One of the aspects of blogging that I love is that it opens up opportunities to connect with people of all walks of life, interests, backgrounds and experiences. In the last year and a half of blogging here at ProBlogger I’ve come into contact with a lot of readers – many of whom have shared their experiences with me. One of these people is ‘Steve’ (not his real name).

Steve emailed me quite a few months back after I’d had a particularly rough few days of blogging – having been pretty viciously attacked as a result of some things I’d written that had been misunderstood. Steve wrote to me to encourage me to hang in there keep on blogging and shared some of his own story of being a webmaster.

The interesting thing was that despite Steve knowing I was a Baptist Minister (I haven’t mentioned that for a while so it could be a shock for some of you) he told me the story of how he’d publishing and making a living from Adult content for a number of years and how he’d recently gotten into mainstream publishing – particularly via blogging.

To be honest – Steve’s involved in an area of the web that I’m not fond of and which I have some ethical problems with – however he’s also a guy that I’ve come to value as a fellow blogger and human being. He’s been incredibly supportive of me and this blog (he’s a regular reader) and has even taught me a thing or two about blogging.

This week I asked him if he’d be willing to be interviewed on ProBlogger – to share some of what he’s learnt about online publishing. This interview doesn’t contain any links to anything Steve publishes (adult or mainstream) and I publish it because while I may not agree with some of what Steve does I do think he’s got some interesting lessons to share and I’m constantly asked by readers of this blog to feature other readers opinions (something Steve has a few of). I’m also fascinated by his story and refocussing towards mainstream publishing. Here’s my interview (warning: it is quite long):

Darren: thanks for agreeing to be interviewed Steve

Steve: No problem Darren. Before I answer the questions I should point out that my wife and I are very much a partnership in everything we do on the Net so you will often see that I talk about ‘we’ rather than just me. For any of the many other adult webmasters that frequent Darren’s blog you may know us as The Other Steve and Marie. For everyone else you will just have to trust me when I tell you that my nickname made a lot of sense at the time I chose it.

Darren: How did you get into web publishing?
Steve: In 1996 we bought a new computer and connected to the Net for the first time. For a little while surfing the Net was great, there were lots of things to do and see but it was only a few weeks before we wanted to build a website.

We started with Geocities and taught ourselves to write HTML – in Notepad. I started a site that looked at trains while Marie was more interested in building something useful like a site that supported women who found themselves in a certain situation. My site is long gone while Marie’s site is still there and will soon be undergoing yet another revamp.

And that was our first shaky start on the Net

[Read more...]