instead of “Lose 15 pounds.” Note how there is no expectation tied to Steve’s resolution, although more than likely there will be a result tied to it.  So without further ado, here are my resolutions for 2006.  This first year back I’m keeping them simple and I’m only making three.

- Do at least 25 minutes of aerobic exercise every day.
- Read a book for at least 30 minutes every day.
- Don’t eat any meat on Tuesdays.

The first, I borrowed from Steve Pavlina (thanks Steve!) It seems like a great way to get myself back on a regular exercise regime without having any expectations.  It’s sad and amazing to me that last year I was able to go from marathon-and-triathlon-shape to couch potato in the span of 8 months.  For the second, blogs and magazines don’t count.  This is because more thought is usually put into written books, and I’ll exercise more control over what I’m learning if I limit my “browsing.” The third is to be a little healthier, and to build more awareness into my diet.  I usually eat everything and anything resulting in an unbalanced diet and in occasional low energy.  So there we go.  Check in with me a year from now...or more often if you’d like.