So I had a weight loss blog that I intended to get going on, but I have been so lazy with the diet and exercise. I will probably get more serious on that front soon, but since my weight loss blog was doing nothing and my mom wanted to start a diet I took a day to try to teach her blogging and gave her the old site.

In a couple hours she learned Blogger, Bloglines, XML/RSS, a bit about social networks and the web, what AdSense spam sites look like, sourcing information, writing for the web, tracking news topics via things like custom Google News RSS feeds, etc etc etc.

She doesn’t remember how to make a link, so I have to help her on that front. I just called her and helped her out with making a link again. 🙂

The blog she started working on about a week ago made $11.71 last month in AdSense earnings. My goal is to help her get over $1,000 a month within a year without me having to help her too much. I didn’t tell her that goal, but I set it. 😉

Not trying to knock my mom (as I love her), but you don’t get much less tech savvy than my mom is, so if she is doing well with the whole blogging thing, and making $1,000 a month from blogging within a year I will be pretty convinced that I am ok at helping total newbies learn.

My mom seems so excited with the diet & blog that she wanted to read a book I was reading about AdWords. I told her it was not what she needed at this point, but it is cool to see my mom jumping on the web.

AdSense and other similar contextual advertising programs have made it far easier for webmasters to make a full time income playing with topics that interest them. I am not sure if it is arrogent of me to think my mom will be really successful, but I think it is cool to think that my mom recently knew nothing about the web (even recently having MySearch spyware redirects in her address bar), and she will soon be able to make decent money just playing around with a subject she is interested in.

It is not a hard framework to set up, and if you do it smartly it does not even require a ton of effort. She also told me she is concerned about how her voice sounds. She cares & is excited, which makes me pretty certain she will do well.