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Trimming the bill

With a drastic reduction in income (and jump in expenses, as well) on my horizon, I’m working on two projects here on the site. The first, which I’ve alluded to before, involves getting rid of my junk. I’m doing stuff offline, giving boxes to Reader to Reader and putting some items on Freecycle, but I’m also selling a lot of unwanted items on eBay and Amazon. To that end, I’ve added links to lists of items I’m selling to the sidebar of the main page. (I should be showing that sidebar, or a subset of it, in individual pages as well. One day I will overhaul this site…)

The second project is more long-term. I’m thinking about ways to minimize the cost of this site. That’s not, “make money from my site,” because that seems like a pipe dream; I’d rather just bundle up a few trickles of income which balance out the bills. (To give you an idea of the scale I’m talking about: it’s very hard to pay less for cable TV, annually, than this site costs me, and I spend much more on a newspaper subscription.) I’ve known this time of tuition was coming for quite a while, and I’ve saved for a while in anticipation, so I’m not going to go hungry as a student. But it would be nice if the “nonessentials” paid for themselves, don’t you think?

This becomes a lengthy discussion, so I’ve continued it in an extended entry.

Now Playing: June from Forget Yourself by The Church

So far, all I’ve done is think about this; I haven’t implemented anything other than those links in the sidebar. Those are pretty inelegant; I need to do better.

My goals are to get maximum return from minimal effort, to fit in seamlessly with the format of the site (however it might change for aesthetic reasons, should I grow some design sense,) and to be tasteful. In other words, I’m hoping to do some work up front, then not think about it for months at a time, and I’m not going to badger the poor people who read here. Here’s what I’m looking at:

  • Web host referrals. If/when I refer people to my web hosting company, a percentage of the host’s income from those people gets applied to my bill. I’m not sure how I’ll get this information to people who are interested—maybe I’ll just put a tag on the front page—but one or two of those can go a long way.

  • Amazon affiliate program. I’ve already signed up for this, but I don’t really have many opportunities to apply it. I may see if I can leverage it for the used books I’m selling.

  • iTunes affiliate. I mention a lot of music here—not as much as a music-dedicated weblog might, but quite a lot. This actually seems like the most logical of the bunch, but probably won’t produce much revenue.

That last is interesting, because as you’ll see, I’ve been linking to Wikipedia entries about the artists, and I’d like to keep doing that. What I may do is create an intermediate page which offers both the link to iTunes and the link to Wikipedia, and the option to set a preference for one or the other if you don’t want to see the intermediate page again.

A few options I’ve thought about and discarded (or just tabled, for now):

  • The PayPal donation link. If you’re feeling philanthropic, there are probably better places for your donations. (I’d be happy to make suggestions.)

  • Google AdSense. It does make “sense,” I suppose, but I don’t think I get enough traffic to make it worth the badgering-the-readers factor.

Ideas? Opinions? Dire warnings?

Posted by pjm on July 12, 2005 12:28 PM |

Comments

well, if you are ever hungry, let me know. You and A (or you without A, if A is busy) can come over. You can be like my upstairs tenant. She invites herself to dinner and makes requests. LOLOL! Of course, I love to cook so it’s not a big deal. And I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t wanna. Of course, there may be times when I just look at you like you’re crazy and say “are you nuts? Do you know the kindaweek I’ve had???” LOL!

Posted by: Julia | July 12, 2005 1:33 PM

My understanding is that it’s pretty hard for the average person to make a blog pay for itself. I’m guessing your traffic is decent, but probably not enough to get you more than a few dollars a year on Google Adsense…still, that’s money that you didn’t have borrow from your savings or Uncle Sam.

The iTunes and Amazon referals are also good ways to raise money, but like AdSense, you’d want to keep your expectations low.

Perhaps also committing to a constant personal purge—making sure that old equipment, books and the like go onto eBay auctions rather than sitting in your apartment might be a way to keep costs down.

Or you could switch to a lower cost or free host, and give up some of your control over the site. Sacrilige, I know.

Another alternative—does your new school give you webspace? If you felt comfortable, you might be able to host it there—provided there were no rules against it.

Posted by: Anonymous | July 12, 2005 4:24 PM

One other thing to keep in mind is that a car is expensive - perhaps $5000 a year or so when you add all parts of the equation. I don’t know if geography will let you consider becoming a one vehicle couple, but it would go a long way towards ratcheting the expenses down.

Posted by: Scooter | July 13, 2005 9:13 AM

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