As an employee, I always thought that mistakes were something that should be avoided at almost all costs because you would incur the wrath of your boss or be fired or some such thing.

As an employer, I saw that same trait in my own employees, and actually it vexed me. After I thought about it for a while, I realized entrepreneurs and employees view mistakes VERY differently. For entrepreneurs, mistakes were actually a vital part of the learning experience.

I was quite glad therefore to read the article You Can’t Win if You’re Not Willing to Wreck, which said the same thing. In the article, Wil Schroter pointed out that fear is often the limiting factor when we are trying something new. It’s fear of failure that haunts us. And the ones who are haunted the most? Employees? Could be.

Rose DesRochers (Where to submit your blog | Rose DesRochers), amongst many other bloggers, explicitly recommends bloggers to submit their blogs to Blog Directories. So I decided to verify whether this was important in gaining a wider audience.

My conclusion after searching for a few of my favorite bloggers on several of the blog directories at the top of the list is: submitting your blog to these is largely a waste of time, and unimportant on how popular your blog really is. I searched for three prominent bloggers in several of the directories on her list. Couldn’t find any listing for any of them.
However, there are two that I would suggest you include: Yahoo! Blog Directory and Technorati, but neither of these is particularly a good blog directory. Their value lies in the other tools their websites provide.

After that, don’t bother much. Focus on writing stronger articles, make sure your articles are pinged properly, and craft your skill. Being listed may help out a little early on in attracting a few new visitors, but it is not critical to your success.

(ed. this post has been edited.)

I was quite flattered when someone approached me about writing for their blogging system, only to realize it wasn’t a blogging system, but a text-link type system later on.

Good evening Kenneth,

I see that you do some client promotion on your blog. Do you have any
more time for additional assignments? We have a lot of clients who can
use your writing skills.

Visit our site www.payu2blog.com for more information and contact me if
you have an interest in getting started.

Best Regards,

Derek

So, I wrote back to enquire about their website, thinking it might be like Payperpost, ReviewME or some such. But this is what I found.

Receiving Assignments:

We have a few additional requirements in order to receive assignments
that you are paid for.

1.You HAVE to AGREE to Link to (within your articles) any assigned
subject. This is a requirement. If your blog has a standard theme and
you do not want to include posts with links to other topics, then I’m
sorry, our projects are not for you. You can link creatively but the
links need to be there in order to be paid. …

Actually, this could be quite an interesting proposition for some bloggers who have general blogs, or blogs that cover a range of topics. I decided, for this blog, that it wasn’t for me because I couldn’t choose my subjects, I didn’t want to end up posting about inappropriate things on this blog and/or linking to inappropriate websites. Would you guys and gals want to read about return address labels, painting costs, etc. on this blog?

Check out this guy’s website, it might be worth it for you, though.