With my last post, I began a temporary experiment with fundraising. I’ve been thinking about doing something for awhile, because the domain name renewals for solveeczema.org and solveeczema.com come up in a few months. I’d like to renew for five or ten years, but it’s costly in such big chunks (even though the per-year cost goes down). Also, while I’m at it, I was hoping to transfer hosting to a better service, updating the site is just so arduous at the moment, I am rarely able to do it.
I have to admit that I have also wondered if I could duplicate some of the blogging stories I have read about lately, where bloggers have gotten enough donations to devote more time to their blogs.
However, I have also read that when a connection to a pay site like paypal links from your site, it’s standing in the search engines drops (for certain kinds of sites). Whether it’s true or just coincidence, visits to this blog dropped an order of magnitude when I put the donations button up. I also lost a subscriber. I put up the site in the first place to help people; the donations button came out of my considering how I could afford to keep doing that and maybe do more, but I seem to be bumbling that attempt.
I plan on removing the donations button in two or three months anyway, and leaving it off, especially if I am able to renew the domain name for several years. Please consider a small donation to support the solveeczema site and this blog. Given what has happened, I don’t think I will be putting a donations button on the solveeczema.org site after all.