The Start

I want to have a business. A successful, prospering business, either online or off. I’ve had the business plan for the off-line part drawn up for about 12 years. For the on-line part, I’ve had it about 1.5 years.

Getting married and having two children can put dreams on the back burner sometimes. Amazingly, this has been my year to start working on dreams. In April, I started a novel. I still have a long ways to go on it, I seem to average about 2 chapters a month overall, but I hope to finish sometime next year. If I can have something come from it, I’ll be thrilled, but the best part is discovering I can do it. That I can sit down and write something more than a few lines of a poem or a couple page long short story. Writing a novel has been a goal for as long or longer than starting a business.

Something else happened this year. Earlier this summer, a friend sent me a note asking how you earn money with a blog. She’d had a blog with a decent amount of visitors for over a year without gaining any income from it, and wanted to know how to change that.

This blog is a direct result of trying to answer that question.

In the process of trying to learn how you do make money from blogs, I discovered some fascinating sites. One of my favorites is ProBloggers. It’s a great place to start if you’re trying to learn about blogging professionally (ie making money from your blog). Probably the most important thing I discovered was information about something called the Thirty Day Challenge (TDC for short) which was being run by Ed Dale and Dan Raines.

Now, I have a confession. When I first discovered the TDC in the middle of August, my first impression was that it looked like one of those sales sites that tries to hook you and then asks for money. But I had read that it was good, so I filled out the sign-up…and promptly forgot about it.

It was only a couple days later that I got the first real e-mail from Ed (I ignored the sign-up e-mail, leaving it unopened for over a week in my mailbox). It sounded interesting, and there still wasn’t a money request anywhere, so off I went to check out the site.

And in a round about way, that’s how I finally set off on my adventure to have a business.