Humble beginnings... or is it considered wallowing?

Over the past several days, I have decided to take my career in a different direction. I have decided to become an online marketer and entrepreneur. No boss, no bullshit, and no boundaries. This blog is a testament to my efforts, and a journal of sorts. It is also a guide to others, but more on that later. I am an instructional aide in a high school completion course, and an in-home tutor for middle and high school students. I love my jobs, but like many positions in education, it's seasonal, doesn’t pay exceptionally well, and can be exhausting. More urgently speaking they are seasonal, which means I have to find something fast.
During the Summer of '08 I worked as a quality control supervisor at a food processing plant. Never again I am vowing, but only if I can help it. I am sure I have been blacklisted anyway. The company fired me after I fractured my foot on the job which is, if you haven’t been through the process personally, a long and grueling process that can eat up hours of time is an emotionally draining struggle. It sometimes results in getting a check for lost wages 15 months down the road, or being rehired, but usually amounts to a complete waste of time. It is not a hell of a lot of fun, but it could not be any worse than the job was. I opted to let my wrongful termination case go, since I did not really want my job back anyway. I had a brief (5 ½ hour) career as a dishwasher, lived off my savings from the cannery, and joined the high school programs department at CCC in the fall. I love working with students, and I may decide to continue in education. But that is no excuse not to be making money on the side, since I would undoubtedly need it if I stay in education.
Over the past year, I have made repeated efforts to find ways to make money online. What began as a semi-serious, half-assed, gullible effort to find a way to get started with no money down evolved into a more thorough effort over time. Instead of just pursuing get rich quick strategies I started investigating work-at-home jobs, online marketing, Forex trading, affiliate marketing, Google adwords, web design and squeeze pages, eBay, social networking and professional online services, and hoards of digital products. I want something that I can do from anywhere so that I have the flexibility to pursue marketing consulting and study for the real estate license exam. I am currently working on a marketing campaign for a real estate agent who is also seasonally hired at CCC. I will be spending a lot of time writing about professional online marketing and exploring a variety of services and guides. I hope to separate the wheat from the chaff, and stimulate input from professionals in a variety of fields who have been successful in using the web to increase their visibility and sales.
With unemployment for the next three months looming, I have to make a move. I don’t mind the pressure. The pressure keeps me honest and focused. When you don’t have a minute to lose, you don’t lose a minute. Well, I try not to lose too many of them anyway. Many business experts say the most precious resource a business owner has is time. The take-away lesson from that axiom is that working smarter, not harder, is the key to making any venture work.
This brings me back to my purpose in creating this blog. I want to help everyone work smarter by benefitting from everything I learn. While my commentary may be extensive, I will include a summary at the end of each post to give readers easy access to links and summarize the highlights. With the specter of unemployment cracking the whip behind me, and the agonizing stress and monotony of the cannery fresh in my mind from last Summer, I am going to attempt what millions of other would-be online entrepreneurs hope to achieve: obtain financial independence and security using the internet. If a particular strategy works, I will let you know. If it is a crock, I will let you know that too. Either way, I will be cataloguing my research, successes, failures, and strategies. I welcome comments, questions, testimonials, and especially corrections and additional resources. If I’m wrong, or if there is a better answer, I want to know and everyone who subscribes to this blog wants to know as well. Keep in mind that blogging is a process of constant revision and refinement, .a perpetual work-in-progress, and I will be taking time to make information as accessible and easy to navigate as possible. If my dead-end spurs a reader to share a useable alternative, I’ll verify it myself and include it in my posts (while giving credit to the inventive reader who shares it with us of course!). My hope is that people with real knowledge and real results will help make this blog even better. Let’s work together. Help me make the internet a safer, more lucrative place for everyone. Information is everywhere. We have the power as individuals to make use of it and create our own opportunities, and not let life take us by the you-know-whats.
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Earlier I promised a guide, and I fully intend to deliver. The next post will cover my work over the past few weeks, and I'll begin to create not only this blog, but an entire personal business that is completely connected and extremely visible. You can watch step by step as I walk you through setting up Blogs, Twitter, Myspace, placing ads on Craigslist, linking various resources through Google, and reviewing different ways that people make money online. Please feel free to offer suggestions and add to the list of reputable resources and revolutionary ways of doing business.

To Your Success,



Todd. A. Bjarnson