Yesterday and the day before I had some nice talks with a friend of mine about life and doing what you like and a bit about this site and being successful in life. One of the things we talked about was my desire to make this website as my primary job and my primary income. I just notice that whenever I work on this site I just enjoy doing it, enjoy writing, enjoy improving it technically. This is just ‘my site’, ‘my message to the world’, my sharing to the world, and it feels good, makes me happy to work on.
And that’s what is one of my goals in life: doing things that make other people happy AND make me happy. So maybe this site, this project might be the way to do it. However, until now I have not made a final decision on how to monetize the site. I still just prefer you guys pay me JUST ONE DOLLAR if you like what I write (see my donate page), if you consider reading what you like a value of two dollars of more. In that case we both win. I like what I”m doing and get 1 dollar per visitor (or visit) and you get a value of two dollars or more, so I guess that’s a good deal for both of us.
However, that’s not how the internet works, at least not in 2013. And this site even is teaching me how bad commerce has gotten as I just got around 20(!) comments with all kinds of positive remarks, which of course would flatter me or any other blogger. However, the only purpose of those comments is creating links to other sites, so there are just people out there being paid to put nice comments in my site just to get links. So to me that is very sad, people getting paid for that type of ‘cheap’ link building and playing with my feelings as of course, especially as this site has no real traffic yet. So if I wouldn’t know better, if I was just an ordinary blogger without knowledge of link building, I might just be flattered and presume these comments are real comments and real readers of my site.
A similar thing that is sad to me, and yes, I do it on some of our other sites, that many sites can just survive on the indirect income from advertisements and affiliate links. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against it and sometimes I click on an advertisement if there is something that appeals to me, but especially for this site, where i put all my heart, all my knowledge, try to make something useful, try to inspire people, try to inspire you, it would hurt me to really go that way as I believe if what I am writing here, including some of my very personal experiences, my suffering, deserves to just be paid for itself, not through indirect advertising, although there are some exceptions as I’m OK with earning a little profit from Amazon links for the books I like, as I just like the books and promote them.
So I guess I made my decision, I will probably go for the direct payment option and not for the advertising option. I will make the decision soon, but not after discussing it thoroughly with my Master Mind group. Yes, I think I deserve to be paid for what I do directly and I think that would apply to many more people. I’m not sure if it is the right thing to give so much power to the advertisers with the large budgets.
And yes, I believe I have some messages to the world, especially that in our daily business it seems we forgot we are humans, not robots behind the counter of the supermarket of link builders posting fake comments to people who do some serious writing.