Why she was happy and I was not

sky-high

I have spent the better part of the last two years trying out every imaginable way of making money with a website, mainly a blog. However, I didn’t have much time to sit down and actually work on it. So I tried one automation tool after the other. And it was a roller coaster ride. One tool would give me thousands of linkbacks a day, others would give me a burst in traffic and crash my server. And others gave me thousands of new friends on Myspace and Facebook. And let’s not forget the automation tools that put thousands of posts on my blogs. Those were the days! I had huge websites. What happened? Why did I quit?

The answer is simple! None of those automated websites made me any real money! Some of them just got me suspended and blocked. By using those automation tools I had some of my websites totally deleted from Google! Yes, they do remove websites from their search engines. I had this cool plugin to post to my blog automatically. And guess what? Google removed my website and my traffic flow dried up! I had this other cool plug-in that would bookmark my sites with the popular bookmarking sites. And then those sites blocked my accounts! So why do I still think anyone can be successful with their website when all my attempts have failed?

Look on the bright side: I figured out a ton of things that do not work and won’t have to waste my or your time on them anymore. All along I kept telling my wife about the latest coolest ideas on how to get links and traffic to my blog. But all I did was automate things with mindless plug-ins and bots. No, I never did e-mail spam, but I more or less spammed my own websites with junk content. My wife would take the little spare time she had and actually sit down and manually work on her blog and do all the cool ideas I told her. She didn’t put up thousands of pages a day like my auto-blogs did. Sometimes she didn’t have more than a single post a week. But guess what? All her posts were written by her. They were thought out and written with love and care.

Not only did her one blog out-compete a hundred of my best auto-blogs, she was happy and I was not! Bummer! I wanted to get rich quick and while I made a dollar and lost $10 on a suspended domain name she would go on collecting her AdSense revenue and sales commission. Those were pennies compared to my $1, but her site didn’t get suspended and kept earning the following day and the day after that and so on. But it’s not all about money! It’s about success! My wife was happy every time she got a comment on her blog. It encouraged her to write a new post. And now she’s writing more than one post a day. She writes so much now, she even guest posts on other blogs.

I got comments too! In fact, I got more comments a day (combining my hundred auto-blogs) than my wife got in a week. But I had no idea what posts those people commented on and it didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t write those posts! I had no connection to them. My wife’s blog got much higher quality comments that added value to her post. My comments were more of the kind ”this sucks” or “cool video”. Those kind of comments add no value to my site at all.

My time wasn’t wasted though. I have learned a lot! And by telling my wife I have proof that all the manual ideas I told her do in fact work much better than any automation I ever tried. So I started a new blog, a real one this time. The one you are on right now. Everything is written by me. It has my real name and picture on it. And I already got some real comments from real people. And those comments made me happy. I am on the way to a much more successful blog now! I know how. I just need to keep practicing what I preach.

So after you left a nice comment for me, go check out my wife’s blog.

Photo credit: Thanks to kakisky on morguefile for this nice photo.