Why I'm Blogging
Disclaimer: I've grown up a bit and learned a lot since this blog was started. In the beginning I took tips from the likes of John Chow and Shoemoney and tried to write titles and content for Digg and Reddit. In the end it didn't do me much good and most of it just seems silly looking back. If you're interested anyway, here's what I wrote back then, but take it with a grain of salt.
I have three main reasons for blogging, in this order:
- I need my own personal soap box
- Personal Branding
- Additional Income
In my opinion, number one is probably the most prevalent reason to blog, in order to be interesting you need to have opinions, and if you’re opinions are worth having they’re worth sharing. I have things to say, and things I’d like to discuss, and sometimes, I just want to hear myself talk. On my site I’ll cover my topics in my way, I’ll tell you that I think Windows sucks, and that hand-crafter HTML beats a WYSIWYG any day, and that’s my prerogative. I suppose it’s not even entirely soap box, because I’m hoping to have at least a little sandbox here, since I’m usually playing with some new technology or framework it will probably be nice to have a place to show the world.
Number two is my ego. A few years ago, if you googled “Eric DeLabar” you’d find a lot of information about a professional soccer player with the same name. No offense to that guy, but I’m an internet professional who has done quite a bit of work in SEO, it wouldn’t look to good if I didn’t rank for my own name. As of now I’m doing a little better, but I’d like to permanently cement my way into the number one spot on Google. I’m also hoping a little work with XFN/ FOAF and the Google Social Graph API will help to strengthen my online identity.
And the final reason is additional income. I’m not going to lie to you, my wife’s not going to let me spend hours a day to appease my ego, if she doesn’t see results she’ll keep me busy on other things. I’m not planning to go John Chow on this site, but I have a monetization strategy that I’m hoping might pay for some of my daughter’s college education (she’s 6-weeks old today so I have some time to work on it) and a lot of my retirement. What does this mean to you, the loyal reader? Basically, sometime in the future I’ll be selling advertising, I’ll probably have AdSense, and I’ll definitely try and take advantage of the Amazon Associates Program. I plan on doing all of this tastefully, I think I have reasonable goals, and as (hopefully) demonstrated by my priorities here, quality content is going to be number one priority.
As far as how I’m going to accomplish these goals, I’m looking to post every weekday, with the most attention paid to the Friday post which I’ll consider an article. I’m hoping the articles will be mostly tutorial in nature with an occasional op-ed on the industry, so far, I’ve kept this schedule for all of a week, but please be patient with me until I establish this site and my voice as an author.