At the meeting (again):

• Myself
• Kyle Graham
• Veron Graham
• Mark Ingles
• Tony Teegarden
• Owen Graham
• Ryan Wade

Making money online, however you choose to do that, can be an isolating business. Not only do you often work from home, but often the people around you have no idea what you’re doing for a living. You can’t talk about work because the people around you simply don’t understand. So, getting together with like-minded people is great because you can bounce ideas off of people who actually know what the hell you’re talking about.

Besides, surrounding yourself with other success-minded people often can breed success in your own life.

And this is yet another reason I have chosen to expand the concept here in the Tampa Bay area with my own Meetup group.

So, what do you do the rest of the week?

I thanked her, yet again, for giving me so many ideas for blog posts. Because it is a fair question. If I call myself a blogger, then the logical conclusion is that I write for a living. You might think that writing my posts for the week would mean I’m done. Well, no.

And herein lies the REAL work and the REAL insight in how you can generate a full-time income by blogging. There is a LOT more to it than writing your blog posts. The blog is only a means to an end.

In looking at what I do other than writing blog posts, here is a list (not all inclusive):

• Answering emails
• Accounting tasks
• Consulting work (not all bloggers do this, but I used to be a paid PHP programmer. I still have one client left and I am in the process of offloading that client. I am writing a lot of documentation work for the next programmer.)
• Tracking statistics and making strategic decisions based on the stats
• Staying involved in social media (Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook) - involvement in the community is important for a problogger
• Reading & Commenting on other blogs
• Staying informed on strategies, trends, news
• Creating marketing campaigns for my products on my blogs
• Creating videos and premium content for PCMech University
• Site maintenance, optimization, fixes, design changes, etc.
• Recording my weekly radio news bytes
• Networking, business travel

The business of being a professional blogger is probably only about 10-15% actual blogging.

I guess one of the downsides of having a spouse as an entrepreneur is that he works a lot.  Forget 9 to 5, it’s more like 8 to 10 with food breaks in between.

This is true. Of me anyway. My typical day starts with getting up around 7:30 AM. I usually do a quick email check, then attend to normal personal things like breakfast, walking the dog, and spending a little time with my daughter. I usually start my day around 9AM and work until around 6PM, with a lunch break in the afternoon. Then, at nighttime, after 8PM, I usually spend a little time on the laptop working on something. So, I guess I’m working, on average, a 10 hour day.

But, that’s me. It doesn’t mean everybody does it this way nor does it mean I have to.

See, I’m not just trying to maintain the status quo. I am proactively working to grow my business. This means improvements to the websites. It means working on new projects. It means staying informed, networking, etc. These things take time. But, if I were just trying to maintain the status quo and just give us enough money to live, I could work less than I am.

Being a truly successful problogger means doing a lot more than just blogging. It means creating products, doing marketing, building lists, and SELLING. The most successful bloggers out there do much more than just write and hit the publish button.

Being a successful problogger IS a lot of work. For me, it is an evolution. I work more now so that I can work less later. When I want time off, I take it. When we want to go on a vacation, I can do it. And, if my long-range plans materialize, then ultimately I will have a web-based business that pays me a nice income stream while not having to work more than a part-time schedule.

If one is a short-term thinker, then this business will prove to be depressing for you. If you see the forest through the trees, you realize it makes a lot of sense and that you are fully in the driver seat. I do what I do, but it doesn’t mean every problogger does it the same way.

Thanks for the inspiration, Obama. We’ll see if it’s short-lived.

So I guess part of me does feel somewhat insecure about having a blogger for a husband.  I do think about what it will be like when we get old and have no 401k or any other income to fall on, I think about the $2500 we have to shell out of our pocket before the health insurance kicks in if any of us gets sick.  I think about the economy and how it is going to affect our small business.

She also mentions my small ordeal in getting approved to buy my first house. This is true. In retrospect, I may have stressed about it more than I needed to, but I did have to jump through a few more hoops to get approved for that mortgage because I did not have traditional pay stubs. Plus, they saw my income (from my tax returns) go from a small amount (due to a college job) to a full-time income even though I was technically unemployed. It didn’t make any sense to them because I didn’t fit the normal template. Who knows, maybe they thought I was a drug dealer or something.

All of this speaks to the various “downsides” of running an Internet business and being self-employed. But, are they really downsides? I put that word in quotes for a reason.

