Yes, I truly believe that the road to success is paved with stones of failure. There are a very few people in this world who are successful in any endeavor on the first try. The remaining 99.9% of us have to keep trying and trying to reach that success.

A Bit of History

When I first started this blog, I started it as a mere journal. It wasn't until several months later that I realized what kind of potential a blogging platform had to offer. Still, I was naive.

About a year ago, I posted my first milestone. I thought 10,000 unique visitors in 7 months was a lot. I set a soft goal of 100,000 unique visitors by the one-year mark. I went way over that goal because of the things I started doing to attract visitors. In a sense, I would call that a success, albeit an easy goal to achieve. Since then, I've stopped paying attention to that figure. I now get well over 5,000 unique visitors per month and well over 10,000 page views per month.

A year ago, I was getting 20 to 40 unique visitors per day. That number, as of a few days ago, was 200 to 400. Using the techniques I recently learned from 3 prominent bloggers, I plan to increase that to a number of at least 2,000 to 4,000 (and hopefully more than that) by this time next year. Will I be successful? I don't know, but I do know that the road to success is paved with stones of failure.

Over the course of the last year, I published posts under my bragging rights category. I was showing how well I was doing with my Alexa and Technorati rankings. Those rankings started bothering me when they stagnated and then started getting worse. My unpublished goals were incredible failures. Of course, I later learned that neither ranking is important and are only indicators of failure or success. I stopped bragging.

My wife is almost a computer illiterate. She has learned during our physical separation how much money can be saved by using an instant messenger with voice. She has been gradually learning other facets of computer operation. I can no longer connect to the PC she's using with a VNC client and she can't figure out why (and neither can the owner). I don't have the patience to try and walk her through all the possible causes, especially since I can't see what she sees.

New Goals

I and my wife have had some recent, long discussions via instant messenger. Starting in April (a good guess), and armed with resources and knowledge obtained from "How to Make Money Online for Beginners", "Court's Internet Marketing School", and "Blogger Unleashed", we plan to launch a series of niche blogs for the sole purpose of making money from search engine visitors. We want to create new blogs at a rate of at least one per month, giving each ample time to grow and ourselves ample time to make adjustments.

Recent events and a financial hardship mitigated, possibly eliminated, by the overwhelming support of our fellow bloggers has made it our desire to be able to do the exact same thing for others that find themselves in tight predicaments. We want to be able to funnel online income to the people who need it more than we do. Will we be successful? Again, I don't know.

I will be teaching my wife everything I can possibly teach her about computers in general, blogging, advertising, and anything else she needs to know in order to assist me in doing what we plan to do. I realize that I may not have any hair left after we're done, but that's a risk I have to take.

An Unreachable Goal?

While this isn't a niche blog, I believe I have the motivation and the talent to put it up there in the same league as the ProBlogger, where a few short paragraphs can make a resounding impact on the lives of others. I realize it's going to take a lot of work, a lot of rewriting (for SEO and SERPS), and a lot of determination to make it happen. I also realize that there isn't a timetable that I can follow to get there.

This is a lofty goal, which means I'll be in it for the long haul. It could be another year or another 10 years, or even longer. I expect to fail many times before I reach the success that I'm trying to achieve. The road to success is paved with stones of failure and it's going to be an extremely bumpy ride.