I've been a blogger ever since blogging became a 'thing'. From about 2002 - 2005 I was on blogspot, from 2005 - 2009 I was on Livejournal, and after 2009 I was on Facebook. Now I'm on all 3. After I left blogspot in 2005 because I wanted more control over who read my blog - and Livejournal offered many options for privacy - I didn't tinker around with blogspot for a while.
Between 2006 and 2011 I worked for What a Bargain, a brick-and-mortar local store trying to make some money on ebay. I learned a LOT about ebay during those years, and decided that one day I would love to be a Trading Assistant and put random people's things up on ebay. I shelved that idea once I became a busy mother of children, although it's still something I plan do once my children are older, IY"H.
When I was bored of just putting things up on ebay and answering inquiries, I decided to try my hand a little at marketing for What A Bargain. I opened a facebook page and placed facebook ads. It cost me a few pennies and I have no idea if it panned out. My second idea was to open a blog - Bargain Ebay - where I simply copied and pasted some of the ebay listings, figuring if someone did a google search for a certain item they might stumble across it on blogger. It turned out to be tedious and I dropped it. (One of the pluses of having a blog like that in conjunction with your ebay account is that if you put a 'linkback' at the end of the links of your items - i believe the link is "?refid=store, the storeowner makes a little commission off every sale. This was my first intro into the world of affiliate marketing.) But just when I started the blog - in 2007 - Google Ads had been launched and I knew very little about it but was curious what would happen if I would put up google ads. Back then, starting a Google Adsense account and putting the code into the blog was very clumsy and cumbersome and the earnings weren't that great either; I didn't think I would make much money from it. But I did it anyway - what did I stand to lose, really?
