Free Money and Expensive Coupons

Yesterday marked the twentieth and final day of my blogging strike.  The impact on my life has been small but measureable.  The strike began as a result of the moneymaking aspect of this blog, Google AdSense, disappeared at some point last month.  I have tried to counter the lost revenue – expected to be in the 3-5 dollar range (that’s dollar with a D) – through various means. 

 

My first attempt in surviving these difficult times was to be extra vigilant in my lost coin collecting.  In theory this should work out.  I figure that on a typical day with AdSense, I get somewhere between 2 cents and 10 cents, and then every now and then it spikes to around a dollar when some secret criteria of viewership is met.  You’d think a penny or two, maybe a dirty nickel or looked over dime would be easy to find if you were searching for it.  Well, it’s not… so stop fooling yourself.  I experienced no such luck.

 

Then, I got a coupon book in the mail that claims to have $18 dollars in savings!  I’m not much of a coupon-clipper, but that’s more money than I made in my first three years of Google AdSense!  Armed with this little pot of gold, I headed off to the store, where I proceeded to clog up the aisles as I searched for each coupon.  When I was investigating what size tub of cat litter my coupon qualified me for, I heard a man trying to get through say, “The cats cost nearly as much as the damn kids!”

 

“Ain’t that the truth,” was the best I could come up with as I struggled to flip through pages of torn out coupons.  I wasn’t prepared for the awkward conversation that followed, and like my claim of having “damn kids,” I found myself stating that coupons are a necessity in finding the lowest price cat food.  As I turned away, I ran the math through my head and realized that I was paying about as much as I usually did at another store.

 

In the end, my shopping bill was around $59, and that’s after my $3.25 in coupon savings.  I saved a good bit, but it turns out that it’s expensive to use coupons.

 

Discouraged and down, I returned home and happened to check my AdSense Account.  Not only did I make $1.85 in one day – cha-ching! – but my Blog was back on board!  Good times are here again!  Now that my blog is once again fully loaded with targeted ads, I encourage everyone to check out my sponsors.