Blogging for money: what is value?

So I've been thinking long and hard for quite some time about how to increase my income. My Landscape Architect Intern salary just isn't cutting it. And the salary of a licenced landscape architect will not cut it either, at least not without another 15 years of experience. And I dont' have 15 years to wait. I really want to kill my student loans long before then, which are currently clinging to me like a cluster of persistent tumors.

I watch my adsense account closely every day, like checking your mailbox in olden times to see if you got that love letter yet. My adsense account has brought in more than zero consistently for three weeks now. But not enough to live off of. Not even in Nairobi.

Clearly I've done something right in gaining enough blog traffic to convert some links into sweet google money. How to do more? Like $50000 a year more. That's $1000 a week, no small amount. At the current level of conversion (less than $1 per 100 pageviews) I'd need 14000 pageviews a day to replace my current salary. And my current salary is below my minimum acceptable ideal salary.

There just isn't enough interest online (or anywhere, really) in Landscape Architecture to generate that kind of traffic. Now if I could transition to gardens and residential garden design, I could get that kind of traffic. But that's a different audience from Landscape Architecture job seekers, interns, and students. Totally different. And a very saturated space. And honestly, I'm much more interested in about 40 decent subjects than in gardening right now: including wine-making, investing, founding businesses, real estate, beer, music, parties, parenting, saving money, paying off debt, clothing, computers, programming, website design, writing, chemisty, history, technology, travel, nutrition, to name a few.

I read a post from Steve Pavlina today, the web guru of self-help articles. He actually has a lot of great stuff, although much of it wreaks of new-age neo-hippy incense. Sorry, you'll have to wade through that.

I like the part near the end where he talks about wealth accumulation as the trade that the world gives you in return for value you've created. It's a very entrepreneurial viewpoint, and one that comes naturally to me. I haven't been capitalizing on it in the last many years because I've been chasing the dream of becoming a designer, but my entrepreneurial instincts are restless and desperately in need of excersice.

It's food for thought, and I am considering re-branding this blog (or basically scrapping it and starting another one in a new vein). It doesn't matter if I re-brand or start over since no one is reading this anyway, so I'll just save the time it takes to re-design it up front and let it evolve. I also need a new name, methinks. I am considering using this blog as a behind the scenes "how I built my other blog" blog. A kind of practical how- to for making a blog that actually gets traffic and creates value (and of course cashes that value out in the form of cold, hard currency). Is this space saturated? Of course. Do I have time for it? Not with my current schedule.

I'm also considering blogging about business ideas. I have shed loads of business ideas. Most people are really scared to talk too loudly at the pub about "their great idea", much less blog about them. But having the idea is the fun easy part that comprises about 0.1% of creating and operating a successful business. So I'm not worried about you steeling my business ideas. On the contrary, if you think any of them are good enough to discuss, let's talk! There's few things I like more than talking about business ideas, strategy, forming a team, and dreaming big.

Have you read these books?

Perhaps someday everyone will have their own website. Geeks who are reading this are saying, "what do you mean, we all have for 12 years now!" I mean 'everyone' as in a significant proportion of the population. Of all ages. It will happen. At the latest it will be when today's 15 year-olds are 70 and anyone born before the Internet is long gone or at least out to pasture.

But it will probably happen much sooner than that. New tools are popping up every day that make it easier and easier for people with no programming or graphic design or even computer aptitude to build a site of their own. Mostly for fun or curiosity (like this blog), some for business purposes, and some because there was a need (WeGoWeGo.com and GreenLid The Landscape Architecture Resource for example). If you're reading this blog then chances are you already know what I mean. Blogger, facebook, Ning, Google Pages, etc.

I've been dinking around with this blog for a year now. Mostly to try stuff out, experiment with widgets, dream of earning money from google adsense... Don't we all? When musing on personal websites I thought it would be really cool if I had a site that kept track of and shared all the books I've read (if I can remember them all). I found the astore at Amazon to actually work well: I can find almost any book and have its picture and some info about it posted, in categories, and online. I'd rather it was more of a chat group, sharing, discussion thing, as it lacks any interaction tools, but it works for now. So here's my reading list (in progress): Have you read these books?

The topic of this blog

Be it settled that I have chosen a direction for this blog. So far I have tried to stick to one topic, or brainstorm a decent stream of related topics, to give this blog some kind of theme. I admire the steadfastness of someone who can keep to one issue, but the world is so f*cked up that you have to be really narrow-minded or boring to keep on about one specific issue. Unless you have a real issue, like David Suzuki does, then you're allowed to make a life's work of it. But for the rest of us bloggers, it seems like the deal is not to tackle an issue, but to relate a perspective.
So that's my topic: my perspective.
And it's not going to be pretty. I don't want to offend anyone, or be a bad guy, but it seems I have no choice. For example, it seems that every time I get together with family I end up putting my foot in my mouth. Like at Easter when I made what I thought was a witty Zoolander joke, everyone took it seriously and thought I was being really conceited. And this from family who watched Zoolander with me over and over again, to the point of quoting the whole movie.
Clearly I have some issues. Hopefully just issues with my comic timing.
At any rate, one thing I seem to be good at is being taken seriously when I'm joking and being laughed at when I'm serious. So perhaps my perspective is novel.
At any rate, like I said it won't be pretty, and here's why. I generally write at two times of day: when I'm on my lunch break at work and haven't eaten yet, in which case I'm needlessly pissed-off (aka "Hangry"), or late at night when I'm overtired, in which case I get delusions of grandeur and/or have been drinking.
Which should give a good indication of where my perspective in this blog is coming from.