I was watching the forbes top 50 earners in television the other night and heard about Katie Couric for the first time. What struck me was not that she earned $15 million dollars a year and owned an impressive real estate portfolio, but the fact that she actually turned down a $20 mil job offer to stay as co-host of the today show for the lower paid $15 mil sole anchor spot of the CBS Evening News.

Not only she is a good looking presenter, she’s also a smart career mover. It’s a great example to everyone that sometimes it really isn’t all about the money. Sometimes, when you stay somewhere too long, you become stale, you loose motivation, and everyday blends into the next. One of my motos is that you always have to be learning. The moment you stop, it’s probably time to either move on to a new role in the same company, or often a new role in a new company…

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One of the money making strategies I was experimenting with was blogging about random topics from highly searched for topics.

The three sources that I picked this up were

1. Lycos 50
2. 
3. 

If I were to follow this today, I’d be posting about

• Lindsay Lohan’s possible sex tape
• Britney Spears guess appearance on How I met your mother
• Ashley Alexandra Dupre - whoever she is
• baba booey (??wtf??)
• dagmar midcap - dagmar what??
• Djimon Honsou - again no idea who he/she is
• Pregnant Man - really?

You get the picture, there’s some interesting random stories in there like the girl who became a man but is now 5 months pregnant - fark! However, after a bit of posting, I noticed that the click through rate on the ads were super low and the blog had no theme and no direction. I wasn’t blogging about stuff that interested me and it felt like that I was just posting for the sake of posting.

As a business model, even though I was getting some immediate hits from search engines, this wasn’t sustainable as it was based off trends that did not last long. As soon as the trend dropped off, the search traffic would also drop and rely on the next trend. I was chasing trend after trend and because of the sporadic topics, repeat visitors were few and far between. There was some small money to be made but it was too labour intensive and not enough immediate return. Perhaps if I kept it up for a year and kept churning out 10 articles a day, I might have seen some good results… but that’s too much hard work for my lazy ass.

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