@themarkymark is putting on a contest encouraging people to get off their lazy butt's, quit making excuses, and start getting stuff done. If you want to participate in the contest you need to make sure that you:

• Resteem His Post
• Comment in his postthat you are participating
• Do something big for yourself
• Write an entry post
• Post a link to your entry here
• Use the #getshitdone tag

Source

If you have been procrastinating participating in this contest, well get off your lazy butt and start working on whatever it is as you only have a little over 3 days left at the time of writing this post. So without further delay, here is what I'm doing to #getshitdone.

Attempt I've Made in the Past at Blogging

I've been wanting to start a blog for a while now to start working on making some "passive" income. Back in 2015 I bought a domain, bloggingwithbloggers.com, and got set-up with bluehost.com as my website host. I had the idea of starting a blog where I interviewer bloggers on the struggles of blogging. Something like eofire.com, but a blog instead of a podcast.

Well after being turned down by all of the bloggers I emailed asking for an interview saying they didn't have enough time and developing an interest in crypto I decided to make it a crypto site. I know hindsight is 20/20 and who the hell would figure out bloggingforbloggers is a crypto site.

I spent a lot of time cruising the bitcoin talk forum looking for ways to earn crypto and came across faucets. I would spend weeks claiming earnings from faucets and gaining a few hundred Satoshi at a time or a few dollars a week if I was lucky. I then came across faucetbox.com which allowed you to create your own faucet on a website so decided to give that a whirl.

The idea behind a faucet was that you would earn more money off of advertisements on your website, then you would give out in Bitcoin so once you ran out of Bitcoin or your faucet ran "dry" you would use ad revenue to purchase more Bitcoin. I supplemented the faucet by having referral links to other good faucets on my website to help offset the costs as well. There were different ways to manage your faucet by setting daily limits, including captchas, etc. to prevent Russian bots from draining your faucet, it was a never-ending battle.

After about 2 or 3 months I was coming out ahead in terms for crypto, but no way I was going to be able to make it as a side business because the profits weren't enough to even cover the cost of the website. I moved most of my crypto out of Faucetbox (RIP all the crypto I left in there) and proceeded to spend the next few months ignoring crypto and given up on blogging.

How I Will Accomplish it This Time

I've spent the past almost 2 years blogging on Steemit. While it's nice, with resteems and a lack of focus on this account, it's not a great way to show off my work, so I've been looking for a way to expand my sphere back into blogging for 2 reasons.

1. If I find a job looking for a part-time writer I want a professional looking place that highlights my work where I can post exceptional content that doesn't get lost in all the other randomness I post on here.
2. I'm looking for a way to diversify the income I get for blogging and using engrave gives me more freedom to do this with Adsenese and other similar companies.

Thanks to @engrave I can keep posting on the Steem blockchain while at the same time growing a blog that can be tracked using Google Analytics and Adsense. While it's not as customizable as I'd like it to be, it's free!, and it's a good opportunity for me to focus on the content I create. Plus, I would like to spend some time getting a better feel on how to use the information that is provided to you through Analytics as well as working on becoming better at including previous posts into my current ones.

I also want to increase my understanding of SEO and figure out ways I can help my website grow in Google's search result. I'm currently working on updating all my social media information so that I can attract new eyes to my site via Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Pinterest seeing which platform yields the best results. As you can see below it is a work in progress, but I have been tweeting about #steem more and new articles when I write one for the blog.

I feel a lot better about my blog this time as I said before using engrave is free, so I can grow my blog without currently worrying if it's a drain on the already small pocketbook. I already have a small audience thanks to the people I interact with on Steem, have some experience of running a blog from messing with my faucet and creating, and am already posting pretty consistently on my Steemit account, so I am feeling really confident.

Progress I've Made

I've already talked previously about setting up social media profiles on other platforms to begin directing new eyes to my blog and interacting with new audiences on other platforms. I've authored 2 posts for my blog, one about posting my blog on the new engrave site and the second one for my 2019 monthly update of my Steemit account, with a 3rd one in the queue.

I had some trouble initially getting all the Google stuff set-up (with the exception of Adsense), but after some help from the @wise-team we resolved the issue and everything is working great. I'm going to start researching different ad platforms I can possibly use on the site. I know mellowads.com is a site that I used back in 2015 and I've seen some people running the JSE coin miner on the blog (which I don't think is possible, but it's worth looking into).

Finally, I've started checking out a few crypto games, but I need to start playing more crypto games and messing around with more crypto dapps. I want my blog to be crypto related, but am thinking about reviewing and discussing dapps a niche of my blog. This is going to take some time as I want to get a decent amount of playing time in before I actually right my guide/review and that will take some more time.

Moving Forward what this Means

I hope I am able to upgrade my blog so that I have my own domain and hosting with more customization options. If I can start getting a few payouts from my blog in a bear market, I might just get a foundation down for something that can be really fun and profitable, in the future, during the next bull run. I don't think I will ever get to "full time" status and be able to quit my job, but it would be fun if I can make enough money to buy some toys to play with.

If I am able to make some money on the blog, I think my first purchase is going to be a rasberry buy and some crypto that I can stake. I currently don't have the ability to leave a computer running reliably for 24/7 so if I can set-up a pi that could stake for me then that would be amazing. Part of doing that would also allow me to write some how-tos on setting up a raspberry pi for staking and may also allow for some income through affiliate marketing or use Amazon affiliates program.

I would also like to set-up a mining rig where I don't have to worry about energy costs. It may not be the smartest move setting up a mining rig, and not worrying about that, but it would be a fun experience to buy, set-up, and run a mining rig for "free" for a few months or years using profits from the blog. If it wasn't profitable to do this then I could easily only run it for a few months and then resell all the parts hoping that the profit from the blog articles I could write would help offset the cost.

I know I wouldn't be the first person to write about some of these topics, but what I would get most out of doing this is fulfillment in helping people out in the crypto community, creating value for myself and others, and hopefully finding and building new relationships that will help me along the way.

It feels awesome to be able to blog again and to be creating something that could have real long term value for me. I've been wanting to blog again but was just looking for a cheap way to start and thanks to @engrave for the platform and @themarkymark for the contest I got the motivation to get started and creating something that has been a long time coming. I'm definitely nowhere near being complete but will be spending the next few weeks putting together some goals and a todo list to start chipping away on for the remainder of the year.