As a reporter who worked for years covering personal finance for other websites, I was ready to start writing for my own website. Two things motivated me: To make money on my own as an entrepreneur with my writing, and to cover the topics I wanted to cover in a way I wanted to cover and write about them.

What I learned about money

It has been an interesting year for me and Add-Vodka. Financially, the site is doing well, though my goal in 2016 is for the site’s income to double. Income is a good thing for websites, because creating quality content takes time, and I like to be paid for my time working on this site.

I won’t go into the specific numbers because I want to keep them private, but after paying for the site and the expenses of a tech consultant and a virtual assistant, Add-Vodka turned a profit in November.

My plan was to put all of the income each month either back into the business by hiring writers, and to put the money that was coming in toward paying myself back for the money I took out of our savings account to pay for the initial purchase. The payback was complete in November, and I’m now focusing on increasing income and looking to hire more writers and keep my assistant busy.

Making money blogging

Before I bought Add-Vodka, the site made money with sponsored posts and didn’t have ads.

I’ve continued with sponsored posts, and have had limited success with advertisements on the site. Most of the ads on Add-Vodka are affiliate ads, meaning I get money if a reader clicks through on the ad and buys something.

These aren’t working too well for me, so I’ll soon be getting rid of the ones that don’t work. I think the site is pretty clean looking as it is, but fewer ads will make it look less cluttered. I also like to only run ads that I think will be of service to my readers and are related to personal finance.

By having sponsored posts, I’ve learned that it’s important to only have quality sponsored posts that are beneficial to readers and don’t go far off the mark of what Add-Vodka is about.

For example, months ago we accidentally allowed a sponsored post to run that linked to a gambling website. That’s not a personal finance strategy we support, so the post was removed soon thereafter.

Website changes

When I first got my hands on Add-Vodka, one of the first things I wanted to do was change the look. It looked a little dated and I wanted something that was easier to view and had a cleaner look.

A website crash created an opportunity to change the website theme, which a tech expert helped change.

While I don’t think the site is perfect, I like the cleaner look and think articles are easier to find and make blogging easier.

We’ve also expanded our use of Add-Vodka’s Facebook and Twitter pages. The Twitter page, in fact, is new this year and helps get the word out about what other personal finance bloggers are doing.

Given how popular our blogging slogan is — When Life Gives You Lemons, Add Vodka — we opened an online store in 2015 to sell shirts, bumper stickers, hoodies, coffee mugs and much more with our logo and slogan on them. We’re hoping to expand the store’s offerings this year.

Blogging topics

One of the biggest things I learned after a year of blogging and owning Add-Vodka.com is an obvious one: writing posts that matter.

Before I bought the site, it was a tale of the owner’s personal journey into her finances. That was something readers were really interested in, but as a new owner, I couldn’t continue her story.

My main goal was to use my reporting and writing skills to bring personal finance stories to the site that would help readers with their personal finances. I didn’t want the blog to be about my finances, but about money tips that could help people in their everyday lives.

The difficulty is coming up with unique content that isn’t repeated on every other personal finance website out there. I’ve tired to publish unique content that’s informative and interesting, but admit I haven’t always hit the mark.

One way I plan on doing that in 2016 is to write less often. In trying to find the sweet spot between too many posts per week and too few, I erred on the side of having too many posts, I think.

Some weeks I had three or more posts up. This can give readers a lot of options and a reason to come back often. But unless the posts are well thought out and full of awesome content, then they’re a waste of time. My goal this year is to only write when I really have something to say, and not just write for the sake of having something new posted.

Thanks for helping make 2015 a success, and please let us know how we’re doing and how we can improve in 2016.

What I Learned in a Year of Blogging is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

In place of your regular Monday morning post, I have some pretty exciting news.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll notice two things:

1) I changed my username and photo. I am no longer a cartoon cocktail glass – I am a real person.
2) I have been Tweeting here and there about the launch date of a new and exciting project coming up.

The second point brings me to this:

After my wedding in July, I knew I wanted to make a change in what I was writing about.

Rather than the hybrid of personal finance and lifestyle that I’ve been writing about on Add Vodka over the past years, I had to face the fact that I am far more interested in lifestyle design – rather, redesign – than personal finance.

Over the past few months, I have been working hard behind the scenes to get a new site up and running. As I planned it and wrote for it and created my timeline for it, something kept nagging at the back of my mind: I needed to figure out what to do with Add Vodka.

