Like any other personal blog, this has been a repository of my thoughts, emotions, angst, and all other idiosyncrasies but not just that, this has also been my savior during my unemployment days and even now that I have a stable cash flow. I must admit that my motivation at the start was to generate moolahs and to get lots of hits when egosearch on Google. That was 11 months ago and I could not believe that I made it this far.
Currently, the search term “Bendever Gerona” gets 90 plus results and my online profile, bendzgerona gets 4,030. Not bad for someone who spend 22 years of his life living in one of the poorest provinces of the Philippine Islands. It even beats Korean stars who don’t even get a hit on Google at all.
Year to date blog and other online earnings is around the ballpark of a minimum wage earner’s yearly income (and it’s not even a year yet), give or take the taxes.
Getting to know online friends is a plus and getting to share your thoughts with the rest of the world (even though they only read the posts about scandals and game cheats), is even a big bonus.
Preoccupied with the demands of a new job, I still got to earn some from here and there posting sponsored articles sandwiched with rushed non-sponsored ones just to meet the broker’s quality standard. I could have kept on doing that had I not realized how important this blog is to me when I lost it for a day this week.
I was suspended by my web host, Holdfire, for CPU overuse. They thought there was some sort of malicious activity brought about by the spike in traffic from my latest posts. Since I am on an economy plan can’t definitely afford an unlimited bandwidth and file size host, there is no way out of the mess than just to wait for their customer support’s email to reactivate my site after several attempts of explaining cause of such spike and my action plan (installing a caching mechanism), which took about 24 hours to accomplish. Imagine a blogger having to endure 24 hours of not being able to access his site’s admin page or check on it’s traffic statistics. that would really be a nightmare of some sorts. Contemplating on the impending loss (I still did not know if they will unban the account), I had the time to think about how I value this accomplishment and what to do so I won’t screw it up once I get it back.
Like a lady friend who believes that changing her looks changes her personality, the first course of action I took was to drastically change this site’s image from being an ad whore selling it’s tiny spaces to advertisers for a couple of cents to what it should be, professional and valuable. The new theme, captured the image of sophistication and creativity I wanted to portray. The next step will be to be less an less accommodating to advertisers and sticking only to those who would be willing to invest their trust and confidence that this site will deliver their needs. Next would be to go out and visit fellow bloggers again. The ones who ventured the same path as I did and still do. The ones who acknowledged my success when my site was listed as one of the top 100 blogs of the Philippines for 2008. (I should have mingled with them when they were in Cebu). The biggest step of all will be to try and write more content. Non-sponsored, that is. I wanna write about my views again, my reaction to what is happening in the country, in the world, just like what I personal blog should be. I kinda miss the intense feeling I get when writing about these topics even though I know I still need to improve on my writing skills (and learn to review my writing before hitting on the post button).
Earlier I asked myself: “When does a novice ceases to be one?; “How many posts does it take for a newbie blogger to be a pro?”. I can’t answer these questions with all certainty yet but all I know is, I’m gonna be working on it.
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