When I started Aximsite almost 4 years ago, I planned to have a place to share what I learn in my move into a new breed of PDAs. Aximsite evolved faster than I ever hoped or imagined. I learned a lot about hosting a popular site and the pitfalls that came with it, high dollar servers, more maintenance, and tons of emails. I don’t really feel that I am doing a super duper job at keeping the entire community happy, but I do what I can. I branched out a little into some other areas and realized that I was over extending myself and pulled back a little. I decided to concentrate on only a couple sites and this has worked out well. Sometimes I get burned out, but I always come back firing. I never wanted to leave my day job to run the sites and still have no desire to so. I am the type person that likes stability and I don’t want to worry about where my families next meal will come from based on my websites revenue.
Anyhow, I am rambling… moving on.
I started out building sites as hobby in 1997 or so and nothing was ever visited as much as Aximsite. When my wife saw me building Aximsite, she complained and said, “not another website”. I told her that I would do this one as long as my hosting didn’t come out of pocket and if I got a couple free cases for my Axim, i’d be content. Well, I got that and a little more, but I paid hosting out of pocket for a while. Within 3 months, hosting of Aximsite went from $40/mo to $200/mo but at that time something I had never had happen before happened…. I had companies contacting me offering money for ads!!! Problem solved.
Moving forward I pay a lot more than $200/mo for hosting now and thanks to sponsors, it’s all covered. Since I don’t rely on income from my sites to support my family, I don’t really run the business as a business. Some friends and fellow webmasters tell me I am making a mistake by not monetizing better, but I don’t care… As long as it still feels like a hobby, hobbies aren’t taken up to make money. (At least I don’t think they are)
All this rambling leads up to a PM I got yesterday on Mobilitysite from one of the original Aximsite members that I am still glowing inside about. It is comments like this (Below) that just make me feel all good inside.
“I’ve loved reading Mobility Site, though; your video reviews of the Zune I watched in the last two weeks were better than anything I have seen. I learned more about the Zune watching them then I have from anything else I have seen – everybody else is either way too critical in completely silly ways, or way too “fan boy”.”
Being a Microsoft MVP, being invited to the Mobius events, getting linked from other websites…. These are all great, but pale in comparison to a nice comment like this. I get these here and there and they all make me feel great, but sometimes some of them stand out more than others.
