When I started this particular endeavour, I had very meager goals. First, could I even get it up and running? I almost died in that valley. Could I actually write the first post? Barely. Could I actually make and stick to a schedule of writing with absolutely no one reading? Yup. Could I actually write articles once a week without descending into the normal inanity (the twitterification of a blog)? I’ll let you decide. Could I make the proggit front page? Turned out to be easy! How about the reddit front page? Done! How about Digg? Yup!

From my perspective, this entire experiment has been a wild success. I’ve accomplished all of the goals I set off initially and now have started aiming higher. I have two current goals. First, I want to make it a year writing something I find interesting every week. Second, I want to make this blog bank-account neutral. I’m not really interested in the money, as much as learning about world of making money online. Since I’ve decided to “sell-out” I felt compelled to make a post detailing my thoughts on that particular subject.

The One True Way

The queen mother of all monetization techniques is to use your own blog as a marketing platform for your own product. Sell something. If your blog is or becomes highly popular, you’ll see huge sales because of it. And, more importantly, you can bring in more people to your blog, and give it gravitas, just by the existence of said product. It’s a brilliant loop. The only problem for me is that I have nothing to sell. Alas.

Ads

Ads are lame. Not that they don’t work, I’m assuming they do. It’s just that they are too easy and it feels like a copout. More importantly, it would make me feel dirty submitting own stuff around the internet. Perhaps, if someone wanted to specifically place an ad on this blog, not through some network, and approached me directly, I’d probably be all for it. More then likely, though, ads always mean AdSense. And that will be a measure of absolute last resort.

Job Board Networks

I actually think job board networks are a potential gold mine for top-tier niche blogs. It solves a very obvious need and provides a very obvious value proposition. The type of people that read such and such are the type of people that you want to hire. The clever among you will notice that I’ve signed up with JobSyndicate for their job ad network. It’s over there on the right. The problem with such a job ad network, in the end, is that, even in our economy, job seekers are actually pretty rare. You must be the absolute top of the pyramid in some niche to really be a place with enough overlap to reach the critical mass to make job ads work.

I’m afraid I’m not at that level. We’ll see if I ever make any money from my job board

Affiliate Links

If I was reviewing hardware, this might work. I hear that people who are pushing various products can make quite a bit of money from various affiliate links. There’s really no good way for me to do this other than through books. Having a book-list is a time-honored way for programming bloggers to actually make any money. I’ve considered this approach but I would, again, feel cheap just listing a bunch of useful books and hoping people might actually buy them. That said, I have read many fascinating books and maybe one day I’ll write some reviews for them. At least then I wouldn’t feel so terrible for hawking them, and you wouldn’t feel so used if you bought one.

Can I do it?

I have to assume that covering my server costs should be relatively easy, if I just bother. So if you notice a few changes over the next few months, don’t be alarmed. I promise this isn’t some clever scheme to extort money from anyone. Hopefully if you make me any money it’ll be because you got a new job or read a great book. If you see any AdSense, though, just know that I tried everything else before it

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