i’m guest post famous.

i’ve always wanted to write a guest post. i didn’t have any idea where, or about what,  but the honor of being asked by another blogger to write for them just seemed like it would be totally awesome. as it turns out, i was correct! the very amazing chris over at part time vagabond recently gave me the honor of writing a little article about budget travel tips that made its debut this morning. what i love about PTV is that it’s grounded in reality. it isn’t all “let’s jetset to morocco for a long weekend”. it’s about the eternal struggle between wanting to aimlessly wander the globe while still tending to the responsibilities of things like jobs and pets and property ownership. chris is all about escaping when you can, and finding adventure in even the shortest jaunt. it’s everything that is amazing about travel, translated into real life. anyway chris, you rock, and thank you for letting me get my stink all over your kick ass website!

blogging for dollars.

after the big week with the wordpress deluge and just the general positive growth of my little blog egg over the last year, a friend recently posed the question: why aren’t you monetizing? first of all, i hate the word monetize. it’s like one of those jargony crap words that everyone throws around when they’re talking about “important internet stuff”. second of all, i hate advertising cluttering up my favorite blogs. it’s ugly and distracting. on the other hand… i do like money. i do need money. as a writer of a blog with the word “broke” in the title, don’t i have a personal responsibility to scrape every penny off the sidewalk that i can?

well, when i first started this project, i promised myself that i wasn’t going to try any funny business like paying for a domain name, or advertising, or trying to make money until i had been successfully operational for at least one year. i have a bad track record with blogs (and a lot of other things)… i get so excited about things for a minute, and then someone jangles some keys in front of my face, and i’m off and running in the opposite direction. the internet is a virtual (pun intended) graveyard of my abandoned writing projects, and i wanted to make sure that this wasn’t just another one night stand before i made any big (potentially expensive) moves. well, i’m not quite at the 1 year finish line yet, but it’s looking good. in short, the patient is still alive, and it’s time to start thinking about what comes next.

but you know what, i have no fucking clue what comes next. how exactly do you take a blog to “the next level”, if you’re not ever sure what the next level is? i’m still really down on the idea of sidebar ads (primarily for aesthetic reasons) and according to copyblogger (one of the best blog resources out there), i probably wouldn’t make any money doing it anyway. so then what direction? do i try to figure out what the hell affiliate ads are (who wants to affiliate themselves with my financially inept ass)? do i try to sell ebooks where i speak in depth on the profundities of my financial ineptitude? do i try to get famous and get talking gigs where i can tell other people how they too can be profoundly financially inept? but seriously, at the end of the day, do i actually have anything worth monetizing?

whether i do or not, i feel like dream of making a living off of blogging is roughly akin to wanting to grow up to be a rockstar or an astronaut. sure, somebody gets to have that job… but the odds are less than stellar for big time success. the truth is that i love this. i don’t think i’d get so little sleep for something i was kind of meh about, and i’m scared about the possibility of losing that love in the process of trying to spin straw into gold. what happens if i try and make money and it doesn’t work? would that failure suck the joy out of the writing, and ruin the whole affair?

for now, i think i’m going to hold off with the blogging for cash schemes. although i can’t promise that there won’t be a few subtle surprise changes headed your way this summer. but if any of my seasoned blog peeps out there have some light to shed on the subject, it would be most sincerely appreciated. i have much to learn, and i’m just going to sit quietly right here until i’m well educated enough not to tear the whole system down in the process.

lost in the mom-o-sphere

my friend jenna told me the other day that my blog header was ghetto. i was thinking bright and graphic, but i suppose ghetto is attention getting enough… i’m new to this blogging thing. i’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to make my place here, and assemble  something that people actually consider worth reading (so far it’s a very slow start). a big part of this is doing a lot of research, and trying to crack the code of blog success (FYI- googling “blog success” isn’t very helpful).  some things that i’ve learned:

1. there are a shit-ton of coupon blogs out there. a SHIT TON. i’ve noticed that most of them just post the deals, and not much else. the really good ones have a little banter and occasional full blown article on something they think is meaningful. am i talking too much?

2. i hate the word frugal. i don’t know why, but there’s something gross about it.

3. a good 70%+ of the coupon blogs out there have the words mom, mommy, mommies or mama(s) in the title. i know that this is a defining role, and a very important one, but is there anyone else out there? i worry a lot that my lack of mommy-ness (and unwillingness to post the latest huggies deal) will make me unreadable to the clipping masses. if i’m not a mommyblogger, then who the hell am i?

4. somebody is making an assload of money designing cute/sexy cartoon caricatures of moms holding shopping bags (or possibly money, coupons, babies, or any combination thereof). who is this guy, and does he need a freelancer? is this the first sign of blog legitimacy?

5. there’s a lot of christian clippers out there… i… just… can’t… coupons for jesus definitely isn’t for me. or home schooling… or extolling the virtues of being subordinate to the man of the house… or referring to my boyfriend as “the king”. i don’t know what it is about couponing that appeals to people living in a far more conservative dimension, but i can’t relate!

anyway… sorry for the rambling mess. i lost 2 of my 6 twitter followers today, and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong. i love the mommies i do, they taught me everything i know, but sometimes i just feel a little lost out here.