Matthew Gates https://notetoservices.com 5m 1,131 #milestone
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Confessions of the Professions Reaches 2500 Milestone
Every 500 confessions, we do write one of these up as a tradition and have done so to mark our milestones. Starting a blog might be easy and writing your first 10 articles is easy too. Coming up with and publishing 2,500 articles? That can be slightly more challenging. Fortunately for us, “we”, “I” am not responsible for writing every single one of them, though I am personally responsible for no less than 400 confession contributions to this website. There is a lot to say and so many situations I personally find myself in that warrant a confession, whether it has to do with my day job, my night job, my freelance jobs, or just about any random event occurring in my life. Since there is a lot to say, there will always be material for Confessions of the Professions.
After seven years, we are still going strong, and the reason for this is because of readers like you and contributors like you. Seriously, as motivated as I can be sometimes, I am only human. I wake up some days and just want to avoid life and people altogether. I get depressed. I have severe anxiety which has warranted me a medical cannabis license so I can literally work up the courage to face the world, or more specifically, my day job, which I absolutely love, but it doesn’t eliminate the stress that comes along with the job.
There are just some times where I do lose interest in maintaining and keeping Confessions of the Professions going. Coming up with new ideas for the site, occasionally redesigning it, keeping it running fast and optimized, as we’ve had to switch away from several different servers, particularly shared hosting and even a small VPS, that could not handle the amount of information this website processes each day. Writing new confessions is not always an easy feat, but it is rewarding to know that there are people out there in the world reading this website.
We are not Medium and we don’t even claim to own your content, but with our very limited and tiny 2-digit monthly budget, funded by me actually going to work at my day job, and we have somehow managed to keep this site going. As we learned the hard way several times: as the site grows, the hardware it sits on must grow too. And none of it was without help from you! At around 2,000 confessions, the site was still on a VPS and running very slow. To save or schedule a confession would sometimes crash the site. To deal with the power and resources we needed, we ended up getting some funding from a few clients of ours.
I, Matthew Gates, run Confessions of the Professions as a hobby interest website. It coincides with the career I had wanted to pursue, which is somewhere between social counseling psychology (helping people cope and deal with the world) and industrial-organizational psychology (helping people better cope within the workplace). As life happened, and no one wanted to hire a man with a Bachelors of Science Psychology, I had debt I had to pay off, and thus, turned to web development as a career, even starting my own company, NoteToServices, selling mostly SaaS services for individuals and businesses. As a way to keep my connection to my original ambitions and aspirations, Confessions of the Professions was born: seeking to understand society, the individual, and the workplace.
We are happy to have so many contributors, from freelancers to marketing agencies to small startups, businesses, and even research departments from prestigious universities and large corporations. The fact that you have chosen to publish your articles on this website, and not your own blog or on a publishing source ensures that not only do we have unique and fresh content, but that you believe in our mission for this site!
A few years ago, we were debating on whether to switch over to Medium when they offered custom domains, but decided against it. As we saw with Hackernoon and even our own small publications on the blog, I was banned from ever publishing on Medium due to their ever-constant changing policies on content, advertising, marketing, or even linking to your own website. As with the case of Hackernoon, which you can read about the entire drama at this source, you basically do not own any of your content, and you are at the whim of an external third-party controlling what you can publish and how you express yourself.
Fortunately for our platform, we do not ban you for your submissions and rely heavily on your unique content. While we certainly do not accept hatred, bigotray, or anti-[group] of people, nor do we accept articles that encourage harm or danger, particuarly working in countries known for their violence, we try to publish whatever you contribute to this site. This is your world, your voice, and your life. Help out others. Provide some knowledge, advice, or wisdom that you have learned in your life. Whether it was the time you worked in government, went to college, became a stay-at-home mother, a stay-at-home father, or anything else. Anyone and everyone, no matter what your age can contribute a confession.
If you became an instant millionaire overnight or managed to develop a SaaS application that is now sustaining you and has allowed you to quit your day job, we want to hear about it! Your confessions belong right here! Confessions of the Professions is solely owned by me and technically run by you, the readers and contributors. We have published confessions ranging from some topics such as politics, the environment, money management, corporate greed, erotic literature, and so much more.
There is no holding back on this platform, and while we would love to keep it free, which is certainly our intentions, we do have some ads, ad space, and try to monetize when and where we can. We appreciate your support and love for this website and could not have done any of this without you. As I have mentioned in the past, this website started with just two visitors: my mom and my girlfriend. My mom admitted that she did not read every single confession, but she did read the ones that caught her eye.
At its height, we were receiving 70,000 – 100,000 visitors per month, while the general consensus is that it has settled to around a constant average of 35,000 visitors per month. We do hope you continue reading and while these milestone posts are nothing like our End-of-the-Year posts, we are just happy to acknowledge that today, we have officially reached 2,500 confessions within a 7-year period.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for contributing.
Thank you for believing in Confessions of the Professions.
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