Is The 9-5 Job Really That Secure?

I think it is an artificial faith to think that having a 9 to 5 job makes your finances more secure. With the economic worries happening right now, you may worry about whether your company will lay you off in order to save money. If you get a 401(k) or other retirement plan, how secure is it really? There are quite a few people out there who have lost a lot of value in their retirement nest eggs because of the stock market fluctuations. If you need to make more money, what do you do? Beg your boss? Cross your fingers? Kiss the right butt?

What it comes down to is one thing: you are not in control.

When you work for a large company, your financial security is only as secure as that company. And, most likely, that company is not controlled by you. It is controlled by management and is dependent on whether they make the right decisions. And when it becomes necessary to cut expenses, for THEM to make the decisions necessary to see through tough times, who do you think is most susceptible to getting the axe? You are, of course.

On the contrary, when I need to make more money, I can create a new product, run a sale, get inventive. In other words, I can make it happen, on demand. And it is based on one person - me. I have no boss to beg.

So, who is more secure in an economic downtime? The person who has to hope their boss makes the right decisions? Or the boss himself?

Working for a large company, you might think they are so big that nothing will hurt them. Well, look at the current situation with General Motors to see that’s not the case. Remember Enron? Big companies can and do fail. They are subject to the same rules as a small business. In fact, many times, big companies are LESS able to maneuver in tough times than a small business.

What About Retirement?

It’s true. Being a professional blogger doesn’t provide a retirement plan. But, I don’t care. Because I realize that there is nothing secure about any retirement plan I might get from a company.

Besides, would retirement be a reason to get a 9 to 5 job? Am I supposed to suffer my way through that slavery for most of my life so that I can sit there and be lazy on a retirement pension when I become old?

No, I can create my own retirement plan - one that I know will be there when I’m older because I have control over everything involved.

I’m only 30 years old currently, so I’m not sitting here thinking about my retirement. But, that doesn’t mean I’m short-sighted about it. I plan to succeed in my life so that I have enough money to work less when I’m older. Do I plan to stop working? No, just work less. The day you completely stop working is the day you start dying.

Will I still be blogging when I get to that age? Who the hell knows. The Internet is changing pretty quickly so I expect this field will be drastically different at that time. I have absolutely no idea. But, I do know that I will be in full control because I will adapt.

My retirement is to be successful, to put money aside, to make that money work for me, and to set up my business so that it can operate independently of myself so that it can continue to write me paychecks even though I am not working on a daily basis.

What About Health Insurance?

I pity people who go work for the sole purpose of health insurance. Look, insurance is supposed to be a protection against losing your shirt. If something unexpected happens, you don’t have to lose everything to pay your medical bills. That’s smart, and I do provide myself and my family health insurance. It would be stupid not to have it. Yes, we have a deductible, and I guess my wife worried about that. But, I don’t. If I need to pay a $2,500 deductible, I can afford it. Beyond that, I’m covered.

I do not live my life in order to provide protection against sickness. I do not let the small chance of sickness dictate what I do with the other 95% of my life. When I get sick, I deal with it. Group health insurance, where they pay for everything, might give you a warm fuzzy, but jeez, what a shame if you make that the focus of your life.

You can either focus on living or focus on sickness and death. Your choice. The medical industry would love to have you at their beck and call, sell you expensive “treatments” while knowing they can get paid by your insurance company. This whole society focus on health insurance is being SOLD to us as a bill of goods. All it does is turn everybody into good, paying customers.

Yeah, don’t even get me started…

What About the Steady Paycheck?

Some might find security in getting a steady paycheck, every two weeks, as expected. But, look at this: It’s the same size check. Every time. Life changes. Your paycheck doesn’t. Where’s the security in that?

It’s true - my income changes every month. But, I get paid a LOT more often than every two weeks. Plus, I have the GAME of increasing my income. I CAN make more money if I want. I don’t have to ask for a raise. And, I make more money than most people with a 9 to 5 job.

It’s a Mindset Thing

My wife, like a lot of people, is a slave to the mindset that our society teaches: to fall in line, keep your head low, work for the paycheck, retire and die. When you do as everybody else does, it gives a sense of security. And when people like me decide to go another way, we have people telling us it’s risky. That there is a chance of failure. That we have to work too hard.

