A Chit Chat With My Readers

Now I have a side business if you call that a  business, I am talking about blogging, and, you know what, I like this one more than my main business which is sitting in front of my laptop 10 hours a day.

After having started as a software engineer my career took its own turns and now I find myself talking over phone for 8 of those 10 hours at work. Sometimes I feel like I am a call center support personal, nothing against the call centre job, but I don’t find it suitable for my skills.

When I turned in to a part-time writer for my own blog I didn’t think of producing 4-5 posts per week, which I am doing for past 3 weeks almost and amazingly I don’t feel exhausted.

Definitely my time towards SMB has been reduced, but she keeps herself busy with books, shes big! book fan, so it doesn’t hurt we sit next to each other and I share some of the things from my blog and blog forum at yakezie. although she complained a few times about my obsessiveness, but it’s fine now, as I do share more stories with her.

Talking about Yakezie forum, I think the amount of forum posts I wrote so far is equal to 4 – 5 full size blog posts, it’s so intoxicating, how can I do otherwise.

Although I haven’t yet mentioned my personal wealth or asset details publicly yet, I still kept my folks at work in dark about blogging. They do know I write something, but I didn’t reveal the details.

I work in a 50K employee strong corporation and I have a strong feeling that if I include OCAAT (One cent at a time) in my outlook signature, I will get some serious visitors just by using day-to-day emails at work.

I am not doing that since I do not want to let my vertical (or any) leaders to know what I do off work. I am one of the identified future leaders at my division and undergoing special coaching classes to further hone my skills to fit the role, I do not want anything to jeopardize my career.

Natural question might arise then that why am I blogging, answer is that I like writing and I live on one pay check only, SMB legally can not work in this country till I get my permanent residency, if I can earn extra money by doing the thing I like, what’s the harm, isn’t it?

So far I am in perfect health financially, I have a very high salary, so it doesn’t hurt being a single income family, but money is ultimately a money, who doesn’t want it? Come kids, our finances will be weaker and we will possibly struggle to maintain the same cash flow, hence, I need a passive income.

So far OCAAT has seen a limited success, it is growing with all of your support, and god willing I will see money one day. this limited success attributed to the reasons below.

1. I wrote consistently – 45 posts in 4 months is not at all bad, some times I did utilize time during meetings (when I’m not speaking) to write on the new ideas, or I did research on the topics I was interested in during such times. I now spend less time with news papers and especially the sports section of it, which used to take up most of  my free time at home.

2. I researched on other blogs – I scanned through archives of GRS, TSD etc blogs to get an idea of how they built their blogs from scratch. I scrutinize other yakezie blogs and closely monitor how they run their businesses. This study built the base on which I am building my blog, my blog layout, colors, writing style, post length and language are all based on this research.

3. I understood Google Analytics – And constantly experimented with my styles while measuring it with GA performance almost everyday, gradually getting time spent on site increased. When I see readers from India, Pakistan and Philippines as regular visitors, it makes me think and urges me to write more on generic money matters which shall be beyond a country or continental border.

4. I tried to follow almost all blogging etiquette – staring with easy to follow pages and no cluttering to not questioning user decisions to quit my site,  followed all the etiquette, my main source of information was problogger as I read various articles over there on the same subject.

5. I joined yakezie – This amazing blog network held my hand and helped me stand on my feet, literally. I learned tips and tricks about establishing blog as a brand. The forum it has is equally amazing as it’s founder Financial Samurai.

6. I commented and commented – Practically who ever offered me a text box to put something in, I did put in. Starting from Yahoo finance, Kiplinger to Yakezie summer teams, I am there, everywhere.

7.  I used social media – From Facebook to Reddit, I experimented with all, frantically pitched for my articles on twitter multiple times a day (as Twitter blocked at work, I used iPhone). After every twit I monitored analytics and checked on visitor stats, understanding the impact of my twit. I submitted articles on Reddit, Stumble Upon and Digg.

I think that’s enough for today, I am nowhere near the real success yet. One thing I would soon start is to offer giveaways to promote OCAAT. I am participating in Bucksome Boomer giveaway and  since then my Facebook follower numbers are increasing. Why don’t you help me further by being my RSS feed subscriber or Facebook friend?

I am now preparing for Sunday’s Yakezie carnival, have completed the begin and close of the post, as and when new posts are getting submitted, I am modifying the body part of it.

Now when I am almost near to the finishing line as far as this post is concerned, it is 11:45PM and SMB already went for bed, let me join her there before it’s too late.

Are you my regular reader? Do you like reading my blog? Please comment below.