Well all of my friends laugh at me now. They all say “I can’t believe you turned blogging into a full time position.” They’re just jealous. They wish they had done what I told them over a year ago.

Now I wake up, work from home, and get paid a decent salary. I can work in my underwear. I can walk the dog. I can do almost anything I want. Something to be said about not having to deal with the rat race…and it’s only my first day.

My last day of “real work” was on Friday. Very stressful quitting a job of 14 years. But I know I made the right decision.

Well after 14 years at my current company, I have resigned as Network Administrator. It’s a bitter sweet thing. I’m glad to be out of the “negative” environment, but there are a few people I will miss.

I am looking forward to an exciting change. I will be working from home. I will be blogging full time now. I’m a little concerned about the future because I left my 14 year safety net. But things should be ok. I’m a lot more employable than I was two years ago.

The longer I work online, the more I realize how many opportunities there are for bloggers like me. There’s always finding conulting gigs on elance, scriptlance, rent a coder, craigslist, etc.

You can always use the multi-user version of WordPress and build a blog network. Also, you can make quite a bit of money blogging and using Adsense.

The other great things about blogs, is everyone has heard of them, but are not really sure what they are. Corporations are suddenly seeing how valuable they can be. Only like 2% of corporations are using blogs.

That leaves guys like me a ton of prospects. I think I’ll stick with blogs until the bubble bursts. Who knows how long that will be, but I know I’ll clean up in the meantime.

The last year or so has been an incredible learning experience. I’ve been living and breathing blogging and internet martketing. My wife thinks I’m a dork cuz I’m constantly listening to podcasts on internet marketing and strategies.

I also have a ton of blogs on the subject being fed into my Thunderbird via RSS. I read a ton every day. Not to mention I belong to the forums where all of the major players hang out and I read those every day. Nothing’s getting past me. I even have Google and Yahoo news being spoon fed to me.

I also have started attending conferences in the industry. I just got back from Ad Tech in Chicago and am hoping to go to Webmaster World Pub Con in Vegas at the end of the year. That’s the thing that blows my mind, is how much information you can get from people by just networking. Forums are great, etc. but belly up to the bar with someone and you’d be surprised what secrets they tell you.

So I’m hoping the next year to be as lucrative as the last. And I hope to learn as much as I have in the last year, hopefully my head won’t explode.

This is a site I created from a photoshop template for my weblog business. I’m not trying to take credit for the design, but I did modify all of the graphics and HTML.

I went to templatesbox and downloaded one of their photoshop templates and customized everything. I was mainly just curious to see how tough it would be. It wasn’t too bad, but I still think I’m better off creating my own sites. Go ahead and check out tf-Media to see how it turned out.

This site was a final project for school. The project was to create a 20 page website with nothing but photoshop and notepad. I got an A of course! It is a site designed to showcase my graphic design and web development skills. This site uses textual navigation. This page includes graphics, HTML and JavaScript.

This was a very early incarnation of the site you are on now. But now I’ve moved away from the static pages and I’ve added a blog.

An educational website built for Growth Strategies. This site is very clean and simple. It has a small textual navigation. This site teaches on line classes to the general public. I did some flash banners, logos, graphics, and design work on this site. You can visit the Growth Strategies website to view work.

I also did some audio and video work. We compressed some giant videos and made them work on the internet. I did a few flash animations and banners as well as technical support for this site.

This is one of the very first websites I ever built. Back in the day, I was a complete music junky. So I built this website to house my list of collectible music.

This site uses a drop down navigation bar and a ton of links. The coolest thing about this site was the Cover Art FTP site. Very useful. This site needs to be visited to see the full effect.

I’m not doing any trading lately, but I still keep it around because it’s a useful resource for setlists, etc. I still get people bugging me all the time to trade.

This is a website that I built using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. This site features downloadable WordPress header images. It includes Javascript as well as textual navigation. This site is being monetized by Yahoo! Publisher Network and includes a sitemeter. Please visit the Header Art website to view the functionality.

I am proud of the work I have done on this site. It is definately a work in progress, I have a ton of more headers to ad, but who has the time?

Well, I did it. I finally took the Adwords Certified Professional test today. I was convinced I would fail, because it was very tough. Lots of stuff to learn. I studied for weeks, and still wasn’t confident.

You need 75% to pass and I got 83%. I feel I did pretty well. I get a nice little logo to put on my websites, business cards and resume. Not to mention Google has marketing material to get clients. How cool is that?

I already have 3 individuals who want me to manage their advertising campaigns. Now I can charge “professional” rates. The best part is I can be confident that I have a complete understanding of Adwords and that my own campaigns are optimized as well as possible.

Check back in few days, I’ll be proudly displaying my Google Adwords Certified Professional logo on this site!