Everyday Bacon Experiment

I love bacon. It amuses me to no end to think that it is a popular search word, which I learned while participating in Bloggy Boot Camp. On a lark I decided I would create the site Everyday Bacon to see if I could capitalize on the popularity! I haven't really done much since pouncing on the initial idea but have now decided I am going to try out the 31 days to a better blog program on that site! I have a ton of funny, offbeat niche ideas for blogs so I am curious to see if some concentrated effort could produce a site that gets visitors... 

Now all I have to do is retrieve the passwords from when I originally set up the site. Do you ever do that? I swear I have dozens of different sites that I have joined and I have no idea how to get back in... I thought I created a password naming convention that was both secure and easy to remember... typically I am wrong and off, by one letter or keystroke, with the password I think it is... it is really quite annoying.

Anyway, I'm not sure why I am sharing that rant except that I promised to share everything in my process. So Tip number one from m is to figure out a sane way to manage your personal pass codes! After I figure out how to log back into my Everyday Bacon site I am going to start the 31 days to a better blog program. I think it will be interesting to see what results, from nothing, I can produce in 31 days!

The Introduction

Pronounced Funkey in homage to my uncle who pronounced our last name that way, Funke Bliss is the place where I will chronicle my journey to become a professional blogger. What "professional blogger" means to me is that I eventually generate a liveable income from my blogging pursuits. As I begin this journey I have been blogging over on Everyday Bliss for a year and The Everyday Mommy for about four months.  

I started blogging on Everyday Bliss as a way to chronicle a personal experiment to foster more Bliss in my life and over the course of the year met many other bloggers and became aware that blogging was potentially more then a personal diary. I became interested in the idea of creating a business around Everyday Bliss and in addition to offering inspiration to my readers I started to daydream about potential products that could also encourage Everyday Bliss. Of course I became conflicted about this. Somehow even advertising seemed to cheapen the Everyday Bliss experience. I tried out Google Adsense and decided it really didn't offer what I wanted, besides with less then 300 visitors to my site each week I hardly had the traffic that kind of campaign required.

I recently attended Bloggy Boot Camp where I was inspired to check out Wordpress as a blogging platform and also learned that the word BACON is a very highly searched word on the internet. I started the site Everyday Bacon on a lark as a place to explore the self hosting platform, since I've been told it is the "only way to go" if I'm really serious about my online presence. I randomly used Bluehost as my hosting provider because they were recommended on the wordpress install page.  I have so far been satisfied with the service they provide but this is not saying much since as of this writing I can't even remember my password. I can't remember the password on a lot of sites I've joined in the past year!

Another serious consideration is the purchase of my own Domain names. Seemingly, the biggest no no in the money making bloggyworld, as far as I can tell, is not to own your own domain names. Everyday Bacon and The Everyday Mommy were available but Everyday Bliss was not. I settled for EverydayBlissBlog.com but was not happy about it. FunkeBliss.com is available so I think I'll buy it later today. I have also purchased my daughter's and my name as domains and the domain The Practical Revolutionary for yet another blog idea. I can see buying domain names becoming rather addictive.

Shortly after purchasing my domain names I started to experience problems on my Everyday Bliss Blog. The blog itself seemed to work normally but my feed was slow to load and eventually it was hacked so that a very spammy website kept showing up in my feed. I shut my feed off and I took this as a sign from the universe that it was time for me to redesign my Everyday Bliss site and am now in the midst of doing just that, or more correctly, I am looking for a company to help me with the redesign. I am planning to spend some money on a professional redesign of Everyday Bliss to include an e-commerce component on which I intend on selling several e-products as well as some more traditional retail items and specialty art work, all of which will be designed to foster more bliss in my reader's lives

My quest for bloggy domination begins here. I've spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $450 to date on domain names, hosting services, membership in sites and downloadable e-book guides designed to help me make money in blogging and or other pursuits. Two notable items Chris Guillebeau's Empire Building Kit and ProBlogger's 31 Days to Building a Better Blog.

I will report here on my success and failures as I explore what is possible. The Everyday Mommy will continue to be a not for profit, personal blog but in all my other pursuits I will be experimenting solely for the purpose of determining what works towards my goal of generating an online income. You are invited to steal any of my ideas (as long as you give me credit for any original material) and I invite you to share your own thoughts and insights as we go along.

I decided to make my quest public because I always do better when I make myself accountable to someone, so thank you for being that person!