Business and Society Articles

Maybe this is a perspective only older people can relate to.  When I was in high school in the mid-90s, I used a typewriter to accomplish my essay assignments that needed to be typed. This really wasn’t that long ago, yet how things have changed. Part of this change is people’s perspectives when it comes to being entitled to write online. Not only do they now expect to be published on sites like Medium, but also make money. And if the money isn’t enough for them to make a living they are critical of the entire platform, like it owes them something. I realize writers need to make money to live, so write a book or submit articles to magazines and other paying publications. Sign a book deal with a publishing house or self-publish, etc. There are so many different ways to make money writing now; the difficult part is everyone else is doing it too, which makes it hard to stand out and find an audience. Even on Medium, the competition is thick with so many different types of people tryin...

I remember one distinct moment during a career development course at a community college I attended 21 years ago when the professor asked us to stand up and do an exercise.  She asked the class to separate themselves into two groups; those who thought of themselves as leaders on one side of the classroom and those who thought of themselves as followers on the other.  This question came without warning at the beginning of the class, so we didn’t have time to think it through. The result was probably more sincere because of this suddenness.  For some context, the class consisted of about 30 students, mostly young adults under 21 YOA; I was about 21 years old. An interesting thing happened.  An Important Life Lesson in Social Perception The vast majority of the class went to the leader side of the class and only two of us went to the follower side. I was one of the followers along with another young man. How awkward; then the professor focused on us followers and ask...

It was an experiment I didn’t mean to happen. When I first published the article back in 2018, the Medium Partner Program was open to everyone despite their following status. All you had to do was sign up for it with Stripe, which I did, earning my pennies every month while not paying too much attention to it.  Only recently have I rediscovered Medium and noticed one of my articles actually did pretty well just sitting here without much love from me. Here it is: A Guide to Winter Fishing on the Oregon Coast And why wouldn’t it when it has such a fetching picture — that is a huge fish! And the pipe is a nice touch, very authentic.  Actually, this is a piece I wrote for a client that was rejected. In hindsight, I’m grateful to have this article/guide as my own. If you read it you’ll see I put a lot of work into it, especially considering I didn’t know a lot about fishing in the winter on the Oregon Coast (I can barely catch a fish in a stocked pond).  At this point you may ...

First off, I want to congratulate everyone who has more than 48 followers on this quality writing site, and I want to encourage those with less to not worry, within only a few years of hard work, you too can achieve this milestone of success. Well, in reality, it wasn’t hard work, but the time that elapsed before I achieved the nearly 50 club is sort of a wonder. I hope it doesn’t take me until I turn 50 years old before I reach 100 (only 7 years away!). At the rate I’ve been going, earning 48 followers in 4.5 years, I’ll just make the 100 club before I turn 50 — that is, if I’m still alive, the world is still intact, and Medium is still a thing. Of course, I’m praying for all those things to be set in place for this to happen. Starting before many of the younger users here were still in high school (maybe junior high, wow), I began my journey on Medium (August 9, 2018) with an article about HubSpot — not a bad piece, yet I didn’t use the canonical link thing and it was originally on m...

Thinking back to 2014 I remember this exciting website that hit the scene called Bubblews. The theme was atrocious and the type of writing was mostly inane, yet the video game atmosphere and hopes of making cash drew many people into its playful bubble. It didn’t take me long to catch on to the most exciting money-making endeavor for online writers, although it did seem like I was late to the party considering how rapidly everyone moved up in social status with every view, star (like), and comment being compensated for payment through PayPal. Bubblews originally hit the scene in beta mode in 2012, which is why I probably felt a bit late coming to the scene in late 2014. They didn’t officially launch until July 16, 2014, according to Business Wire . The founders were 26-year-olds Arvind Dixit and Jason Zuccari who moved to San Francisco to launch the grand idea. To be fair, this was during an early time with internet adoption, only a couple of years after smartphones became ubiquitous ...

  With the internet changing so rapidly, being stuck in time with an archaic blog and writing to the obscure winds of vacant space within its outdated theme seems to be an exercise in futility at times. Yes, I can syndicate the content to places like Medium, yet what is the point of pointing them back to my blog anyway, and won’t that ruin the chances of the Medium article being indexed if by chance the site thought it worthy? All of these thoughts and more run through the mind of the old blogger. The crux of the issue has always been strategy and the lack thereof. Honestly, the majority of my writing efforts online have been committed to the strategy and technical aspects of blog design, building, and formatting. What a waste to spend the majority of my writing time trying to face the huge and ever-changing learning curve of building a blog and creating an online writing strategy. The importance of having a strategy of some sort is vital, yet in the back of my blogging mind, there...

  What started in 2012 has become a reality in 2022, yet the reality isn’t quite what I had in mind. Writing is what started, originally for a website called  All Voices , which was a citizen journalist site working from a revenue-sharing model (is no longer around). This was very exciting to me at the time, an ambitious writer in his early 30s, a person who had been internet starved throughout his twenties and early thirties and now had access to the online world — the world was awaiting my opinions, so I hoped. The reality ten years later is what could be called a scrambled blogger or a scatterbrained writer, forlorn in the shadows of obscurity and lost in the wide efforts of his ambition. The whole “eggs in the basket” idea has turned into ashes in the woodstove, as little efforts spent far and wide equal little payoffs in the proverbial basket. It’s not even the stretched-too-thin problem that has rendered my efforts nearly penniless, it is the lost ambition to write and t...