So, after four and a half awesome years on this blog, I have decided that on January 5, 2015 (4 weeks from today), I will be shutting the doors of Add Vodka.

After January 5, you can find me at Unsettle.org, where I will be blogging about something I’ve been very passionate about for a long time: lifestyle redesign, online entrepreneurship, and starting and building something for yourself using the internet and the opportunities that it has afforded us.

Over the past year and a half or so, as I began to reveal more to my family and friends about what I do online and the businesses J and I have created, people became more interested.

I began coaching a handful of people on how to create websites and online businesses, and how to get in the mindset to pursuing online entrepreneurship. It’s been incredibly rewarding and it’s something that I will be pursuing full-time.

If you are interested in any of this, I’d encourage you to subscribe on the launch page of Unsettle, which you can find here.

It’s the end of an era for me. I’ve spent four and a half years on this blog, which is practically forever in the land of the internet. I’ve spent hours – probably an accumulation of weeks – writing for this website, and giving it up is like giving up my home for a new one.

This is bittersweet news that I’ve been nervous but excited about over the past couple of months, and I wanted to give you a very heartfelt thank you for reading along. Thank you for your emails, comments, and friendship even if you’ve been quietly reading along without ever having connected with me.

Sarah/Daisy

Exciting News & The End of Add Vodka is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

Every week, I end up writing it on Saturday or Sunday morning, and editing it on Sunday evening.

Since I publish on Mondays, this means that every week, I procrastinate until the last minute and pound out an article in the writing period before I publish it.

I’m not alone in this sensation of procrastination. Unless there is a compelling reason to not procrastinate, humans have the tendency to wait until the last few days before something is due to actually get started.

We Procrastinate in Setting the Startline…

If you are in debt, how many times have you told yourself “I’ll start paying more of it down in the New Year” or “when the summer is over”, or some other time in the vague future?

You reach the fall or the New Year and it turns into the spring or after Christmas, because you didn’t have a plan, let alone a target date, and you procrastinate further.

You continue making minimum payments on your debt and a few years pass by and you wonder why you didn’t start paying down earlier, because now you have incurred hundreds or thousands of dollars in interest.

We procrastinate on setting real startlines, let alone deadlines.

And Set Low Standards For Ourselves When Setting the Deadline.

We have terribly low standards for ourselves. When we decide we want to do something, we give ourselves a ridiculous amount of time to get it done.

This is tied to two things:

1. Self belief: “I have to give myself a long deadline because I don’t think I can do it in less time”

2. Timeliness, or and the misguided notion that SMART goal concept is the be-all, end-all of goal setting and that “realistic” piece means that we have to be easy on ourselves.

Take my goal to save $12,000 for travel by February, for instance. I had seven months to reach this goal.

I’m accountable to my readers, myself, my husband, and our budget since I already have many travel plans. There’s no turning back with this goal, so I know I must reach it.

When I first set the goal, I was excited. It was new, shiny, and important, so I saved $5,000 within the first few weeks of setting it.

Then: nothing. I have spent the past two months saving very little. I was travelling, then excusing myself for not saving more because I was getting back into the groove of having a full paycheck.

Come December, there is no doubt that I’ll realize the error of my procrastinating ways, panic, and save the next $7,000 over the two month period.

(In reality, since I’m writing about it now, I’ve transferred more money into my savings, but that is what would have happened had I not decided to write this post).

What I really should have done is set a higher standard for myself.

I probably could have reached this goal in four or five months. If I had given myself four months, I would have been pushed to find a way to make a little more or cut back on another expense.

Setting Unrealistic Deadlines

In the 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss writes about the concept of setting unrealistic deadlines to avoid procrastination and increase productivity.

The concept is this: Instead of giving yourself ample time to meet a goal or finish a project, setting an unrealistic deadline will help you actually get the goal or project done and likely increase the quality of it.

Think about all of those times in school when you had too much time to do something, whether it was writing a paper or studying for an exam, and you didn’t even get started on it until a couple of days before it was due.

If your professor decided not to tell you about the exam until a couple of days prior, you would likely have done just as well on it, if not better. The time constraint may have focused your efforts in on studying only the relevant material.

The concept of setting these types of deadlines strips away the time you would have otherwise spent procrastinating and gives you only the bare amount of time that it takes to get the job done.

