Day One - Why I Set Up This Blog

This is day one and what a nightmare it has been! I need to give you all some background first so you will know how I got here. I’ll be light on detail as I don’t want to be identified, but I promise to be totally honest.
My name is Mike and I’m in my late forties and married with two kids. We live in Europe. I went to a good school and had a great career for many years working for other people. Ten years ago I took the plunge and went into business on my own. We’ve had nine great years, with good income and a decent lifestyle. During that time we put our money into property and we own our own home and another place we rent out. Both have big mortgages. This year started OK, but steadily got worse as the recession bit. Business was poor anyway, then the banks got cold feet and greatly reduced our funding, which left us with no money at all. The past few weeks have been a nightmare, first we had to scrape all our money together to reduce our debt to a level the bank were happy with, then we lost client after client. We’ve had to lose most of our staff and my wife and I have had to take up the slack. As well as working really hard, we’ve had to deal constantly with the problems of having no money, which takes so much time and energy. We’ve both lost lots of weight, but we’ve managed to keep feeding the kids.

Today I had another meeting with the bank, and got a stay of execution on the second mortgage until 7th January. We have some money due in that’s now three weeks late, but I hope it will be here tomorrow, if not I despair about Christmas. Today we are at rock bottom.

I’ve been reading about blogs for ages and I love writing, so I figured maybe it’s time to combine my love with a chance to make some money. My hope is that I can learn to write a really interestig blog that will appeal to people enough to get them coming to the site every day. If I place Adwords on the site, I know I can earn some money, and I will also set up a paypal link so people can donate if they enjoy reading this.

For you, my readers, I hope you can gain by learning how I’ve set up this blog, and learn from the mistakes I am sure to make, and learn from the successes I hope to have. I will post every day for a year, I will tell you about my life and I will tell you what I have done to the blog today and how much I have earned. I think it will be an interesting journey, and I hope you will join me on it and tell your friends to come and look too. Please comment and let me know what you think, and feel free to offer advice.
In terms of the blog today, I have simply created this on Servage, made some basic changes to the pages and written this first post. There is much work to do - I need to set up the ads, start to look at SEO, put on the Paypal link and tidy the menus up. But that will have to wait until tomorrow as it’s now 11.00 PM and I’m so very tired and these days bed is a sanctuary. Until tomorrow, and thanks for reading this.

Update: Reading these early posts seven months later can be a little depressing, but they accurately reflect what was happening in our lives at the time. Now, thank goodness, things are much better, and the links below will give you a flavor of how this blog has so dramatically changed my life:

1/ Lifestyle benefits of being a blogger

2/ What happens when you guest post on John Chow?

3/ How to get your partner on board with your blogging