Sunday, October 28, 2007

Sun
28
Oct
2007

My End of Paid Blogging?

Today I got my last $5 payment from paid blogging that I had pending. I have found nothing on any of the paid blogging services that I wanted to write about in the last 30 days. With Christmas coming, the timing of this couldn't be worse. I've tried not to care about PR and all of that other stuff, but this blog dropped from a 4 to a 2 this time and I was a little surprised that it made me a little sad. I joined that one paid blogging service briefly where you fit contextual links into your posts and I just couldn't do it. I can't write about subjects I have no interest in or can't support just for the $. Since their service is an all or nothing deal, I had to pass. Oh, well.

Marcus asked me today when I told him that my last payment had come if that meant I was done for good. No, I'll still do it if I can find acceptable topics at a worthwhile price, but that doesn't seem to be the case for now. I AM going to have to find another income source, though. My raise has helped a tiny bit, but the OT that everyone kept saying was coming has yet to materialize. If I want out of this mobile home park and back on the road to financial security, I need to make more money.

On the positive side, not writing paid posts has been a bit of a relief. In fact, staying off the Internet as much as possible has been a good thing. My kitchen is getting cleaner. I've watched a lot of movies that I got through Netflix. I've been getting more sleep (I wonder if the information overload from constant surfing or the searching for acceptable paid blogging topics was causing my insomnia). I'll admit that I feel a bit lost without the constant online stimuli. I have to retrain myself to be happy with a book or a walk. It is kind of frightening how addicting it is and how much time I've wasted mindlessly being online.

I'm sad but also relieved that the Vegas trip fell through. It was for a blogging conference and I haven't been into blogging much lately. I would've loved to have met some of the people going, but I'll meet them all one day if I'm meant to. The fact is that the timing of it was bad and I really don't have that kind of money to spend right now. When I do go to Vegas, I want to really enjoy the experience, not feeling guilty that I went and not having the funds to do the things I really want to do there.