It also removes the period of unfocused and counterproductive analysis, planning, and questioning. When you have very little time to complete the project, you are forced to do good work in less time.

Take my travel savings goal, for example. Since I have such a long deadline, I could be spending these months strategizing about how I might cut back on my expenses and make extra money. I might be analyzing a budget to ensure that I will be on track, and questioning whether I should have set the goal at $11,000 or given myself a couple more or less weeks to reach it.

Are any of these things productive? NO! I might tell myself that they are productive, since I am engaging in these activities as a result of the goal, but they are just another distraction, pulling my focus away from the goal itself and helping me procrastinate in actually doing the important work.

How to Set an Unrealistic Deadline (And How to Know When It’s Unrealistic Enough)

Unrealistic deadlines are difficult to set, because you will likely want to default back on going easy on yourself. Ask yourself this, without lying to yourself to get out of making real progress:

If this was a work project or objective, and my boss told me I had to reach it in [x] amount of days or I would lose my job, would the deadline be too close for comfort and make me get my butt into gear right away?

If the answer is no (and be honest with yourself) then bump the deadline up.

If the answer is yes, then give yourself a very small amount of time extra (ie if your deadline was in a week, give yourself a week and one day).

If the deadline is too unrealistic, you’ll be paralyzed in inaction because of fear. We need to have a tiny bit of time to procrastinate, before setting ourselves into motion. This helps us strategize, gather our thoughts, and focus ourselves.

Raise your self-standards, and set a deadline that sounds a bit crazy. Don’t join the masses of people who set deadlines that are solidly average and struggle to meet them.

You Can Do Better: Set Shorter Deadlines to Beat Procrastination is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

My pseudonym choosing process was not a complicated one. I saw a picture of my mom’s Yorkshire Terrier on Facebook that my mom had posted, and took her name for my own blogging identity. There was no other thought that went into the decision to use Daisy as my pen name.

For the record, here is Daisy, my pen-namesake:

I decided to be anonymous for three reasons:

• The subject matter (money) is highly personal and back then, I wanted to post real numbers
• I didn’t know how far my blog would take me
• The thought of my friends and family members reading my blog left me feeling highly vulnerable.

I blogged under the pen name “Daisy” for four years until I decided to put Daisy (the pseudonym, not the dog) to rest and start using my real name.

I wasn’t going to write about it, but there have been tweets, emails, and comments from readers and/or fellow bloggers asking about my decision.

Why I No Longer Want to Blog Under a Pen Name (aka the end of anonymity)

Over the past four years, my blog has evolved and changed, and so has the reason I continue to do it.

I started blogging when I was 21 years old. I was a student, a full-time employee and I’d just moved to the Vancouver area. I thought the blog was something that I’d just do for fun. I didn’t know yet that it would be so instrumental in my growth, or that it would become such a big part of my life.

Over the past year, my blog has grown into something that is ingrained in my identity. When people ask me what I do, my answer always involves my blog. I spend so much time on projects related to blogging, developing habits to make me a better writer, and connecting with readers, bloggers and online entrepreneurs that anonymity made me feel as if I was leading a double life.

Blogging has evolved from something that I did as an outlet, to something that I’m proud of. Something that I don’t want to hide from.

Blogging has connected me with places, ideas, and most importantly, people, which I never would have seen, considered or met had I not sat down and put fingers to keys.

Passion Projects

I am working on two projects right now that light a fire in me. These projects are badges that I want to wear proudly, that I am excited to put my name on.

One of these projects I’ll be working on with Cait (who is my favourite example of a friendship that never would have started if it weren’t for blogging), and the other is something that, if done right, will be my hard-earned ticket to time, location, and mental freedom.

The rockstars in my personal life will most definitely know about these projects, and in fact will be instrumental in supporting me and championing me through the inevitable tough times as I try to create something bigger than myself.

Both of these passion projects will focus in on giving back. Leaving a mark on the world and contributing is something that I want to do, and I’ve realized that anonymity will simply hold me back from meeting the objectives of the projects.

As I mentioned in my previous post, What’s Going on with Add Vodka?, I have been looking at everything that I do in my life and ensuring that it all is true to my values and helps me meet my goal to live my life in the best possible way that I can. Using my real name is part of that.

The End of Anonymity is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

Long-time readers will know that I started Add Vodka back in 2010. The site was born with Blogger, but I moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog as the site grew, and have been at add-vodka.com ever since. If you have been around for a while, you may remember how quickly this little site grew at the beginning.

