Tag: dialysis (Page 1 of 2)

Can MY blog make money too?

May 27, 2014 / Justin Matthews / 17 Comments

I have been thinking a lot about money lately. How to monetize my blog so I can stay home and have enough cash to finish my degree. I am still trying to figure out exactly what to do to make this happen. There are so many different opinions about it. Where do we start?

Of course there are affiliate programs and Google AdSense. I have a few of these but I don’t think they do much good right now. I need more traffic to make them a viable source of income. I also have Kontera and Chitika on my site. I have used sponsored tweets as well. As of today, I have earned a grand total of $.85. I should be excited that I have made any money at all online but it is not enough to be successful.

The good news: I don’t care right now. My blog is still in its infancy and just getting started. I had the most visitors to date yesterday and I am very excited. I have topped 1300 visitors and can count on a few visits every day even before I get something posted. Thanks for that. I amnot keeping hard and fast to the three month mark that seems to be when people give up. I started mid December of 2009 but didn’t start pushing it until January. I consider my blog to be a month and a half old right now. I figure by april I should be cruising along quite well. My exposure has been more than I ever expected to this point. My Alexa raking is rising, and while I am not fixated on this number I do want it to go up and not down.

I know some other bloggers who are working on the monetizing thing too. James over at TheInfoPreneur has a ton of great stuff and is now working on compiling some of it for sale. His experience has got me thinking about my site as well. James is a wealth of information on how to blog and how to be a better person. He posts tons of content and his site has skyrocketed since he started it. He has been a major inspiration for me (no he is NOT paying me to say this. Yet. 😉 ) and getting my blog going.

Now, I am basically a cheapskate. I don’t have money to throw around at the latest make money online scheme. Kidney transplants and dialysis is expensive, even with insurance. So, being a cheapskate, I am extremely picky with what I buy. Like with James, is there stuff I would buy from him? Yes. Will I actually buy stuff from him? At this point I honestly don’t know. If I was making money myself would I? Yes, most definitely.

This brings up another question. How do I go about monetizing without driving people away. I know this is the same struggle that many bloggers get to. I know that it takes selling your own products to make a bunch of cash. I have seen several places that will give you exclusive resell rights to certain products. Can I sell other people’s stuff like this and keep the cash? Sure. Do I want to? I am very lukewarm on the idea. I don’t want to be another one of “those” type blogs. Many of these give you “300 products you can resell” for like $15. How do they make any money for these products? Sure they get the $15 but why are their products so cheap? Are they outdated? Are they just rehashes from other sites? Are they plagiarized from other sites? Too many questions. I may put some ebooks up for sale in the future and some affiliate programs but not right now.

The next thing I am trying to figure out is what do I have to offer that would be either of use, or entertaining enough to entice fellow cheapskates to part with their money. My wife and I have a business that we have been working on selling handmade quilts, table runners and some other crafts at Brenda’s Quilt Shop.com. It has been doing ok in the real world, selling several to friends, neighbors and associates. We have even sold several things on eBay, but we barely broke even with eBay and PayPal fees and postage. I am still going to use eBay over the holidays to sell our stuff but I want to sell with the website as well. On this website I want to focus on selling my writing.

Now, what can I sell of my writing? I am not an authority on WordPress like Dave Doolin, or on blogging or on content production. Anything I wrote on the “how to” front would be rehashes from other places. Is there a market for fiction? I am going to make an ebook of my Saturday fiction serials when they are finished. They will be free for a while at least but would anyone want to spend money on them later? Maybe send them out for free to email subscribers and beg for reviews before selling it. I have other short stories that I am going to run on Saturday’s as well. I am looking at revising some of my old stories that I just love so maybe they can stand on their own as an ebook.

I can write ebooks on simple car repair and maintenence, but that is not something I talk about in more than passing on this site. I can write about kidney failure and taking a 1 year old through 2 years of dialysis and a kidney transplant. I have written tons of blog posts on that as we were going through it while not calling it an actual blog. www.carepages.com page: ameliarosematthews. Would that sell? Maybe. I have seen several things about self publishing on Amazon for both Kindle and .pdf ebooks. That is always in the back of my head.

I just wonder if anyone would buy anything that I can put out like that. Or is my ego just not big enough yet to say screw it and just do it. I figure I have until April and the 3 month wannabe blog hurdle crossed before I have to actually decide and just do it.

