Why The $200 Budget to Start With?
You might be wondering why I chose to start with a $200 budget, instead of starting from scratch with no budget at all, without a penny to scrape with in the first place. Well, there’s three reasons why I chose to start with a budget (and damn good ones too).
1. Commitment
The fact that I put in money is a token of commitment. If I quit, I’m at a loss. A tangible loss. $200 is an amount big enough to do some nice things with, and as such is big enough to make it a loss I can feel. After all I could’ve bought an Apple iPod nano 8GB
That $200 makes things more real, and make sure that I take this experiment serious. It makes sure that the psychology of investing money is helping me to succeed, or at the least to persist.
2. Brand and Web Presence Continuity
The budget enables me to build a brand and have continuity in web presence from day 1. Having my own domain with affordable hosting simply costs money. But because the blog remains in the same address from day one, every link you get stays in place. There’s a lasting presence on the web, and every effort you put in building the brand adds to the value of the brand.
And a strong brand and a strong web presence increases the likelihood of getting a nice price for your blog, in case you decide to sell it one day. Of course, that’s totally out of the question for Scraping Pennies for now. We’re just starting, but it’s good to know that every effort adds to the total value of the brand.
Of course there are free domains and free hosting, they’re widely available even. But they either show ads that don’t earn YOU money but them (the hosts), have terrible performance (and most of the times both!) and generally have a very amateuristic image. And as soon as you start to get serious, you want to move to your own domain and start building your web presence from there (again).
3. Kick-Starting The Earnings Curve
Making Money Online is not new, there are more blogs about it. And there are many systems and tools that you can use to earn money. Some are free, but a lot of them are not. Having the $200 budget makes sure that I can decide on buying a tool or entering a program, that can help me earn money faster. But the budget is tight enough to make sure I take deliberate decisions, instead of impulsive ones.
The $200 budget will help to skip the pennies stages of the Earning Curve as soon as possible and speed ahead to the dollars stage of the curve. After all, my intention with Scraping Pennies is not to scrape pennies 
I intend to get past that stage, and by disclosing everything it’s going to be an interesting case study on how making money online is done.
5 Pennies' Worth Of Thoughts Here!
A Penny For Your Thoughts:
If you don't put your two cents in, how can you get change?
Lode,
This is a seriously cool idea and I’ll be following you closely (already subscribed). I think we’re all going to learn a lot from your experiment.
Good luck with this, and I’m looking forward to what you have in store.
-Brett
Brett Legrees last blog post..eight random facts about me. no kleenex required.
Thanks for subscribing Brett!
If anything, I’m gonna have a lot of fun with this experiment! If it should fail (which it won’t), at least I’ve laughed a lot
This project may lead to some good laughs, but on the other hand it also may be an important guide on how to succeed with a newly started blog or website. As a teacher in information technology i’ve come to learn that learning by doing leads to the best form for understanding, but learning by observation come as a close second. I’m looking forward to monitor your progress (and success
), and to pick up some tips along the way.
Hi Lode,
You will have fun, and you’ll succeed - and the rest of us will learn from it
Brett Legrees last blog post..canada 2, greece 0. a story about running.
@Leif:
Thanks for the early support! You’ve touched on a good point. I’m setting this blog up in such a way that it looks as a new blog. I have another blog already, but I’m not going to leverage the accounts I have for that one to propel this blog forward.
It starts naked, and I’m going to experiment with it as a stand-alone project. The only thing I’ll do is mention it once in a while on my personal blog. I’ll write a post about it next week to clarify that. Full transperancy.
And I’m having fun already