After a period of rapid growth, I pulled away from the personal finance blogging community, unsure of the direction of the site and my online career in general. My posting frequency dropped substantially, and I engaged with readers less and less. My social media use slowed substantially as I disengaged myself.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few months re-arranging my life so that I am living true to my values. Everything that I do, everyone I spend time with, every habit, and even my spending has been going through a test to determine whether they are impacting my life in a positive, negative, or neutral way.

Though I am far from finished, the outcome so far is simply that I’m making an effort to make life happen, instead of letting life happen to me.

All of this to say that my life has changed so much since I started blogging, and mostly for the better. Add Vodka passed the litmus test of life improvement, so it’s here to stay.

You may have noticed recently that I’ve been writing more frequently. The quality of the information has improved substantially. My posts are more thorough and thoughtful.

I’ve also been tweaking the way the site looks by putting myself in your shoes, and thinking about what I would want to see (or not see) when reading a blog. I’ve been trying to make it a better place to read great content.

This website is like my online home. I wouldn’t want my physical house to be cluttered, disjointed, or unfocused; I wouldn’t want my friends and family members to avoid visiting my home because it’s messy or an unpleasant place to be. I feel the same way about Add Vodka.

I’ve changed things up, simplified, and rid the blog of the bright colours and tacky icons. I’ve eliminated Adsense, and anything that might distract you or otherwise get under my reader’s skin. I’ve gone back and have begun to edit some of my previous posts for grammar and spelling issues. I’ve been reformatting older posts to fit in with the new design and to replace broken links and ugly images. I am sure you will find it much easier to navigate and read.

I’ve been spending more time on Twitter, Instagram, and Google Plus, because I genuinely enjoy interacting with all of you, instead of just pushing out and promoting my own content. I’ve been seeking great articles around the web and have been trying to share this information with you, both on social media but mostly through my posts.

Everything I do on Add Vodka is going under the magnifying glass to become the best representation of myself and my work as possible. If there is anything that you want to see, don’t like, or just want to chat about, please send me an email.

Otherwise, I hope you subscribe to get posts and updates straight to your email inbox, and enjoy a far simpler, more streamlined and engaging site.

What’s Going on With Add Vodka? is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

First of all, I agree with Aloysa’s post completely. Wholeheartedly. In fact, when I open my reader, and look at the post topics, I get a little bitchy (and even verbalize it on Twitter sometimes). But that doesn’t mean that I’m different from other bloggers. I too spout the same, boring old “advice” on a very narrow topic from time to time.

We’re all learning and trying to evolve and be better bloggers.

But I think, as bloggers, we all try to find out niche and make a spot for ourselves where not many other bloggers are writing. I’m a personal finance blogger; it’s a boring topic and it’s over saturated.

When perusing the comments on Aloysa’s topic, there were a couple about teaching people things. I got into a bit of a debate on Twitter with another blogger about blog audiences and personal finance blogs not being for other bloggers.

The blogger I was debating with is a new blogger, and while the goal of blogging is not to reach other bloggers, newer bloggers have one tool in their toolkit to get ahead: other bloggers. Newer bloggers don’t have a steady stream of non-blogger readers vying to read their blogs to see their advice.

It’s a little egotistical to think that this is the case. And that goes for all of you who avoid other bloggers when you are just starting out so you can “teach people” about money and “help people with their ____”.

When I see blogs like that, I avoid them because it alienates the REAL readers.

Yes, the real readers. The people who actually read your blog (regularly) are made up of probably 90% bloggers, and, if you are lucky, (VERY LUCKY) 20% non-bloggers that think you are credible, dumb, entertaining, funny, or whatever it is that makes them keep reading your blog. Bloggers are what keep your bounce rate and returning visitors rate from making you want to cry every time you log on to Analytics.

Friends, there are hundreds (thousands?) of blogs covering money topics out there. How is it that you think that you saying the exact same thing on your blog will be something of authority to the masses?

It won’t. Why, as somebody researching a money topic, would I ever bypass Moneyville, Gail Vaz Oxlade, Forbes, MSN Money, (etc, etc) to seek out your tiny little blog (even if it’s a huge blog, it’s tiny when compared to the aforementioned) to get information?