The one thing, in this society, that is consistent is that when you stick your head above the crowd, somebody might try to shoot it off.

The first step to success, in many ways, is to DISAGREE with the status quo.

Perhaps it is true that being self-employed just isn’t for everybody. I have a hard time believing that, but it’s true that somebody out there has to screw the lids on the jars for us. But, I believe the American dream is to be your own boss, make a good living, have the FREEDOM to do what you want. And I will continue to remain an evangelist for that lifestyle.

I feel as if I’m living it, right now at the age of 30. I create my own schedule. I have a beautiful wife, cute kid. We live in a nice house. We’ve got two cars in the garage. We’ve got nice furniture. We can afford to go on a vacation. My wife and I are going on a cruise in January. And on top of that, I really enjoy what I do and I enjoy the GAME of expanding my business so as to create more wealth for me and my family.

I’ll take this over a slave job and an artificial security blanket any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

It scored me at 99.5, and ranked me #1517 out of the 365,650 who have used the service since launch. Woo. Hoo? Not really sure.

These things are nice for a little moment of zen, and I guess it is the natural human inclination to want to take something like Twitter and rank and classify the people in it. Oh well.

So, what’s your Twitter grade? Post it as a comment. Oh yeah, and follow me if you’re not already.

We were driving at the time, so I don’t look at the camera too often. But, behold:

The questions she asked brought to mind some interesting thoughts. I will post follow-up posts here on this blog with my thoughts throughout the week. So, stay tuned!

For now, be sure to go subscribe to Malika Risley (that’s my wife).

I had an interesting conversation with my wife a few days ago. She is starting up a new blog, but she wanted to maintain her anonymity. She wasn’t going to hide her name, but she didn’t want to be herself. She wanted to put forth an image that wasn’t really her.

It got me thinking about this one thing that I believe wholeheartedly:

People follow and do business with PEOPLE, not businesses.

In other words, people want to deal with real people, not a big corporation or something that is fake or artificial.

And taken back to the idea of blogging, people are more likely to want to follow you if (a) they’re interested in what you’re saying and (b) they LIKE you.

That means you gotta be a real person. You want to show personality. You want to let people into your daily life – at least somewhat. You want people to know who you really are. Because it is that person – you – who your readers are going to develop a compassion for.

A lot of people have the instinct of clamming up. They don’t want to share details of their lives. They want to remain super private. They want to hide. If that’s you, fine! But don’t try to be a big-time blogger.

You will see on this site that I do post things about my life. Not everything I do is focused around blogging. I have a family. We do things offline. I bring my Flickr pictures into this website. I participate in Twitter. I even do videos of things that I do while offline. These things let you guys – my readers – into my personal life so you can get to know who I am. I have control over how far things go. There are things you’ll never see me put on the Internet. But, I’m not hiding and I don’t have a problem with people getting to know me like that.

You’ll find that when you, as a blogger, let your personality hang out there that you will get more readers. People can sense whether you’re real or not. And, in the same way that reality TV attracts the audience, your life can also attract an audience. Not in a stalker way, but in a way that people come to admire you and they may identify with you. Sure, you may piss somebody off sometimes for being a little too real for their tastes, but whatever. You probably cannot grow your blog without pissing off somebody.

My wife is a beautiful person and she has literally no reason to want to clam up and be super private about her personality or her life. Obviously, like me, there are things she probably wouldn’t share (and for the sake of my reputation, that’s probably best ), but I hope that she’ll get over that initial fear about strangers knowing her better and open up.

And you do the same if you want to develop a reader base on the Internet.

Searching For The Bad Economy from David Risley on Vimeo.

There are two choices, as I see it:

1. Watch the news, be sold the idea that everything is doom and gloom, and then react accordingly by reducing spending, worrying and being unhappy.
2. Look around, realize little has changed, and get busy working to create your own success such that your own economy isn’t dependent on such things.

I think you know which choice I made. What about you?

On a related note, here’s a good reason to ignore the stock market.

Yeah, its a biggie. You put all this work into your new blog. It has the makings to be a hit. You’re certainly hopeful. But, once you’ve put it out there for the world to see, nobody seems to come to your site. It can be frustrating and rather depressing. It makes you wonder how all those other people out there managed to do so well.

Trust me, there is no magic pill. It isn’t that those other guys just got lucky. It probably has more to do with the fact that you simply don’t know what to do. You’re new to this.

