Tag: Admin

Goodbye, affiliate links

If you google “best wireless printer”, the whole first page is full of weird sites that have endless lists of printers listed, with links to Amazon or Best Buy or wherever. They are all affiliate links – you click a link and the website makes a percentage – often not just from that sale, but from all your purchases from that merchant over the next 24 hours.

To be clear – there is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate programs, per se. And Amazon is far from the only company doing this. But it also incentivizes shitty behavior. Like the whole first page of Google on that printer search.

Over time, people have came to distrust affiliate links, so websites began to hide them with URL shorteners, or redirects, or clever server-side tricks, all to keep people from knowing they were clicking on affiliate links, and thus sending money to the website owner.

After all, the reader comes to think: Did you put that link in there to help me, or because you make money from it? Is this really your favorite novel of all time, or did you just want to make money from me?

These are questions I never want my reader to have to think about.

So: I’m announcing a change in policy. Going forward, I will use NO affiliate links on any of my properties. Not here on my blog, not in my newsletter.

To be clear, this will cost me some money. About 10% of my income last year was from affiliate links, mostly in my newsletter where I recommended books or movies. But when I launched my membership program, I said that this would mean I never had to sell ads on my website or newsletter. It also means now that I never have to use affiliate links.

Simplify

February is the most expensive month in my little publishing empire. My hosting all comes due. My domains renew. My bookkeeping subscription renews. My Evernote subscription renews. My Microsoft 365 subscription comes due. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. (Edit: I was! My PO Box comes due.)

I did not plan this – not at all. But when it is cold and damp and grey outside (like, say, February here in the Southland), I tend to curl up by the fireplace in the evenings and feel the irresistible urge to putter around these digital halls and fix change things on my website, or change business things like bookkeeping software, or try a new system, like Evernote or Microsoft 365.

I’ve been writing on the web for 21 years now, and it’s astonishing to me how much change always happens in February.

So, in related news – I’m making some changes around here.

In the early ought’s, when I was cutting my internet teeth, it was somewhat fashionable to have subdomains for different websites. Then, as domains got easier to buy and branding got involved and everything was getting optimized for search, we started buying new domains for everything. At one point, I was using something like 8 domains to run a personal website and a blog and a newsletter.

But now I’ve reverted – there is strength that comes from not chasing clicks and Google – and so I’m bringing everything back to subdomains, and not renewing most of my URLs. This means just one hosting bill, and just one URL. This is also much easier for my ADHD brain to keep track of.

My current setup is:

My personal site – hughhollowell.org

My blog – blog.hughhollowell.org

My newsletter – lisb.hughhollowell.org

I still own and will keep hughlh.com – it was the first URL I ever bought, and it is my social media handle on most sites, and it’s short, so I will keep it, even if I’m unsure what I’m going to do with it.

Not everything has to make sense.

Membership Month

Sunday, June 5th, is my birthday. I will be 50 years old. Yes, I know, I seem young and sprightly, but trust me, that is just the Tylenol talking. In any event, the last year has been my most creative year ever.

Over the last year, I launched a new blog, Humidity and Hope, on which I have published 186 articles just since October, consisting of more than 152,000 words. I published my weekly newsletter, Life is So Beautiful, where every Monday morning I send a short (previously unpublished) essay and five links to beautiful things to thousands of subscribers. And I launched The Hughsletter, my personal newsletter, where I share what I’ve written that week and links to cool things I’ve found.

And now I’m launching something new: A membership program to support my work.

Figuring out how to monetize this sort of work is hard, especially if you have scruples. I don’t want ads everywhere, scraping your privacy. I don’t want to limit access to only people who can afford it, like a paid newsletter. And all of this *waves hands* costs a lot of money to do – my email service alone is hundreds of dollars a month, whether I send anything or not.

I’ve had a Patreon account for years, but we are transitioning from it to a simple membership program: People who want to support my work, who want to keep my public work free and ad-free, and who want more of my work in the world can contribute as little as $5 a month and help make that happen by clicking here.

One more thing, related to this: Just like there is Pledge Week at NPR, June is “Membership Month”, because of my birthday. I will be making a big announcement next week about a secret project that is for members-only, for example. And I will each week, highlight more of the creative work I do, made possible by the members who support this work.

And to the existing members who all kick in to keep this train going: Thank you. Seriously. I could not do this work without you.