Making Money

For years I’ve been trying to think of ways to make money on my own. My ideas have ranged from making crafts to sell (never seem to finish any and am not sure I could get enough for them to make the time spent on them worth it) to doing the naked paid webcam thing for weirdo fetishists (yeah, don’t think my mom or husband would like that career choice much).

Without a solid knowledge of Dutch, getting a job here in NL has been proving quite difficult. At least a job I could stand doing… I have no intention of flipping burgers or doing phone sales (no offense to those of you who do, but I’ve worked too many of those jobs already and am in no hurry to do it anymore). So that has left me having to use my imagination, which seems to be lacking when it comes to ideas to make money.

I tried the petsitting thing and while some gigs were totally dreamy (like my times with Gus and Ike, from verypink.com), others were not-so dreamy. I’ve come home black and blue from large poorly trained dogs, I’ve been completey ripped off and not paid for my services, and I’ve spent weeks at a time away from home. It wasn’t always so much fun… but the money was fairly decent.

Recently I’ve been thinking, hey.. why not try to make some money from my blog? I was reading Dooce’s site and apparently she pretty much supports her family on what she makes from advertising on her site. Ok, so her content may be more interesting than mine, but I’m not looking to support my family either. If I could make -some- money from it I’d be happy…

So what would I have to do..

• Update very regularly
• Join sites like Blogexplosion and BlogMad to initiate traffic
• Join blogrolls for themed posting (like Photo Hunt Saturday)
• Create pages for things of interest.. books, movies, TV, electronics.. that would bring in searching traffic
• Advertise my site on other sites with banners, renting and so on.
• Place google / amazon ads throughout my site and probably pimp them and bug people to click ’em

I can do that, and have already put the wheels in motion for most of it… but I wonder, will it ruin the blogging experience for me?

I created this site as an outlet. A place to talk about my life and share my dreams, goals, fears, failures and frustrations with the people who choose to visit this site. It has been a friend to me when I’ve felt like I had none and comforted me when I was sunken so deeply into my depression that I didn’t want to talk to anyone directly about it.

Will putting effort into my blog in hopes of bringing in a small amount of cash make this more like an obligation than a place of comfort? Will I start to dread having to write in my blog and feel pressured to come up with witty and interesting posts?

Will people not like my site anymore because of the ads?

I guess I need to just throw the ads on there and hope people click them, without getting too obsessed with pimping my site in hopes of bringing in cash.

Hell, I don’t even know if it works. I’ve noticed that a lot of people have these google and amazon ads on their site, do they even make anything from it? (Other than Dooce, I mean.. who obviously does. She has many other advertisements though.)

I’m torn.