For now, I will just write and write and hope like hell people come to read! Don’t forget to check out my Pre-Writing Challenge page that will start on Friday the 19th! That will be more writing! I am also going to work on some guest posts for other sites. All of these things have to be good somewhere right?

Until tomorrow, I have some thinking to do.

Thanks for being here with me.

Justin

On Diapers and Potty Training…

May 27, 2014 / Justin Matthews / 6 Comments

Is there anything that strikes fear into the heart of the “average” man like the threat of changing diapers??? That gets made fun of all over TV and in homes everywhere.

The truth? I have never had an issue with changing diapers. I would just go and change the kids if they needed it. It was always funny to watch my Dad squirm and my Mom ttry to take the kids to change them. Diapers no problem.

I do complain about them now, because my almost 4 year old is doing what I was afraid of more than anything when we first had kids. Potty Training. There should be horror movies written about potty training. There should be death metal songs about it. The end result is fantastic but the process sucks.

The ONLY thing I was nervous about when our first daughter was born 9 years ago was potty training. And not crushing her with my inept grip. Potty training time has been the worst time I have had dealing with my kids. Kind of silly huh? I would rather do diapers if you must know the truth. Flip a brain switch and suddenly they are trained! Woo Hoo! Doesn’t happen though.

Now, you may wonder why I am talking about potty training. It is something I have been doing with my nearly 4 year old daughter who is not potty trained. I have been working with her and it is coming but still….. Why is she nearly 4 and not potty trained? I am just lazy.

No seriously, she spent 2 full years without any kidney’s. She didn’t urinate for 2 years straight. We saved tons of money on diapers. She was completely dependent on dialysis (dialysis is a helluva lot more expensive than diapers, in both money and soul. Not a strategy to save anything) for those years and didn’t have any bladder function at all.

You want a good laugh? Watch the interns at the hospital digging through the diaper pail looking for the wet diaper that just had to be there. We would let them go for a while and then remind them that “bi-lateral nephrectomy” (both kidney’s removed) means she will not have a wet diaper….EVER! The senior Nephrologists love that story too.

So we are here almost exactly 1 year after she received her new kidney. It took several months for her bladder to stretch back out to where it would hold more than a teaspoon at a time. It took time for her muscles to be able to hold in some urine. For the past 2 months, she has been doing well and is fairly normal with her control, if a year behind. We are not worried, it is the time now to get her trained. I am sick of diapers and pull ups.

Besides, there will be a whole new round of diapers when the new baby gets here in July. I will be stuck with diapers for another couple of years and then be done. And then another round of potty training. I can do it. *Deep Breath* I have to, I am the Dad.

Please regale us with your potty training stories below! I would love to hear them!

-Justin

Migraines and Laundry, Which is Worse? part 2

March 24, 2014 / Justin Matthews / 0 Comments

As I started yesterday, This is part 2 of my migraine journey and latest stay at home dad info. And Journey just came on the radio, Any Way You Want It is AWESOME! part 1 is Here

Admittedly, laundry sucks and it is not my favorite thing but if I don’t do it, there are no clean clothes. No, the wife can’t do it, she works and now she is pregnant with number 4 so her energy is gone. I am not complaining about doing laundry I just don’t like to. But I went to fold the 3 loads I had washed. About that time I got what I call the “numb bubble” again.

The numb bubble is one of my migraine clues. It is not the scientific term but it is my term. It is a strange feeling, complete numbness in a “sphere” roughly the size of a baseball that moves. It usually starts in my fingers and “travels” through my hand, up my arm, and through my face. That is the worst part, it is like being on lots of novacaine but it moves. And it sucks.

If you just think that a migraine is a really bad headache, there is much more to it, usually. I have read about migraines lately and there are different types but most have some sort of “aura” associated with them. That is the type I have.

Since I was about 12 I have had migraines but didn’t have them diagnosed until something like 14 years ago when my girlfriend (now wife of 13 years) the nursing student (now Nurse) told me what my “sickness” actually was. I used to wake up in the middle of the night with the “numb bubble” in full swing and the visual aura happening. I would think, “Oh great I am sick again.” I didn’t know all of what was happening but I knew that I would be throwing up a few times with a bad headache to go with it. And then I would be fine later. I believe to this day that my parents thought I was faking because I was better later.

