I started this blog over a year ago in a great burst of optimistic enthusiasm. As it turns out, it was probably over-optimistic. Before very long the project was crowded out by the demands of everyday life. I discovered that the amount of work and commitment needed to maintain a blog was more than I had expected. I found out that what I thought would be hard was easy — and what I thought would be easy turned out to be hard.

I was worried about figuring out the technical aspects. But I’ve found that, with enough persistence, I can usually make things work. That part has actually been fun.

Writing, I assumed, would be a piece of cake. I write all the time. I’ve kept a personal journal since my teens. It now fills boxes and boxes! I keep a work log detailing my daily travails. I was an English major, for Pete’s sake! But the writing part turned out to be agony! It’s not that I can’t write … and it’s not that I don’t have anything to say. Rather, it’s like sitting in a large seminar where the moderator unexpectedly asks you to come up on the stage and say a few words. I just wasn’t prepared for that reaction.

So my blog has been essentially abandoned for almost a year. The idea behind it, however, has still been simmering along on the back burner. Even though my optimism has been dented just a tad, my enthusiasm has managed to hang in there.

How I Spent My Summer (Not Working On My Blog … )

The little brick and mortar shop that has provided my meager subsistence for all these years has been on a slow slide to oblivion for several years now. That’s what inspired me to get started on all this internet stuff in the first place. Part of the problem (one problem among many) has been that the old building on our family farm where my shop is located has been about ready to fall down over my head. Neither my store nor the farm has had the income needed to fix it. Finally, this spring I convinced my mother and sister that we ought to sell a few acres and fix the roof before it caved in and left us with a lot bigger problem on our hands.

So, we listed the real estate. And, on that basis, the bank agreed to give us a short-term note to fix the roof. (It really was to that point — do it now, or lose the building!) Promptly after we listed our land, the real estate market took a nose dive. At this point, we have the land and no buyers in sight, with the note coming due all too soon. But we do have a roof.

That project, which I thought would take a month, just totally consumed the summer. It was decided that, since we were doing the roof, we should add insulation under it. But, before doing that, wiring needed to be roughed in for the large upstairs space. And, before that, the door we had always thought the area needed would have to be installed. And, if you have a door leading out onto the roof, it really needs some kind of landing. And when you’re rebuilding a large south-facing roof, it’s the perfect time to add a simple solar heating system.

After consuming the summer, the project went on to consume the fall. My store was closed for most of it, and there was no time or energy left to even think about my internet plans. Time was spent dealing with contractors, waiting for contractors, finding new contractors, waiting for the new contractors, making plans, changing plans, doing work myself. (The solar heater still isn’t done. We’re waiting for a break in the weather.)

The outcome to all this is that I now have a functional office again (the ceiling of my office fell in during August of 2006 — I moved my work back into it in August of 2007). I have a store that’s now heatable so it can be open year-round. We don”t have ankle-deep water in the video section every time it rains. The old building has been saved. Now, all we have to do is pay for it!

Future Plans For Life, The Blog, And Everything

Finally, as the dust settles, I can get back to wrestling with my fundamental question: What do I want to do when I grow up?

Actually, that’s not too bad an analogy. Young people are at a point in their lives where they instinctively know that their job is to play, explore and learn. But the fact is, we go through that phase several times in our lives. The normal business advice is that you have to pick your field, narrow your focus, and use discipline to maintain that focus.

Yes, I think this is right … But … only after you have put in the requisite period of exploration and learning. The word for that is “play”. You play with ideas and approaches. You don’t worry about how much you can earn. You just need to find out what trips your trigger, what rings your bell. Then, when the time comes to settle down to business, you’ll know it. This exploration phase is where I am right now.

My plans for this blog are still pretty much what they were when I started. I’m using it for exploration and practice in my quest to find an online income. As part of that exercise, I hope to eventually earn a little something from the blog itself. However, this blog isn’t intended to be that online income I’m searching for. (Time will tell and we won’t rule out any possibilities!)

It’s starting to look like this is a blog about doing blogs. That’s not intentional. The blog is just a jumping off place. There are a bunch of ways to earn on the internet! I’m planning to delve into a lot of them. Here are some of the ones I’ve been looking at:

• Affiliate Sales

• Ecommerce

• Ebay

• Selling Crafts

• Selling Used Books on Amazon

• Ebook Writing

• Resell Rights Marketing

• Niche Sites

• Public Domain Re-publishing

So, now what?

I have some log entries made last year in my handwritten log when I was starting this blog. I’m going to enter some of those retroactively, just for the sake of continuity. Then we’ll just have to see where the future takes us. (I would predict spurts of activity with quiet gaps in between. That’s been the pattern of my life so far.)

There are a couple of things I would say, at this point, to people who are in my shoes. (In other words, people around my age who are looking to the internet as a source of retirement income, or as a second career — but who weren’t brought up with the internet as their playground.):

1. Promoters of many programs will tell you , “You can do this with absolutely no technical knowledge ..”. I have my doubts about that statement. You’ll probably need some. More is better. But you can learn the technical side and have fun doing it.