So, most of your (regular) readers are bloggers when you’re first starting out (and, a lot of those bloggers don’t even care what you have to say – they’re visiting/promoting/commenting on your blog to get noticed, to get a link back, or because you reciprocate. But that’s another post for another day).

I’m not saying that we, as bloggers, do not learn from each other. WE DO. Quite a lot. I even wrote a post about that before. But we need to start treating our blogs more like a business, figure out our audience (hint – it’s likely bloggers at first) and targeting that market.

Since most of the people who read our blogs are other bloggers in the beginning, and usually from the same genre, why are we trying to “teach” other bloggers how to do things? Heck, they’ve probably already written about it.

Some might write generic posts like “how to increase your credit score” to get search engine traffic from those search terms, but unless you have a wildly popular blog with tons of readers and just the best SEO skills ever, you won’t even be on the first page because all of your predecessors have written about that.

Even if you want to get to the point where you have readers that aren’t bloggers, other bloggers are the ones to help you kick start your blog. They are the ones promoting your posts, commenting on them, helping your PR, Alexa, and Moz rankings to get your blog out there and attract those readers. Why alienate the very people who will be key to your success in gaining other readers to “help”?

Now, I’m not saying that everyone should just stop writing about generic topics if you love writing about them, because quite frankly, I don’t really care. Except when I’m grumpy in the morning. But I’ll get over it. What I’m saying is that we all need to get off our high horses, and get over ourselves in thinking that we know these nuggets of knowledge that nobody can get anywhere else and will flock to our blogs to find out about.

I’m not saying never write about topics with a lesson, I’m simply saying that you must know your audience as a blogger and tailor some posts accordingly. It doesn’t have to be all posts, but some.

And really, by all means, write about generic topics sometimes. It’s really what brings search engine results to our blogs and maybe the reader will like how we present it and stay. But don’t write about them all the time, because that alienates your regular readers.

Now, there are some blogs with authority, and that’s great, but they usually find a way to make those topics a little less dry. If you are going to write about generic topics, think about how you do that thing differently than the rest of world; what can you offer that another post might not? What is your twist that makes that post believable, or that tip worth trying? Having that twist is what made those bloggers like Get Rich Slowly build authority and non-blogger readership.

Or, maybe this whole post is a reflection of my thinking that I know everything Probably that, too.

Bloggers are Egotistical is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

As my blog has grown, I’ve found myself getting more overwhelmed with the time and effort required for me to sustain it. I’m not complaining, because at any time I could just stop blogging if I didn’t like it, but it’s a known fact that running a blog isn’t easy.

I didn’t know you could outsource anything blog related until early this year. It turns out you can outsource a whole lot, though, and you can find a lot of the services on various classifieds for blogs.

Here are 5 time sucking blogging activities that can be outsourced:

Commenting

Commenting takes up, hands down, the most time of any other blog related activity on my end. It’s a time suck. Especially if you want to leave thoughtful comments that are more than one sentence long.

You can outsource commenting, and a couple of bloggers will go out and leave comments for you for per-comment fee.

This is not something I’d pay for, simply because while commenting is a time suck, it’s also my favorite part of blogging. Plus, I feel like I’ve built relationships with the bloggers that I frequently comment on, and it would be odd if somebody else was to comment on their blogs on my behalf.

However, if you can’t comment on the amount of blogs you’d like to, and you want to respond to frequent commenters on your site, outsourcing commenting can be a good way to do it.

Carnival Submissions

Submitting to carnivals can be a very important way to build links, create relationships, and drive traffic to your blog. Carnivals are essentially just a big, long link round up, usually on a specific topic, that a host posts on their blog.

Because these roundups are so big, it’s not like a weekly link love that you are included in because a peer liked your post. Instead, you have to actually do some leg work and submit your posts to these carnivals.

While this isn’t as big of a time suck as commenting is, carnival submissions still take a bit of hunting around, and let’s be real – it’s not even close to being as fun or engaging as commenting.

Tech Issues

Many people aren’t great with this aspect of blogging. Personally, I’m learning how to be more self sufficient when it comes to troubleshooting, but it used to be that anything techie was beyond my scope of knowledge.

When something goes wrong on my blog, no matter what it is, I take it to Twitter. Twitter rarely has the answer, so then I take I refer to somebody who knows what they are doing. Everybody should have a friend who is good with tech stuff.

Since internet/tech/blog issues are the things that give me the most headaches, it’s always worth it to outsource it for me.