I got medication at the hospital thanks to my girlfriend and from there it has helped to alleviate the symptoms before they led to the vomiting stage. I still have the numb bubble but much less now, mostly just the visual aura that tells me the migraine is coming. I have tried to explain that visual aura to people and I think I will try to do it in the next post.

Later

Justin

Continue to part 3 Here

My 4 year old’s 1 year Birthday is today!

November 11, 2013 / Justin Matthews / 3 Comments

Today marks 1 year since my daughter Amelia received her Kidney Transplant! This is a copy of the post I put up today on our Carepage, the family blog that keeps grandmas and friends informed of what has happened with Amelia.

I have posted links to copies of that Carepage, the posts from the day of the transplant and the day before. These links are on my website. If you click any links on those pages, it will direct you to the Carepages site where you will have to register in order to see more. Feel free to, but you don’t have to. This is the direct link to her page: www.carepages.com and her carepage name is ameliarosematthews.

anyway, this is a direct copy of todays post on the Carepage:

12 May 2010

Well friends, it is finally here, Amelia has had her new kidney for 1 year!

We keep looking back at how fast it has actually gone. From the Transplant on the 12^th, to her going home on the 18^th (6 days in the hospital for a MAJOR surgery kids, she is a trooper!).

Through all of the clinic visits and blood draws, 2X per week for the first month, 2 blood draws and 1 clinic per week for the second month, Every other week clinic and weekly blood draws for the third month, every other week clinic and blood draws for month 4-6, and then to once a month. After our next visit in June, We will be on quarterly clinic visits and monthly labs. That is quite a drop!

By my calculations, that has been 32 blood draws (plus a couple of unscheduled ones for illnesses) over the year, 20 of those coming in the first 3 months! That was a lot of poking for Amelia. Now, at once a month, it is much easier on her. She is still a trooper with it though. She stick her arm out and lets them poke her, and then tells everyone she sees where she got poked!

The nurse at transplant clinic gets told which arm to do blood pressures on because she can’t do them on the same arm as the poke! I really love the determination of a 4 year old. Some days it is interesting to see just how much she remembers and knows about the procedures she has gone through.

She continues to do very well in her overall health. There have been a couple of bumps over the past year but nothing that required her to be hospitalized for. We are pretty proud of that, many kids who get transplants are back in the hospital multiple times.

We have kept her away from many situations that could compromise her health and we don’t take her many places if she is sick. That has helped. We are looking forward to getting back to church and church activites more.

Right now, she is only on 2 regular medications, much better than the 8+ she was on last year after transplant. We tapered them down and now, she is only on the 2 anti-rejection meds that she will be on for the rest of her life. Just a reminder, these medications keep her immune system slightly suppressed to prevent rejection. This is why we have to be careful and still steer away from sick people, she can’t fight diseases as easily as the other kids.

It has been a wild ride so far, we hope to keep going in the same direction. Amelia is currently in the final stages of potty training, something that was much delayed with dialysis and the fact that no urine is produced with no kidney’s. She is finally figuring it out and is almost half way to her one month “no accident” prize!

We also wanted to thank Carol again and again for her gift to Amelia. It is still a wonderful thing that we think about every day. When we think back to dialysis and how we had to structure our lives around it we can’t help but think how Carols donation has helped out whole family. We have much more time together.

We are looking forward to having a barbecue with Carol and her family this Saturday if the weather will cooperate. We will have to see.

And finally, I thought I would list the links back to the day before and the day of the transplant, if you are interested in reading about it as it happened. Brenda still has a hard time reading some of these and so do I. I am working on a book right now about this whole experience and I am going to use these carepage posts extensively. As for today,

Amelia Meets Carol 5-11-09, day before transplant

Day of Transplant

We wanted to thank all of you who have been with us since the beginning, and all of those who have joined us on the way over these past 3 years.

I hope that we have been able to explain what has happened to everyones satisfaction.

I hope that we have been able to give some help along the way (Hi Pollock family!).

We appreciate all of the support that has been given to us over these 3 years. We have had a wonderful outpouring of love and support from all of you. Our lives have been blessed and we feel like you are all a part of our extended family. Thank you again and again.

We are coming to you live and kicking 365 days into the new kidney!

-Justin

PS look for new pictures!

Tag: dialysis (Page 1 of 2)

Can MY blog make money too?

On Diapers and Potty Training…

Migraines and Laundry, Which is Worse? part 2

My 4 year old’s 1 year Birthday is today!

Segments of my Brain

The Mail is Calling

Go Shopping!

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