Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Just saw yesterday that the domain OnAPostcard.com was available and it seemed too good to just leave it sitting there.

Anyway, it’s now home to our latest blog.

We’re planning it to be a group blog, initially with myself and Wendy but open to others on request.

As ‘yall know, Wendy and me have been plugging away with paid posts over the last month or so.

One thing that we hadn’t expected was that by taking it a little bit more seriously, we’d be rapidly closing on the top 10 earners on PPP quite so quickly. Due to the delay in payment (you’re paid 30 days after your post is approved), it’ll actually be another month or so before get into that list but ’tis encouraging that we can get there so quickly.

Actually, all being well, we’ll not only be in that list but moving up it next month as we should be bringing online another blog by then.

As you know, I’m in the process of building up a sort-of technology blog over at An Age of Magic. It takes about three months before you can make money on these things so it’ll be a month or so before I’m ready to start raking in the cash from it and retire on the proceeds. Well, maybe a “bit” more than a month before I can retire on it 🙂

Anyway, I’ve been putting on vaguely techie type postings as you can see. Techie with a slightly different slant on the technology.

What’s really interesting is the kind of searches people have been using to arrive on the site…. “walk on water with magic”… “travel in time”… “move things with magic”. Also interesting are the results that I get when I use Digg and similar social bookmarking sites on individual posts: some of them do incredibly well considering the content that’s on the site.

Now, the bigger question is whether I’ll be able to make money it….

One of the best things about the paid posts is that there are a fair number of them that I’d be writing anyway in due course. ‘Tis easy enough to pick these ones out as they’re a lot longer, more complete and get a photo or two.

I’ve even had someone offer to pay for one after I’d written it!

Now, the big question is how I can get people to sponsor the other websites directly….

As you can see we’ve started offering the option to buy prints of the photographs from this site and others that we run.

However, as soon as we started doing that we hit the problem that the resolution of our camera ain’t good enough to produce the largest prints and indeed isn’t high enough for the images to be accepted by some services.

Related to that we’re now looking for more images for our Whole Earth Guide and it seems to make sense to do something about the camera for that too (we’re hoping that we can supply the majority of the photographs for that from our own picture library).

Which is where we hit our dilema. We have a massive library of slide photographs and could continue to take those using the Nikon F3 but would need a slide scanner to be able to use them properly. That would run to £500 or more.

Alternatively we could buy something like the Nikon D40x (also £500+) and use that to build the library for the future.

At the moment I don’t know which way to go. Ideally, of course, we’d buy both but there isn’t enough money in the site development kitty to do that.