I just discovered Steve Pavlina.com because of the meme that Matthew Jabs completed. Steve gets over a million visitors a month and yet I had never visited his site until today. Do you want to know what I discovered? He thinks like a lot of us do but he puts it to practical use. He doesn't write a lot of articles per week, but he puts a lot of himself into each one.
I want to talk about monetizing. There are really a lot of good blogs out there and I've been fortunate to find a lot of them — I'm sure I'll find more. A lot of the good blogs are not self-hosted. They use wordpress.com, typepad.com, livejournal.com, blogger.com, etc. You can't monetize those like you can when you self-host. Looking at traffic rankings for some of them, I know they could generate serious income if they wanted to. One of the things I did when I first started my blog, and I've experimented with it a lot, is to monetize it. I wanted people to know up front that I intended to do that and not to do it midstream after I had a lot of regular visitors. Do I make money? You bet I do. Is it as much as I want? No, but I'm a patient man. I know that as my visitor numbers increase, so will the revenue.
Unlike Steve Pavlina, I didn't start the blog with the intention of making it a huge source of income. On his blog, he talks about people being slaves to their employers and that making money without working is the way to go. He's right, but not everyone can do that based on personal circumstances. I was a slave to an employer for 20 years — the U.S. government. I am being rewarded for my "loyalty" with a monthly pension that pretty much takes care of my needs. It doesn't take care of my wants, but that's a whole different story. As I just mentioned, I'm a patient man. I own my house — I have no house payments. I own my car — I have no car payments. I have no televisions in the house, but I intend to get some before too long. I still watch TV on occasion, but I watch it at a next door relative's house. In the meantime, I have hundreds of DVDs waiting to be watched.
Anyway… knowing what I know, it won't be too long before I make more than I want to make. At present, my goal is to make no more than $4,400 U.S. dollars per year. Why? So I don't have to deal with taxes at all. My yearly pension plus $4,400 is still under the amount defined as nontaxable by the United States Internal Revenue Service for my family situation. Steve Pavlina makes more than $1,000 per day. Crazy, isn't it? If I ever make it to that amount, which I highly doubt, or even a tenth of that amount (on a regular basis), I will move back to the United States. There are some things (okay, a lot of things) that I cannot do here regardless of how much money I make. It's another long story that I don't want to write about right now.
The point is that I'm monetizing for my wants, not for my needs. Some of you are quite content with how your blog is set up and your choices for monetizing or not monetizing. I want you to think about monetizing if you haven't thought about it recently. It can't hurt you or your blog, even if you think it can.
