First off let me say that we write this blog because we enjoy it. We love sharing the cool places we’ve been with friends and family and blogging is an easy way to do that (shout out to Allison’s Grandma Martha who gets a printed copy of all the posts and shares them with her friends!). We also love writing about how we do it in case anyone else decides to follow a similar path. We’ve heard so many dreams from people looking to change up their life in one way or another and it’s inspiring to share our experiences with them and exchange notes.
That all said, in case you didn’t know, we make (some tiny amount of) money from this blog through affiliate links. Any time we link to something on Amazon (like our wishlist 🙂 ), we make it a special “affiliate link.” If someone clicks the link and goes to Amazon.com, if they end up buying anything from Amazon in the next 24 hours or so (it doesn’t necessarily need to be the item we linked to), Amazon will pay us a commission on that sale as a thank you for sending a customer to Amazon.com. The nice thing about using Amazon is that they have almost anything so we don’t need to feel obligated to push particular products (and if we love something that isn’t on Amazon, don’t worry, we still write about it and give a link to where to buy it).
You’ve probably also noticed the ads at the bottom of every page (unless you run a decent ad blocker). Those ads are added by wordpress.com in exchange for hosting the blog for free. Sorry we make you sponsor us that way. 😦
What we’ve learned is that blogging doesn’t pay. Or more precisely, we’d have to work way harder (and probably start a youtube channel) to earn much real money. We got to the end of the year and were doing some boring tax stuff and found out how much the blog made this year. We earned $250 from Amazon referrals, but paid $40/year for “therecklesschoice.com” and “recklesschoice.com” (people we meet at breweries who have had a few beers often forget the “the” in the name 🙂 ) and then another $50/year for a business gmail account for [email protected]. That works out to about $2.30 after expenses per post. On average I’d guess we spend about an hour and a half per post once you add up all of the photo editing and proofreading each other’s posts. So about $1.50/hour.
We’ve heard from other bloggers that do a much better job of marketing themselves that they can make some decent money, but the work involved doesn’t seem worth it to us. It would feel like a job then and not just our travel log. So we’ll keep doing what we do and hoping to break even in the costs each year if you keep reading along and letting us know what you think. 🙂
The Reckless Choice 
I like seeing your pics and reading about your adventures, so thank you. I’ll never be one to live in an RV, but my husband and I are talking about buying a travel trailer as an alternative to hotel rooms, as they are quite pricey here in Alaska in summer. I’ll be re-reading your posts about organization!
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We’ve heard that hotels in Alaska are expensive a few times so having an RV of some kind sounds like an excellent way to see the state. We’ve talked about taking a season to see Alaska but we already have 2017 planned out, so maybe 2018? Any must-see attractions up there? Hope you get to do the trips you want to!
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Allison & Nik,
We’ve been following in your footsteps – sort of. We sold our house in September and having been living in our 5th wheel for the past (almost) 4 months. We did the solar thing using a lot of your information and links. We’re using 2 165w panels without an inverter (our microwave is mostly a bread box) and have been pleasantly surprised at how well everything is working and at the great cost savings your tips provided. Improvement projects continue on a regular basis as we discover things that take full-time versus weekend trips to a whole different camping scale.
We opted to spend winter in Arizona rather than a snow state (since we’re from Montana) and so far it’s been GREAT!!
Keep up your postings – we enjoy your adventures.
Connie & Conrad
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Awesome! I’m so happy to hear it was helpful advice! I does seem like a never ending improvement project doesn’t it? How’s Arizona? We keep going back and forth about whether it would be worth it to us given that we love skiing but winter in Arizona seems like Mecca for RV’ers. Any recommendations if we decide to winter down there some year?
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Nik.
I probably need to hit you up on the blogging aspects. Not for $$, but the ins an outs of utilizing word press, your own domain, etc, just to keep a blog active, and interesting (on the cheap). If you are interested in “blog for dummies quick review” let me know. RB …[email protected] yeah, I could look it up, but , i’m sure you have some advice on what not to do, etc.
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I recommend NameCheap for domains. You can probably cut your yearly expenses on domain names in half. These days $40/year is way too much to pay. I used to pay Network Solutions $35/year per domain when they were the only registrar. Then I switched to GoDaddy for a few years, but their prices have been creeping up (and I hate their ads) so I found NameCheap. I’ve used them for a couple years and can’t recommend them more highly.
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The $40 is $25 for therecklesschoice.com through wordpress.com and $15 for recklesschoice.com through Gandi.net which I use for all the rest of my domains. It comes with the SSL cert and private DNS entries. I’m extremely happy with them and their support, their privacy policy and their Terms and Conditions. I’ll probably move therecklesschoice.com over eventually, wordpress.com just makes it really simple to just do it all in one place when you set it up and it hasn’t been worth my time yet at $10/year in savings for the one domain.
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Oops I misread it as you were paying $40/year for each domain. Now I see you have already got this figured out.
I’m hoping to hear about your experience with your AGM batteries when you get a chance. You can email me at my Yahoo address (edbock) if you prefer.
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