General Hoohah 09 Jan 2008 09:34 pm
Monetizing the Homelessness Blog
I’ve visited your site often since I found it, and have wondered why you haven’t taken advantage of the means to monetize your blog through Google, Amazon, or a small number of successful on-line models.
You live in a van. I’m disabled, yet I make a fairly good income with AdSense and affiliate programs.
Your writing is top-notch, and it speaks to the soul. You should reconsider monetizing your blog, or perhaps make a topical essay site on tightly-focussed niche themes.
–Rick
I’ve looked in some of those monitizing models before, when the site was young with little traffic and lofty expectations. But reality sunk in when I realized just how much traffic I’d need to effective spend my time setting up these various schemes.
I have thought about it though and will perhaps bug you in the future for some assistance in wiring together the bits that needs to be placed. My traffic is getting better albeit slowly. And now with the chillier days I’ll be spending more time “indoors” and paying attention to the site. Ideally this will help traffic all the more as I’ve not been posting regularly for some time now.
Part of the hesitation is that I can actually meter out the time to pay ratio of “real world” writing projects as I have professionally worked as a writer before. And last time I did that it was $16 per hour. One thing I do need to keep in mind though is that setting this blog up, the loading of the borrowed server space and mucking around with PHP and whatnot was very time consuming–but educational too. So if I could think to myself, “Oh, this is a good entry, with the google hits I should make X number of dollars from it.” Then I would be very keen indeed on monitization.
on 18 Jan 2008 at 5:17 am 1.anoynoous said …
Ahoy
You should SERIOUSLY head over to elance.com and become a ghost writer; your writing skills is superb.
You can net $1000 a month as a ghost writer if you try.
on 19 Jan 2008 at 6:20 pm 2.Ruthie Rader said …
HEY THERE!!!
It’s about freaking time!
Email me, will ya?
Pronto, Tonto.
on 19 Jan 2008 at 6:25 pm 3.Ruthie Rader said …
Yeah, several people have told me to put ad sense ads on my blog.
I haven’t.
But you can be the test case. LOL!
I don’t have banners or anything on mine.
My ads are…well…subtle.
But if you decide to do it, let me know how it works out.
on 01 Feb 2008 at 6:15 pm 4.RomanaS said …
I have a similar web site about van living, but earning money from adds aslways seems like you’re selling yourself out a bit to me.
I develop a few web sites, and have a steady job so I don’t need the income from web sites, but even if I did I would feel guilty about doing this. My whole concept at carliving.info is to give info for free. I think adds kind of make web sites look tacky too. It makes your web site lok like a cheap tripod or geocities site.
I wonder though if there are contracts involved? Can you just get rid of the adds if you decide you don’t like them?
I recall way back when here were no adds on the Internet. Quite litrally there were none at all. hose were the days of editing web sites with notepad.