Dane Morgan

Well, as you can see I did it.

If you don’t know what I did, that’s okay, I’ll explain in just a minute.

For the handful who do know what I’m talking about, I decided not to wait for a consensus. One of the new rules is not waiting. No pondering. Any action, even the wrong action, is better than inaction.

Andy Beard and Mike Paetzold both saw the last post on the old blog and commented. I’m not really sure if they had the chance to see my replies to their comments or not, but as is always the case with these two, they were very useful comments and I really want to express my gratitude to both of them for years of great ideas and inspiration.

I consider myself a pretty fair blogger and WordPress guy, but these are a couple of the guys I look for to learn something new in this field.

So, lets start with some back story, shall we?

I had a WordPress blog here for a long, long time. and one day i had the brilliant idea of expanding it into something more than a blog. I determined to turn it into a full fledged CMS with all kinds of features, departments, bells and whistles. I tested a bunch of things and settled on drupal. I installed it on the site and backed up the posts I had already amassed into a “legacy” section of the site.

But it never really worked out for me. The CMS approach just never fit for what I really wanted to do here. This site just should be a blog in my mind, and I never put my whole heat into the community concept.

I continued to blog, using drupal as a battleship in a bathtub solution for about a year, but I just wasn’t happy with the results.

Don’t get me wrong. I love drupal. I just don’t love drupal as a blog. Eventually I decided to experiment with this blog. I just quit posting altogether. I only very very rarely responded to comments.

The Blog Would Not Die!

And yet it would not die. I mean, there was nothing earth shaking going on, but I was still getting between 50 and 80 visitors a day (with an 84% unique visitor and a 75% bounce rate).

And they were commenting! Sure a lot of the comments were just attempts to get a link and some were outright abusive spam, but many of them were genuine comments. Probably 4 or 5 a week on average.

And Google was the chief pusher of the traffic; Followed by StumbleUpon and then a group of about 14 blogs that had linked to me in old posts (sorry about breaking those links guys, I’ll be fixing any links you have out there with 301s shortly).

And came the anniversary.

So the plan had been to let the blog sit fallow for a year until it was good and dead, then kill it off and start fresh.

The tabula rasa effect, right?

Nope.

I checked in last month after a year of neglect and realized that the simple fact was that in order to start fresh I would have to actually delete what was already there.

A month of agonized consideration ensued.

And then, Last week I did something rash. I quit my day job. Not like all of the other marketers you are so familiar with. Not because I was making enough money to do so. But because I simply could not endure another day working at that job.

Guts? Stupidity? I’ll report and let you decide.

But you know what. Action is what makes things happen. I know I can earn a good living online.

I’ve made money on line. I know why I haven’t made consistent money online so far.

I’m correcting that starting now. By the by, a nod to The Success Addict, Robert Plank is in order here. I’ve been absorbing a number of his products lately, and I’m deploying a lot of what I’m learning from him here on this blog.

One thing from the start is New Rule No. One. TAKE ACTION. This theme aint ready for prime time. Stuff I want here aint ready to go. But I ain’t waiting. I’m getting content up now. I’ll continue making things more like what I want, but forward momentum is the order of the day.

For instance. In the past I’ve made my own themes. Not this one. I downloaded something close, hacked it just enough to get it looking a little different and I’m publishing. I’ll continue to work on it. But it’s going to take some time. The content comes first. Starting when I push that publish button in just a couple of minutes.

I’m living the 8020 rule I’m doing the 20 and getting the 80 from here on in. No more working for 100% and getting nothing because 100% is never reached.

I’d love to read your thoughts on this post. Please take just a minute to leave me a comment. Am I nuts? Completely starkers? Shrewd? Gutsy? Let me know what you think!

Tags: 8020, blogger, drupal, take action, wordpress blog