Thomas W.P. Slatin

Someone told me recently that you could start a blog, register it along with a dot com for $30, and make $20 profit on the same day.  I wish I could remember who told me this and where they heard it from because in all honesty, the whole concept is so completely far from reality, it’s almost asinine.

First of all, I run my blog as part of my business.  A blog, like any business has expenses to start it up and other ongoing expenses that keep it running.  I’m not trying to brag, but I have been doing websites for a little over 10 years now and never in my experience have I heard of anyone profiting in any business venture, let alone a blog, on day one.  Setting up a blog or website development business takes money.  Big time money.  First, you need a computer, broadband Internet access, software, etc.  The list goes on and on.

I run a big website / blog and do consulting work, website development, writing, and photography on the side.  In the early days of my business, it took me almost two years of maintaining a website to make a profit.  Remember, a profit only happens after you have paid off your start-up expenses and all of your ongoing expenses are all paid up.  It took me a couple of months to make $20 through advertising back in 1998; have times changed so much that in 2008 you can make a $20 profit in 24 hours?  A $20 profit would mean that you really made $50 worth of advertising revenue on your first day.  Impossible.

A blog is more than just a dot com.  You need to have legendary content, good people skills, website traffic that increases monthly and hardly ever decreases, and luck, lots of luck.  A blog or website isn’t done overnight, either.  It took me years to get to where I am now, and all of the work could be lost forever if I stepped away from the blogging scene for too long.  A blog not only takes a lot of time and content to create, it takes a lot of time and new one-of-a-kind content to keep it going.

Anyone who tells you that a blog brings in income overnight or on a regular basis without any intervention on your part is full of shit.  Sure, there are checks to be signed and cashed (eventually), but you don’t get paid or even remotely profit for at least the first 3 to 6 months of very long hours of work and dedication towards creating and maintaining content.

If anyone can prove to me otherwise, I’d be really interested in seeing just how it was all possible.

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Originally uploaded by Thomas W.P. Slatin Photography

testing the camera phone to blog setup…

As a freelance writer, I tell a lot of stories.  Many of the stories I tell are about my life, because as far as writing goes, they are the ones that require the least amount of research.  Also, the accuracy can’t be beat as I was the one who had the experiences, and I’m not writing the story through someone else’s eyes.

I was talking to someone at a bookstore the other day.  Angie and I went in to look at the books that were marked down to clearance prices.  We decided upon two books, both of which retailed for about $40 US, but were marked down to the unbelievable price of $5.99!  One of the two books happened to be a complete collection of poetry and writing by Alan Ginsberg, the other, a complete compilation of works by Edgar Allen Poe.  Sadly, poetry and the arts in general are underappreciated in this country, especially among young people like myself and Angie.  The cashier asked what made us decide to buy these particular books.

I explained to the cashier at the store that as a younger man, I had met Alan Ginsberg.  She looked down as the cash register in disbelief as if to say that I was lying.  But the fact of the matter remains that I didn’t just meet Alan Ginsberg on one occasion, I knew him personally as a friend of the family.  If the layperson isn’t going to believe me when I say that I’ve met someone famous who changed the world through their written word, they’re never going to believe me when I tell them that I knew someone of the same accomplishments.  But I did.  It didn’t matter; she would never believe it in a million years.

Believe it or not, it doesn’t stop there.  I also knew Charles Kuralt, the host of CBS’ Sunday Morning.  He lived directly across the street from me when I lived in New York City.  He would even stop in from time to time for a drink with my father after the morning show.  I remember him being a very nice friendly person who had a million stories to tell and no one to tell them to.  On his show, he would talk about the flowers and the garden in his neighborhood; he was of course, referring to the garden my mom had planted in front of our house, or at least that is what he told me when he came to sit and talk with my dad for hours at a time.

I can remember one time when I was just 7 or 8 years old going into a very fancy hotel ballroom with beautiful polished floors, walls, and columns made of marble.  It was nothing but very wealthy business men in suits enjoying cocktails and eating little hordurves on silver trays that were carried by young men in white tuxedos.  I felt really out of place going in there, especially when a very tall man at the door announced my fathers entrance… "we welcome to the club a Dr. Harvey Slatin."

Some years later, The New Yorker Magazine called us for an interview.  They asked about our personal relationships with well known celebrities (apparently, my father knew many famous people, the likes of which include Woody Allen and Harry Belafonte).  I’m sure he knows many more influential and interesting people and celebrities.  My father ("Arnold") took precedence in the article as the main character, told by a nosy writer who used to occupy an apartment with a window that shared the courtyard behind our house.  My old house had huge floor-to ceiling sliding glass doors in the back, so apparently this lady got a really good view of all the action.  According to the article, the writer used to watch my father out of her apartment window; I’m not exactly sure why she did, but she apparently got a tremendous amount of entertainment from doing so.  His late wife (Yeffe Kimball) is mentioned as always being gone on trips and towards the middle of the article, my mom is mentioned, and then of course, me.

Again, sadly, the names were all changed to protect our identity, and I’m a little sad because I would have really enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame, and some added traffic to my blog.  Add that to the fact that nobody I know believes any of this, but believe me, it’s true.

Can you believe they actually changed my dads name from Harvey to Arnold?

The following are photos from a recent trip to the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, VA.  These photos can also be found on Flickr by going here.

I’m really starting to get into this whole state tour, but in all reality, my biggest ambition is to travel the world.  Not sure how taking photos at international border crossings would be tolerated, but traveling the world is something I want to do some day.

By the way, very loving thanks to Angie for taking these wonderful photos at the South Carolina welcome center along I-95 North!

Yay!  Angie and I made it to Georgia!  By the way, there are lots more states we’ve traveled to in the USA.  Just check out the 50-state tour (an ongoing project).

On the first day of our road trip "Down South", Angie and I stopped at a curious little place called "South Of The Border".  We spotted huge billboards along I-95 advertising the place, and after spotting well over 100 of them, we knew we just had to check it out.  Needless to say, upon our arrival, we found a photographers paradise.  The following photos are not to be missed!  By the way, they also have a website.

This is a skate park in the City of Oneonta, New York.
Click the image to view the gallery.

It’s kind of ironic that when I was in grade school, I absolutely hated reading because what I whenever I was assigned a book to read, it always turned out to be a boring one.  Quite a difference high school and college made because during that particular time, I always had a book in front of my face.  I would either be reading a book for class (college books are far more interesting than those assigned as reading in high school), or writing in a notebook.

I’m very messy and unless it has something to do with my business or blog empire, I tend to misplace things.  Suffice to say that many of the books I read, and many of the notebooks filled with very important ideas and information have gone missing some ten or more years ago.  Sadly, I have no idea where they went; they’re either in storage, or got thrown away, or someone stole them.  In all likelihood, they’re at my parents house buried in a closet filled with my old belongings.

Thanks to the Internet, I am now more organized and neat than ever before; on the Internet, that is.  Accordingly, I have decided to review some of the books I’ve read lately, as a new section for my blog.  Believe it or not, everybody is a critic on some level, no matter how small.  If you don’t believe me, check out Amazon.com, where people have gone to the point of becoming almost obsessed with reviewing products.  Everything (or almost everything) on Amazon.com has a review, and it doesn’t matter how small or insignificant, or pointless a product is; the fact is that if someone bought it, they’ve likely come back to review it.