Welcome and Welcome Back!

Many of you will read this and say “wow – John is blogging again!”. Truth be told, I’ve been blogging all along – just not here on jtpratt.com. It’s been about 10 weeks since I last worked on this blog, approved comments, or wrote a post. I’ve been asked before why I don’t include date and time on my posts, and the main reason is – if I want to take 10 weeks off I can and my blog won’t look dated (to new visitors). Those of you that have been subscribers for a long time in your RSS readers know that I haven’t posted in forever though. THANK YOU – to those loyal readers that haven’t removed me from your readers yet! I also want to say WELCOME to all the new people, since I’ve been gone it looks like I’ve picked up almost 200 new RSS subscribers (w00t)!

What I’ve Been Up To

A lot has transpired in the last few months. Even thought I’m pretty much a full time blogger, I’ve had a day job for the last 10 years as a Webmaster. I worked at one of the Big 3 auto companies in Detroit. If you’ve been following the news in the U.S – then you know all about the auto company bailouts and how many people have been let go and laid off from auto companies and suppliers in the last few years. Back in the beginning of December I was told that my job would be ending at the end of December 2008. It actually ended the first week of January, 2009. I was an “agency” person (or contractor) – so I went back to my home company on “the bench” for about a month, but with all the layoffs there were a couple hundred of us without assignments. After a month there, I was let go – or should I say we were all “mass fired” due to these “hard economic times”.

Even though I have been blogging a few years now the money I make is not enough to replace my day job income (or my benefits). As I’ve stated a hundred times, you can’t just start working online and make money overnight. You can (over time) build up a stable income that will provide you with checks month after month. I do know that now (more than ever) I need to focus my goals on building up my online business and working each and every day on tangible things that produce results and make money. It’s not hard to waste time online with too many activities that don’t actually make money.

What’s to Come…

There have been a lot of things that have compounded my predicament, such as one of our vehicles having mechanical failure, or our other (main) vehicle being rear-ended (and totaled) in an accident. This has meant that instead of blogging and working online I’ve had to worry about getting new transportation and many other things that go hand in hand with the trials and tribulations of life.

As always – this blog with be a candid detail of my online work, my successes and failures, and how you can put these lessons to work for yourself (learning from my mistakes). Presently I seem to have more than 200 comments awaiting approval, and there are some older pages that desperately need re-writing, something that has recently been brought to my attention by a few people. Don’t worry, it definitely won’t be as long this time for you to hear from me again….what have YOU been up to the last 10 weeks?