I’m going to give you some pointers here to get rolling, however keep in mind that this IS work. Nobody said blogging was easy. You can’t just upload a new blog and expect people to magically find it. You’ve got to go out and get them. So, here we go…

Videos. Lots of Videos.

People LOVE video. And you need to give it to them. Take whatever your blog is about and start making videos related to that. And then you want to throw those videos up on as many different sites as you can. What I do for PCMech is have a profile on the following sites:

• Youtube (because it is the big kahuna)
• Yahoo
• Myspace
• Metacafe
• Google
• Revver
• DailyMotion
• Blip
• Veoh
• Viddler
• Howcast

We then use TubeMogul to launch all of our videos simultaneously to all of these sites. For DavidRisley.com, I tend to put my videos on Youtube and Vimeo, as well as my Facebook profile.

But, you get the point. Make videos and spread them far and wide across the Internet. Put descriptive text (with your URL) in the video description field (for the search engines) and be sure to use some basic video editing software to put your site URL into the video itself.

Each and every video you do, on as many sites as you can get them on, acts as a beachhead that captures eyeballs and potentially sends them to your blog.

Get Social.

You simply cannot be a blogger (a successful one anyway) and hide on the Internet. You’ve GOT to get out there, be yourself, and have people get to know who you are. That means you’ve better get busy using social media (if you’re not already). This includes:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Myspace
• LinkedIn
• FriendFeed

There are, of course, a boatload of others out there. But, I consider these the most important.

If you’re not on these sites, set up profiles. If you already are, then log into your profile and make sure all the information in your profile is modern and up to date. Even more importantly, make sure that your site’s URL is in your profile.

After that, here are a few tricks to get going:

1. Set up a widget on WidegetBox. We have one for PCMech, for example. It simply pulls your latest posts from your blog’s RSS feed and makes it into a portable widget. Then, not only promote that widget on your blog, but use it to get your latest post headlines onto your social media profiles (where allowed). Put it onto Myspace, for example. For each and every site you can get your widget onto, that is yet another outpost for your content which can drive traffic back to your blog.
2. Set up a profile on TwitterFeed so that your latest blog headlines are sent automatically to your Twitter followers. Just be sure to participate in Twitter like a normal person, too, because you do NOT want your Twitter presence to be nothing but your latest blog posts. People will not want to follow you unless you’re a real person.
3. Set your blog up on FriendFeed so that your latest posts automatically show up on FriendFeed.
4. Install the Friendfeed application onto your Facebook profile. This will ensure that your tweets and latest posts from FriendFeed (and hence your blog) also get posted to your Facebook profile.

There are numerous other tricks in the arsenal, but the idea is to have presences across the social web. You want all your blog activity to be automatically spread to all your social profiles and have all your social profiles point back to your blog. By doing this, you cast a wider net across the Internet.

Leverage.

If you already have any presence on the Internet, you can use them to draw traffic to a new online endeavor. For example, when I launched this blog (DavidRisley.com), my already large presence at PCMech most definitely helped me get this site off the ground a little quicker. The audiences are completely different which is why I still have to promote this blog elsewhere, but it is a bit of a headstart.

You might not already have your own PCMech, and that’s fine. The idea here, though, is to use any social media presence or other presence on the Internet to help jump start your new blog.

Be Active

Having all these video profiles and social media profiles is one thing. Using them is more important. You’ve got to get out there and actually PARTICIPATE.

Blogging is not a one-way flow, where you sit there in an ivory tower and lecture the masses. It is a 2-way activity. You’ve got to be yourself and you’ve got to be accessible to your readers. As your blog expands, the ways in which you handle that might change for the sake of time. But, that 2-way connection remains important.

So, actively participate in Twitter. Post little things that don’t have anything to do with your blog. Send replies to other Twitter uses. Be a regular member of the community. Same goes for any other social media profile. It is called SOCIAL media for a reason. So, be social.

And as for the videos, yeah, you’ve got to make them. don’t be shy. And don’t worry about professional, TV-quality editing. It just isn’t that important. Obviously, you want to think about the image you portray. But, most of the videos I do are done using my Flip Video and iMovie 08. We’re not talking big budget here. And training videos are using screen recording software and my webcam.

Hopefully these ideas have given you some ideas so that you can start getting some readers on your brand new blog. This isn’t rocket science.