This guest post is by Roman from how this website makes money.
Two years ago I stumbled across the concept of blogging for money. Instantly it hit me as the perfect thing: sit behind a computer, design a site, write, be my own boss, work from home, what could be better? I knew nothing about traffic, SEO, backlinks, Pagerank, or keywords. I knew nothing about how to make money with a website. So what did I do next? I registered the domain name howthiswebsitemakesmoney.
Looking back all I can do is laugh at my arrogance. Like thousands before me and thousands who will come after me, my first attempt at blogging was a site about making money online.
Two years later, I know how to start a site, I know how to write content, I know about SEO, I know about backlinks, I know how to add advertisements … but I still do not know how to make good money online. The site makes dimes a day, not dollars.
The site has been two years of disappointment. Two years of waking up in the morning and seeing the same green egg in AdSense. Two years of waiting for a four-digit affiliate check with my name on it. Two years of working without pay. Two years of scratching my head.
So I asked for advice, and every time the reply was the same: create a site about something else. Create a site about what you know and what you enjoy. Do not create a site with the intent to make money, create a site with the intent to help people by doing something you enjoy doing.
What happened when I changed my intent
Six months ago I created a new site. This time my intent was pure pleasure.
I live in Prague and I love it here. So I made a little site about how great Prague is and what people should do when they come for a visit. It was built in a month. In a gust of activity I designed the site and wrote the content.
It was so easy. I did not agonize over what to write about. The content flowed effortlessly from my head to the keyboard. I did not have to take long walks with the dog or waste water standing dazed in the shower coming up with new ideas. I just sat down at the computer and wrote about what I know. It was so easy I actually looked forward to it.
As an afterthought, I created a simple page where people can order a real postcard from Prague. Visitors select a picture of Prague and fill out a form indicating what they want written on the postcard. After they hit the Submit button I get the request by email. I grab a postcard and, like an ancient scribe long before computers, lick the tip of the pen and write. After pounding a Prague stamp on the postcard I toss it into the mailbox on my way to work. I charge $4.00 for this five minutes of work.
I created this site with no aspirations of becoming rich, no day dreams of shaking hands with Oprah, no imagined scenes of telling my employer to find some other donkey to kick around. I created the website because it was easy for me to do and I enjoyed it. I made it because I needed a break from my ‘real’ website. I expected nothing to happen.
Again, I was wrong.
My hand is ink blue from all the postcards I have written.
I wrote a postcard from a son playing a trick on his mother: “Hi, Mom! Sorry for not calling in last few days. But I am in Prague with friends. Having a great time and the beer is sooo cheap. Say hi to Dad.”
I have written postcards to countries all over the world. Some of them in languages other then English—I have no idea what I am writing. Fortunately, the order form does not allow Chinese characters!
I get emails from people thanking me for the information they found on the site, thanking me for the postcard, asking for more information.
I feel like I am making the world a better place. I made a website about something I know about and am interested in and people are thanking me. Emotionally it is a soft, warm, fuzzy ball.
And yes, I am making money.
Intend to enjoy and you might make money
I learned a lot about making money online not from my site about making money, but from licking postage stamps.
New arrivals to the make-money-online scene go through the same initiation—they start out with the intent to make money, then fail to make more then a pile of pennies. For some it means the end and they quit, but for others this brutal introduction teaches them that their intent needs to change.
Of course, making money is about traffic, clicks, affiliates, backlinks SEO, but it’s also about finding something you enjoy doing. If your intent is only to make money the odds are stacked against you: you will probably quit. But if your intent is to do something you enjoy then you will keep moving forward until one day, you will be surprised to find that you are making money.
What’s your intent?
Roman intends to figure out how this website makes money. He has been trying to do that for two long years, so when he needs a break and do something fun he goes onto his other website to send a real postcard to his mother who misses him very much.
Rethinking Money: Breaking Up Currencies
from the different-purposes dept
I remember when I was quite young, my father predicted to me that we'd probably see the end of cash within our lifetimes, as all money would move to electronic money in the form of credit cards (or credit card-like interfaces). Every so often this idea has been discussed, but it usually gets shot down by those who like the anonymity of cash (which is one reason why some governments don't like it). So it's interesting to hear via Slashdot that an Estonian economist is recommending that the country go completely electronic as it adopts the Euro. I would imagine there are some issues with doing so (including the fact that cash and coins from other Eurozone countries would inevitably bleed in).
That said, there have been a few other stories lately that have me thinking about the future of money, and I actually could see a way that countries could move in this general direction without actually getting rid of cash entirely. Last year, we wrote about the question of whether or not the world would move to a single world currency, while simultaneously considering whether or not we'd actually start to see growth in very localized currencies, which are increasingly common in various cities to encourage people to shop locally. Again, neither situation seemed ideal, but were definitely interesting to think about.
Recently, however, Umair Haque wrote up an interesting post, positing that money could be split into three types of currencies which serve three separate functions. The idea is not to break them up by region -- as described above -- but by function. Umair's writeup is a bit opaque, but he notes that currency is used as a store of value, as a medium of exchange and as a unit of account, but those functions can be separated. The end result, would be as follows:
You have three kinds of notes in your wallet. The first you use at the grocery store. The second, at the bank and in the financial markets. The third, between your employer, the state, and public services. Each has very different volatilities and trajectories, because each has very different levels of supply, demand which are, crucially, independent from one another--but interdependent on real wealth, long-run productivity, etc.
Now, this may be difficult to comprehend in the abstract. How would that actually work and why would each have different volatilities and trajectories? Well, the good news is that we actually have a real world example of this. A few weeks back the always excellent Planet Money team at NPR did a wonderful episode on how "fake money" saved Brazil from rampant inflation. The story is fascinating, and I highly recommend listening to it. But, it was basically a simplified version of what Haque is suggesting. Brazil had crazy inflation, so crazy that every day, stores had to remark their entire stock to raise prices, and people would rush ahead of the clerk with the price stickers to get "yesterday's" prices.
The way Brazil "solved" the issue was to effectively issue a made up new currency to handle some functions of money: mainly the unit of account. You couldn't actually get paid in it, or pay with it, but all the goods in all the stores were suddenly priced with it. Then, rather than having to change the prices every day, each day, the government would put out a rate card with the exchange rate, and people would work off of that. Now, you might say this shouldn't make a difference, but it actually did. It got people thinking in terms of the new "stable" rates, and got them past their general distrust of monetary value. (One side note: this upset some of the wealthy, who were simply making a ton in interest -- and they complained about how this new system meant they actually had to innovate and invest to make money -- which reminded me of certain industries in the US who like to avoid innovating and investing themselves...).
Either way, you had a situation where the currency for prices was perfectly stable at the same time the other currency was still dealing with massive inflation. As Haque points out, you have different currencies with different volatility. Eventually, Brazil switched entirely over to this new currency and made the fake currency a real currency, but there's no reason why you couldn't keep multiple currencies, and break them up into a third bucket as well, as Haque suggests.
I can definitely see how there could be some value in doing so, providing a lot more flexibility, and removing certain risk elements. However, I do wonder if the greater level of confusion might be a problem for many, and lead to huge potential arbitrage opportunities, where the more financially sophisticated folks took advantage of much less financially sophisticated individuals, to swap these different levels of currency around. I'm not convinced either way on this, but it does seem fun to think about the possibilities...
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