As you may have read in my bio, not only do I write this blog and build web sites, I do affiliate marketing through Cost Publishing, which publishes over 100 web sites covering topics ranging from technological gadgets to food to business products and services, but what I don’t often talk about is why I write or how I got started.
I started out writing books on PFS Write about the songs I’d hear kids sing at school. This was before Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web and Marc Andreessen wrote Netcape. I had to collect each song by hand and type it up on my computer at home. I called it, Gross Songs Kids Love.
When the time came to translate the files from PFS Write to a document type that could be read on Windows, my dad had to use his computer at work to print each document to file. During this process he must have read the material for the first time and was not as pleased with my efforts as I was. However, one of my teachers in high school thought the idea of capturing kids songs was good. That was the same year Amazon.com went online.
In high school, I wrote books during Math class like “Tales from Trigonometry Class”, which was a set of fictional stories about heroic teens overcoming their fears of asking the Swedish exchange student out and other feats of the heart. It was printed and distributed by hand. If I find a copy, I’ll reproduce it here someday.
In college I started buying used books from local libraries and selling them on Half.com under the name BluBux Company. In the early days, the margins were big enough for this to be profitable, but over time, the market became saturated and I had to get out. It was the first experience I had working together with my wife (before we were married). She would help me input all of the books into the system to be sold – an arduous task.
After college I started making websites and promoting them online. That’s when I discovered affiliate marketing and how to make money online. Since I was named after a figurine designer named Erich Stauffer, I started this blog to promote it, and eventually wrote a book about Erich Stauffer, the figurine designer. I also wrote a fictional story about time travel and teen romance – a theme for me I guess.
Cost Publishing’s media group, which consists of over sixty blogs, has just under 10% of it’s web sites devoted to the ereader market, which consists of electronic readers, or read pads and their corresponding ebooks, covers, and accessories. Some are specific to particular brands such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle. Both cover the ereader devices and accessories to protect them, but one focuses on Nook covers mostly.
Cost Publishing Media Group, or Cost Pub for short, is a collection of personal blogs, informative web sites, and web directories. This extensive content network’s mission is to filter and codify information relative to each web site’s respective topic. All blogs, web sites, and directories are free to read and use and readers are encouraged to subscribe to RSS feeds and follow them on Twitter and Facebook. Each site will eventually have its own Tumblr site, which is an up-and-coming social network you’ll be hearing about more in the future and ebooks, or digitions, are a natural next step for this market.