I am a Selfish Blogger

I should point out that this is not my first blog. No, you see I wasn’t always a selfish blogger.

I had another blog before this but it went a bit wrong.

It started well enough but I just lost my way.

After I left work to become a stay at home dad I convinced my wife that I’d create a blog, write a few ‘stories’ and we’d be able to make up my lost wage after about six months. Hah! Needless to say it didn’t happen.

The learning curve was steep. I spent a lot of time researching and building and I ended up spending less time with the very people I’d left work to be with. Not good.

Unfortunately the site was hit by a technical problem and I didn’t handle it too well.

I lost my nerve and became anxious and panicky about it. This transferred over into home life and I became intolerable to live with.

It’s not that I’m a jerk, it’s just that I desperately wanted it to work.

I love being at home with the kids, but when things started going wrong online, they went wrong offline too.

I stopped blogging for a while but couldn’t stay away because somehow I believed I could remain a stay at home dad if only I could find the breakthrough.

I went back to the other blog to try again but sadly another family member ratted me out to my wife.

That’s why I started this blog.

I know it sounds like I’m being deceitful, but it’s one of those where I know I’ll be forgiven when it all works out.

Why selfish? Well, for starters I was going to be blogging whether my wife wanted me to or not – that’s pretty selfish (even though I did it with the best of intentions).

But also because I was going to be writing here but not allowing comments. Instead I wanted people to talk to me on Twitter. As it turned out I was too far ahead of my time. Leo Babauta stole the idea and it stuck for him. To be fair… Maybe he thought of it independently of me?

It didn’t work. By the time I switched the comments back on I’d annoyed everyone to the point where there was no need to have a comment section at all.

I lost interest again and my blogging became sporadic.

The irony is, I’d wanted to be anything but selfish. What I really wanted to do was celebrate all the good people in my circle of friends while dabbling in a bit of social blogging.

I was way out of it by this time though. I wasn’t commenting on other sites and wasn’t producing the sort of content that would attract readers, or I dare I say it… search engine traffic.

Still needing (or at least desperately wanting) to make a living online, I went off to research it properly.

I used this site along with my first site to experiment with what I’d learnt and in the process, found a way to make the interent work for me.

Mister Good Guy was born and I’m going to use what I learnt to build a business from it.

That’s a bold claim, I know, but my face is so egg covered you wouldn’t notice if more were added. I’m kidding, I’m not that insecure!

I can also see now that there’s scope for this site too and whilst I make no rash promises I feel I’ll be posting here more often.

There’s more to this little story but I’ll cover it on another occasion.

Dave