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BLOG REVAMP

Despite being a self-confessed skeptic of The Secret and its rumblings, I have to admit that starting this blog has had a strangely positive effect on my life. Opportunities have appeared where I wasn’t expecting them, and I’m in the unfamiliar position of having to decide between several work options, a couple of them only distant cousins of TEFL. The only cloud on the horizon is my overpowering proclivity towards procrastination, and the very real danger that my blog turn into just another, slightly more sophisticated form of frenetic dilly dallying.

With this fear at the back of my mind, I have resolved to remove most of the third-party functionality and widgets from the Graveyard, the searching out and finding of which have already cost me too many precious hours of my finite lifespan, and which I feel are the principal risk to my new-found productivity.

Also banished is Google Adsense, which frankly made no sense. When resolving to include advertising, I was only too aware of the possibility that, as the ads are tailored to the content of the blog, the kind of tongue-in-cheek brickbats I set forth on TEFL are unlikely to persuade many visitors to do one of the TEFL courses that I am wont to advertise. Added to that, many of the ads are for funeral services and online tributes to the deceased which a computer algorithm might find relevant to my content, but I do not, with no disrespect to online embalmers or virtual funeral parlours and their ilk. I must confess that I was a victim of greed, having read a post by Personal Development guru Steve Pavlina, who claims that his blog earns him a thousand US dollars a day. That supposes that you have something marketable to say, I guess. So far, in just over three months, the TEFL Graveyard has generated income of $1.68, a figure that crushes my early enthusiasm that blogging could be a fun alternative to TEFL.

Recently, in an expletive-strewn pep talk, my wife Show made an interesting observation, the gist of which was that if I spent a fraction of the time and energy that I spend on fool-headed attempts to escape TEFL on actually dedicating myself to it, I might actually manage to earn a decent salary and thus start moving from our paw-to-kisser existence living with her parents to a life any newly-married nineteen year olds would expect as the minimum so as not to divorce within six months. This time, I think she’s serious - and dare I say it, right.


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