You need health insurance. You don’t know when all of a sudden you’re going to come down with something and the doctors are going to tell you that you need an operation that’s going to cost anywhere from $8000 - $12000. Here’s another ugly reality of poverty, not being able to afford to make a choice between life and death if it comes down to it. If it’s discovered that you have cancer for example, and you have no health coverage and can’t afford to pay out of pocket for your treatment what do you suppose is going to happen to you?

The health insurance subject has come up in my life a number of times in the past and has been dismissed as being too tedious, too difficult to understand, too much money, too much this and too much that. Now I am facing exactly such a scenario. No health insurance and needing an operation that will cost anywhere from $8000 - $12000. Health insurance is important. Cancel the Netflix and Match.com accounts if you have to. Get health insurance. Take your life seriously. Stop taking things for granted.

Begin now by searching for health insurance for the self-employed Get health coverage for yourself and your family now because you never know when one of you is going to need it.

I have an appointment today with a vocational rehabilitation program to see if I can qualify to get a reduction on what it’s going to cost me to get the operation I need. Once I return home I will begin the process of educating myself about health insurance so that I can secure coverage for myself and my family.

One of the reasons I haven’t tried to get coverage is because I’ve assume there is no legitimate health insurance for people who work for themselves. I’ve made that assumption while not really fully understanding how health insurance even works. I just figured, you work for yourself, people are going to be looking to try to rip you off by selling you worthless policies. You won’t be able to find a doctor anywhere within 20 miles of where you live who has even heard of the company issuing the policy.

Maybe a few years ago this was true, but by now, with so many more people working for themselves, it can’t be the case that the self-employed don’t have any options for getting affordable health care from reputable health insurance companies.

It is highly irresponsible of me not to educate myself so that I understand how health insurance works first of all so that I can know what to look for and how to choose the right company and the right policy.

Todays moneyless life thought of the day: Being poor is bad enough. Don’t be stupid on top of it.

It seems Carlos Slim Helu, declared by Forbes back in March to be the 2nd richest person in the world, has overtaken Bill Gates to become the unofficial richest man in the world; this according to published reports. The Mexican tycoon is said to now be worth $67.8 billion. Bill Gates, as or April 2007, was said to be worth roughly $56 billion. The estimate of Carlos Slim’s net worth comes from a respected financial news site in Mexico which attributes the increase from April’s estimate of $53.1 billion to a 27 percent surge in the stock price of Slim’s wireless company, America Movil, in the second quarter.

Neither Bill Gates, nor Carlos Slim Helu appear too concerned with holding the title of world’s richest man. Gates has apparently expressed in the past that he wishes he wasn’t the world’s richest man because nothing good comes out of it; and Helu is said to have told foreign correspondents: "I don’t know if I’m No. 1, No. 20, or No. 2,000. It doesn’t matter."

I will admit that I am not among the 1% of bloggers who are making enough money blogging that they can rely on that income alone to pay their bills. I started in the blogging business about a year ago. Prior to that I was trying my hand at running membership based websites (dating and model portfolio hosting); and prior to that I was developing and selling software, including the dating software and modeling agency management software programs I was using on my own websites. I decided to get out of the software development and sales business because things had started to become overwhelming and I simply couldn’t handle the stress. As for the dating businesses and the modeling portfolio hosting business, I simply didn’t have the funds to invest and couldn’t establish a competitive presence so I sold them; and now I am maintaining a handful of blog sites with the goal being to make enough money via the blogs to pay my bills and maybe get some furniture after 2 years sleeping on an air bed and having no couch to sit on.

So far I am not having tremendous luck with the blog sites. The main problem is that I am not getting much traffic. At one point I had started to see an increase in traffic on a number of my sites, and the traffic increase had begun to translate into an increase in earnings (I use adsense currently. I’ve tried adbrite but I didn’t care for the lack of options, and I haven’t looked into the other programs available). But then Google penalized me when I made the mistake of creating a duplicate of one of my sites. I had networked my sites by interlinking them, so all of my sites got dropped as a result of creating that duplicate website. I had created the duplicate site because the domain name of the original site was somewhat offensive so I decided to buy a new domain and try to build up the new domain then close the original domain once the new domain had obtained a page rank. I had not known at the time that if you create duplicates of a website, Google sees it as you trying to cheat the system and drops you from their index. I suppose I ought to be thankful that they only dropped me to the bottom of the index as opposed to kicking me out completely; but a year of hard work to bring my sites from getting 0 - 10 visits per day to getting 100 - 1000 visits per day instantly went down the drain, and 1000 visits wasn’t nearly enough to realistically expect to live off Google Adsense income. My adsense income range from January to July looks as shown in the graph below with the figure range set from $0 - $140.

Clearly I am not a blogging success story. But I haven’t quite decided to give up yet, though I am looking for more reliable ways to make money in the meantime.

So, back to the original question, can you make money blogging? Well, yeah, you can. People do; but the likelihood of you being able to make enough money to pay your bills is very small. You need to be running a very popular blog to have any hope of pulling a 5-figure monthly income from blogging. Even a 4-figure monthly income is tough to pull off. You might be able to pull off a 3-figure monthly income but the 3 figures are likely to look more like 100 than 999, which isn’t to say you shouldn’t make the venture into the blogging arena. You might have what it takes to get into that 1% of blogger success stories. You never know.

While you try to figure it out, here are some useful articles about blogging for profit.

Can Bloggers Make Money? - April 19, 2006 - an open discussion between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler on the subject of blogging and whether or not blogging can become a viable means of income for the average person.

How to make money from your blog: 5 tips - Jeff Wuorio writes a piece for Microsoft Small Business sharing 5 strategies that could turn your blog into a moneymaker

How to make money from your blog - Steve Pavlina, who as of October 29th 2006 was reportedly making $1000 per day from his blog, shares some ideas for how you too can make money blogging. But be aware that Steve maintains you need to be smart to have a chance. He writes "while most people can’t make a living this way [blogging], I would say that most smart people can." So are you smart? Well, again according to Pavlina, "Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t."

How bloggers make money from blogs - this piece by problogger.net lists the ways in which you can make money from your blog. There are many avenues via which a blogger can seek to monetize a blog. Adsense is probably the most common but by no means the only option for monetizing your blog.