Design

The average blogger does not have the know-how or eye to go and design their blog to make it look half decent.

A bunch of them think they do, but in reality, owner designed blogs can be hard to look at, not very functional, and inefficient.

This included me up until I started opening up far too many sites, gave up, and learned the basics of web design. It would cost me a pretty penny to get a professional design on all of my websites, so I had to learn for the sake of my wallet, but if there’s something so nice about having a beautiful new blog design without having to lift a finger.

Social Media

I handle all of my own social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) but it’s getting time consuming having to update all of the social media that I am on, and sometimes I let it slip through the cracks.

You can outsource social media management so that you don’t have to worry about keeping up with all that is out there.

This is something I should definitely do, because my Facebook page looks a little empty, but I do plan on working on it eventually.

Starting a blog? You may also be interested to read some of my other posts about the subject:

Blogging 101

• Why Should You Blog? I Have a Bunch of Reasons!
• If You’re Just Starting Out, You Should Start on WordPress. Here’s why
• Ways to Inject Personality Into Your Posts (because nobody wants to read boring stuff)
• A Post About Knowing Your Audience
• Make Sure You Are Running Your Blog Like You’d Run Your Business
• Learn From My Mistakes in Blogging

Should You Blog Anonymously?

• Blogging Anonymously – How to Do It
• A Case for Blogging Publicly
• My Beef with Blogging Anonymously

Feel free to email me with any blogging questions and I’d be happy to help!

5 Things That Can Be Outsourced On Your Blog is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

The person who emailed wanted to know how I blog anonymously, whether it was really possible, and how to ensure nobody finds out your real identity.

It’s possible. Easy, even.

I started an anonymous blog almost three years, and am still largely anonymous. Some of my fellow bloggers know my real name, and I have met a few of them, so I can’t very well be anonymous to those I’ve met, but I am still an anonymous blogger.

My picture isn’t floating around out there at all, and nobody knows my last name who hasn’t met me in person. You wouldn’t be able to find my blog by Googling my first and last name, and I like it that way.

I started off anonymously and I’d like to stay at least semi-anonymous for the duration of my blog. Being anonymous has provided some issues as my blog has grown and become more popular, so I’ve been considering loosening the anonymity reigns a bit, but not because it’s difficult.

Here’s how I did it:

I Started Off with a “Pen” Name

I started off with the “pen” name (alias?) Daisy. I found that having a pen name – instead of people knowing me as, for example, Lemons or Add Vodka, gave me a quality that was a little more real. Plus, it’s easier to relate to somebody or want to get to know a blogger if they blog under a pen name instead of just the first word of their blog. If that makes any sense.

So I picked my pen name on a whim after my mom’s dog (yep, seriously), and have gone as Daisy ever since.

I didn’t really tell anybody that it wasn’t my real name until recently, and of course if people asked. But if you pick a believable name, nobody will ask and it will protect your anonymous identity.

Invest in Whois Privacy

When you are registering your domain on a site, it’s important to pay the extra couple of dollars to have Whois privacy. That way, when somebody looks up your domain, they won’t be able to find your real name, where you are from, etc. I register all of my domains on name.com [Referral] and who.is privacy is $3.99/year – super cheap and very much worth it.

I should also mention that you can’t register Whois for .ca domains.

Be Cautious

At first, I was cautious to the point of paranoia. I double checked everything before even posting a comment; I only had a Twitter account because I didn’t have a personal Twitter account so I couldn’t slip up. I didn’t check my blog Twitter, email, stats, or anything while I was in a public place. I really, really didn’t want anyone knowing I blogged.

Once I got more comfortable with it all, I loosened the reigns a bit. I got into a groove where I didn’t have to worry as much. I still double check everything, but for awhile there, I got sloppy.

My mom discovered my blog because I used a website under my real name, but wrote that I blogged at Add-vodka.com in my intro. Silly me.

After she discovered me, I swore her to secrecy and proceeded to be a little more diligent in covering up my tracks.Now I don’t really care if people who know me in real life find out about my blog. My main concern is the Google monster and privacy.

Log Out of Everything

Once upon a time, I was on Twitter (I only have Twitter through my blog) and decided to creep somebody I had once known.

When I did that, Twitter pulled some voodoo magic and followed that person (or so it said) without me pressing the follow button.

