For ten years I have not given much thought to monetization of this weblog. Other people took care of that for me.
The upside of running my own ship is obvious in terms of control. The downside is I’m now my own sysadmin, and I’m not getting paid to do that (not to mention hosting, etc.).
For over a decade I’ve also been an Amazon Associate. When I put up book reviews I link to Amazon, and if you buy the book I get a cut. But, another aspect of this is that the referral session stays active even if you use Amazon to purchase something else.
I’ve been rather passive about this so far, but now I’ve decided to put a link to my Amazon associates page on the top right. If you click through that link and buy something at Amazon I get a cut. This isn’t trivial when it comes to big ticket items. Anyway, I would appreciate if long time readers were conscious of this.
I know many of my readers buy from Amazon anyway, so it’s a way to support me generating this sort of content for “free” in the normal course of things.