2. It takes longer than you think. Give yourself plenty of time. Don’t plan on starting after you retire (if you’re needing that extra money to get by). And, for heaven’s sake, don’t quit your day job until after you have your online business producing. Start small and start now. Don’t forget that the initial “fooling-around” period is mandatory.

3. Expect to deal with some emotional baggage. A person’s work is a large and meaningful part of their lives. Any change, for good or for bad, planned or unplanned, is going to bring up emotions that you’re not used to. Trying to fix the problem where your FTP client won’t maintain a connection can be frustrating. But trying to deal with the situation of breaking out in hives anytime someone asks “Is this the year you’re retiring?” (even though you’re looking forward to it), can completely derail the best of plans. (True, this doesn’t have anything to do with making an income online. But, if that’s your plan, this is the one factor that can bring you down more surely than any technical, mechanical, or strategic problem you could encounter.)

4. Even if the internet wasn’t your playground as a child, it is now. Life is supposed to be fun. Work is supposed to be fun. So have fun!

I’m so excited! I’ve gotten my first blog installed, working and (almost) figured out.

I feel just like the first guy who invented the wheel! In fact, there’s a 50-50 chance that first “guy” was a woman — maybe even a grandma like me. I can picture her jumping up and down, crying “Ooga-booga!” I know just how she feels! And her next thought was probably “I’ve got to tell the rest of the tribe about this! This has possibilities …”

Well, when she invented the wheel, she most likely didn’t really “invent” it. She found a nice log and figured out how to use it. What I’ve figured out how to use is the blogging program called WordPress. (And available for free!)

I’ll be giving the blow-by-blow description of what I learn as we go along.

At this point, I imagine there are some people saying, “Oooo! Cool!” and others saying, “You’ve figured out how to install WordPress … have you also figured out how to tie your own shoes?”

Yes, it’s fairly simple — now that I know how to do it. But it did take a little struggle to get there. I’m writing for the people who are fairly close to me on this path of learning.

Blogging is a very liberating way of writing. If you were to write a book, before you even began you would have a certain premise. You’d have an introduction, then would build up some chapters flowing in a logical progression to a conclusion. You would start out knowing approximately how long the work would be and with a pretty good idea of how it would end.

So, if I were writing a book on, for example, “Can The Average Grandma Make a Living Online?”, it would necessitate my having already found the answer to that.

But a blog is immediate. I’ve asked the question, and in the blog, I’ll document the exploration. I can’t tell you the conclusion, nor can I tell you how long it’ll take. But I invite you along for the ride.

An even bigger difference between a blog and a book is that the blog is interactive.

I used to go shopping frequently with a good friend. (She has since moved away; hence the past tense.) Sometimes I’d drive and sometimes she would. We’d be happily chattering away when the one in the passenger side would interject, “You need to get into the other lane here.” or “Watch out for those kids there.” or “I think you come to some construction right around the next corner.”

That’s an example of how interaction works. (I occasionally used to try the same sort of helpful “interaction” with my late husband but he’d just get annoyed and reply, “I know how to drive!”)

Okay. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

The purpose of this blog is to explore ways people of varying degrees of technical ability can make a full-time living online.The primary guinea pig here is me. My daughter, April, is the second one.

I’m under a fair amount of pressure to make this work. (I’ll write the whole story in the “About Me” page …)

I’m Shirley Chase — better known to certain members of the population as “Grandma Shirley” (Just your average Grandma.)

Most of the entries will be explanations of how I did this, that or the other.

I’m no “expert” at any of this (which is going to become pretty obvious), but I’ll tell you what worked for me, as well as what didn’t.

I’m starting right here where I am today, with the installation of my blog. But that’s not really the beginning. I had to get a domain, find a hosting account, a whole bunch of stuff (like find out what a “blog” is for) to even get to this point. I’ll write a Prologue to explain what I did up to now.

So here we go — let’s get started.

For many years, I’ve kept a log of everything I do when working on the computer. I keep a clipboard with notebook paper on the desk beside me. Then I just note what I do as I do it. Later I transcribe those notes into a plain text document using Notepad.

From there I have a sort of complicated procedure that has evolved over the years. I won’t bore you with it at the moment, but one of these days I’ll give you all the details because it works quite well.

I strongly recommend that everybody keep some sort of log for things done on their computers. Even the best memory can’t keep track of this, and your personal log will tell you things the computers logs won’t.

However, what I’m getting at right now is that, since I’m accustomed to keeping this log anyway, I can just adapt it for blog entries. (Like, take out the cuss-words, leave off the complaints about the weather, etc. Normally, all that goes right into my log.)

Today I’ll be experimenting on getting a small test item for sale in the blog I’m making for my daughter, April. Stay tuned to see how that works out.