I didn’t want him to see that I followed him, click on my blog or Twitter and figure out who I was, so I freaked out and made my Twitter private for quite awhile.

I learned from that. Log out after every single thing you do on your blog or personal accounts.

Another thing that I’m paranoid about is “sharing” one of my posts onto my personal Facebook account instead of my blog Facebook account because I didn’t log out.

Have Different Passwords

Most of us use the same password for almost everything, for simplicity’s sake. I do too. However, I learned early on to have a different password for blog related things than I do for my personal accounts.

That way, I can never log in and send emails from my blog account to my dad, for instance. The different password would be another security measure.

Use Different Email Providers

My personal email account is a Hotmail account. My blog email account is a Gmail account. If I’m on Hotmail, I know to never email anybody from that account that is blog related, and vice versa.

Using completely different providers makes it easier to distinguish between the two.

There are few reasons why you’d need to give out your real name in a blogging situation. There has been some debate over whether blogging anonymously hinders one’s blogging success, and so far I haven’t had too much issue with that, though things are slowly changing. If you want to blog but you don’t want your name floating around out there attached to your blog, going anonymous is a good solution.

Starting a blog? You may also be interested to read some of my other posts about the subject:

Blogging 101

Why Should You Blog? I Have a Bunch of Reasons!

If You’re Just Starting Out, You Should Start on WordPress. Here’s why

Ways to Inject Personality Into Your Posts (because nobody wants to read boring stuff)

A Post About Knowing Your Audience

If You Want a Successful, Money Making Blog, You Should Outsource (or quit your job and blog full time)

Make Sure You Are Running Your Blog Like You’d Run Your Business

Learn From My Mistakes in Blogging

Should You Blog Anonymously?

A Case for Blogging Publicly

My Beef with Blogging Anonymously

I also welcome any emails regarding starting a blog, blogging anonymously, or really anything else that you may want to discuss or ask. You can find me at addvodka@gmail.com!

Blogging Anonymously 101 is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

After that point, I devoured books like it was going out of style. I read Sweet Valley High, the Babysitters Club, Goosebumps, pick your poison. I was always above my reading level by several grades. I remember walking through the grocery store with my mom, reading while trying to navigate the store. I read in the dark car, hungrily absorbing all of the words I could catch when we passed under a street light.

I remember as a tween, I took a 4 hour bus trip and forgot a book. I was horribly lost without one, and read everything I could get my hands on; car magazines, the Globe and Mail, song lyrics, street signs; anything to distract me from not having a book.

My love of reading translated into a desire to write.

I wrote a whole bunch of short stories and even wrote my elementary school’s newsletter. I got to take an hour after my recess every month or so to put together a column in the newsletter that went home with my peers.

At nine years old, I decided I was going to write a children’s book. I called it “Pigs in Peanut Butter” and it rhymed. It was actually pretty wonderful. I still remember most of the book off by heart.

It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to write a book. When people would ask what I wanted to do when I grew up, I’d answer that I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write something substantial; something that people would read all over the world.

As an adult, I haven’t even considered starting to write a book. After all, what would I write about? Sometimes, when I come across blog posts discussing how to become a better writer on a blog, I’m a bit taken aback.

I had never considered blogging writing. I mean, obviously it is, in the literal sense of the word; we, as bloggers, are expressing ourselves through written words. But as a little girl, dreaming of what I’d become when I was older, blogging wasn’t even on my radar (shouldn’t surprise you – was blogging even a thing in the 90’s?). Even into high school, as blogging gained popularity, it never crossed my mind that something so simple could satisfy my desire to write.

As I’ve began to read, and participate in, more blogs, I have found some beautifully written prose that blow me away. That make me thing “yes. That is writing” (in the figurative sense of the word).

The jury is still out for me. It’s not my traditional sense of writing, but I’m starting to warm to the idea. Maybe I’m the only one who has a weird definition of what “writing” is.

So, I’m interested, dear readers (writers?) – Do you consider blogging “writing”? If you’re a blogger, do you consider yourself a writer?

Are Bloggers Really Writers? is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

Some people blog for their businesses. Some people use their blogs as their business. I admit though, it was not always like a business in my case; I started out blogging for fun and as a hobby. I didn’t know that you could make money from blogging. Even still, I don’t make all that much from it but it’s turned into a huge part of my life. If you want to start a blog and don’t know where to start, Jeremy has a great post with some tips and tricks and things to consider.

