I recently downloaded and read John Chow dot Com's free Make Money Online e-book (which you can get, too, just for signing up for his newsletter. John makes more money in one month, just from his blog, than I make in an entire year at my full time job. And he doesn't keep any secrets. He'll tell you exactly how much money he makes, and the e-book tells you how he does it. After reading it, and then this recent Chicken Soup story, I'm ready to do something to change my life. As outside-of-home, work-for-the-man type jobs go, mine is not bad. But do I love it? Is it what I want to do for the rest of my life? No way. I want freedom. I want to work the hours I want, and to not work when I don't feel like it. I want to sleep in; no, scratch that. I want to get up as early as I do now, but I want to want to get up. I want to work in my underwear... or not. 
I'm not going to do everything exactly the same way that John does it, but I am certainly taking some of his most important advice. The first thing I have to do is set goals. My first goal is to make $100 online this month. It may not all be from my blog; it may come from other internet ventures as well. I will of course keep you all posted on everything I am doing.
It's time to clean up those sidebars, so you'll be seeing some changes over the next few days. Fortunately, MyBlogLog's stat tracking helps me to figure out what is grabbing your interest, and what isn't. The Netflix queue? No one clicks on that. Ever. It's not particularly useful to anyone to see what movies I'll soon be renting, especially when I'm so behind the current releases, so that is going. People do click on the links in the linkworthy section, which is just items I've shared through Google Reader, but I think I can generate more interest, as well as more content, by posting those items as individual blog posts as I find them, instead of summarizing them days or even weeks later when I have finally collected five of them. It might be easier for me to remember what it is I wanted to say about them as well. So as soon as I've had a chance to summarize the new items there that I haven't written about yet, that will be disappearing as well. I will probably also trim down the MyBlogLog widget (who's been here) to show a smaller number of recent visitors, as no one really clicks on that either, but I still want to keep its stat tracking functionality. All of that should help to make some room for more useful, and income-generating, links and widgets.
Aside from the typical methods of monetizing a blog via various ad networks, I have some other ideas up my sleeve. Web site reviews, web design services, all things on which I will go into more detail later on.
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