"You Make Money Doing That?"

This was actually a question posed to me by a "life long friend" (at the time.  I don't think I've seen him since) back when I was visiting N.Y. to do some movie work and a bit of work for Cult Goddess Magazine and I think some filming.  I believe we were up to Volume 2 at the time,  but I'm really not sure.  Some of you may read the question and think, "Well that's rude?"  I get that in polite society asking what someone makes or if they make a "good living" performing their chosen task is considered rude.  I think in many cases it's really just curiosity.  People trying to figure out if they can make a living doing what it is you do.  In this case, however, I think the question was actually meant to be rude.  A "challenge".  I'm clearly not rich and people who publish magazines are rich (according to this person's thinking), so I must be doing a poor job of it and not making money.

The fact is, on paper, I wasn't.  I was happy to break even with these things and I had gotten to a point where I was travelling to get some of the photos, so my budgets got a bit high.  Nothing I couldn't handle, but a lot to "earn back" from a free online magazine.  We offered ad space for sale, but I've never been a big salesperson, so we didn't do much business that way either.  How could I make any money at this?

And here's how it tended to pay off.  In order to have "ads", I would run them for my own projects, movies, T-shirts, etc.  I ran free ads for friends as barter for times they had worked for me free/cheap in the past.  Over the first year I noticed each time an issue would come out my web traffic went up, my sales and rentals went up and through those means I guess I "Made Money Doing That".

I eventually stopped because attempts to keep costs down meant less interviewing people in person, doing none of the photo shoots myself and generally sucked a lot of the fun out of it.  Doing it properly took too much time and was too strict a schedule and doing it wrong was just, well, wrong.  So, eventually, I came here, launched the much less formal Cult Goddess Magazine Blog, enjoyed ad revenue from video interviews conducted over the phone and using photos and banner ads on the sister blog to this.

This whole long story came back to me yesterday because, well, YouTube is shutting down my partnership and so I no longer will be able to collect revenue from the videos by way of ads.  The past week since I found out I have posted one video.  In that week I also have written fewer blogs.  What I discovered this weekend is that my numbers on Amazon (one of my bigger indicators for my movies ), which had been recovering steadily the past few weeks, dove 20% since I stopped posting.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But I have to consider, is writing blogs and doing videos worth it even if the only pay is from the effect it has on other aspects of my business?

Of course, the short answer is, "Yes".  If they prove to be effective marketing tools then it just becomes a question of how much time and money do I put into them.  I originally started my channel and blog as ways of informing people about my movies in the first place.  The ad revenue was a nice bonus.  So, I'll be trying to stick to that 100 videos for the year and to post to each blog at least once a week, but you may notice specific projects being spoken about more, like Jack vs Lanterns (especially on YouTube) and shows I have planned.  I actually think these are the things people are interested in anyway, besides Chaya.

If they start to slag off you know they didn't have the intended effect.