Here’s how running a blog is like running a business.

It’s Time Consuming

If I’m not at work, school, or asleep, I’m blogging.

Of course, the scale of one’s blog also dictates how much work goes into it, but generally speaking, blogs take up a lot of time.

It’s not just writing content that is time consuming; in order for your blog to even be read by anyone, you need to network, comment on other blogs, tweet, promote other blogs, guest post, etc.

It’s very time consuming and so is running a business.

It Requires Capital

For any business to be successful, the owner needs to put capital out before raking in the profit. Blogs are no different.

Typically, you have to pay for the hosting, the domain, a custom design, a logo or header, and possibly even outsource some things, like carnival submission, commenting, etc.

It’s usually not a ton of money, but will typically take some money. That being said, doing all of these things and getting away from free blogs will usually increase your chances of earning blogging income, if that’s what you are after.

When I switched to self hosted, not only did my stats sky-rocket, but advertisers also started to contact me.

You Provide a Service

While you aren’t cutting anybody’s hair or cleaning their gutters, you are still providing a service; that service is entertainment, inspiration, and information.

It’s largely a free service, unless you have an eBook that you are selling or a subscription fee. Most blogs are free, but the “profit” that readers provide comes with advertisers. The more readers you have, the more interesting you are to advertisers.

So, readers and visitors pay you in page views, either from a Google search or from their subcription.

It’s sort of like a radio station, in that they get more advertisers the more people listen, but other than having a radio (and, in a blogs case, other than having the internet), the service is free.

You Have a Target Market

When you write your posts, even if you are not thinking about who you want to read it, you are targeting a certain demographic.

My target market varies per post; sometimes, I target 20 something females, sometimes, 30 somethings, sometimes other bloggers, but I would say that my target market is anybody who is wishing to improve their life and live for themselves.

If you didn’t have a certain demographic that you wanted to pique the interest of, you’d have either a private blog or a paper journal.

You Have Competitors

Luckily, in blogging, your competitors – or, the people who do the same thing as you and produce the same product – can also be your best friends.

Those competitors promote you, link to you, and refer to your posts. They bring your Alexa ranking down and your PageRank up. Your competitors can become your readers, and your readers can become your competitors.

Especially in blogs about a specific topic – ie personal finance or mommy blogs – there are only a limited number of things to discuss before you start repeating each other.

It happens. It’s not the end of the world. Sometimes, you don’t even know the topic has been done before. You usually hope that your take on it brings something different to the table.

You want to promote your blogging competitors, because at the end of the day it’s not like your target market can only read one blog and one blog only – they can read multiple, and usually do.

Sometimes, there are some real and sneaky competitors; just like Blackberry stole the Playbook idea from the iPad, there are some “bloggers” that steal whole identities from other bloggers. I’ve only seen this happen once, and it’s not pretty.

You Need to Advertise

I don’t necessarily mean that you need to go out and put on a radio ad or buy ad space on a website. What I mean, is that much of bloggers time is spent getting their names out there in the blogosphere.

They comment, Tweet, and spend time on Google+. They network and email and connect.

As bloggers, we’re frequently out there pounding the proverbial pavement finding ways to get our “brand”, or our names out there.

Many bloggers have made their blogs into businesses; they make their incomes off of their blog and work to grow and nurture their work.

I can’t claim that WLGYL is run like your average business, in that I don’t really have a clear vision (I know where I’d like it to be but that changes sometimes), and my mission is under-developed if at all.

But there are certain elements of business that blogging shares.

Do you run your blog like a business? Do you blog for money or pleasure?

Starting a blog? You may also be interested to read some of my other posts about the subject:

Blogging 101

• Why Should You Blog? I Have a Bunch of Reasons!
• If You’re Just Starting Out, You Should Start on WordPress. Here’s why
• Ways to Inject Personality Into Your Posts (because nobody wants to read boring stuff)
• A Post About Knowing Your Audience
• If You Want a Successful, Money Making Blog, You Should Outsource (or quit your job and blog full time)
• Make Sure You Are Running Your Blog Like You’d Run Your Business
• Learn From My Mistakes in Blogging

Should You Blog Anonymously?

• Blogging Anonymously – How to Do It
• A Case for Blogging Publicly
• My Beef with Blogging Anonymously

Feel free to email me with any blogging questions and I’d be happy to help!

How Running a Blog is Like Running a Business is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.