In November when I quit my salaried job with health insurance and retirement benefits, I was terrified.  Everyone was already saying that the economy was going to hell in a handbasket, and folks were clinging to their jobs like life rafts.  Four months later, our income is nearly as high as it was last year (granted, never very high working for a nonprofit) and my stress level has gone down by about 80%.

Mark and I now firmly believe that the way to sail through uncertain financial times is to work for yourself, diversify your income base, and become more self sufficient so that your expenses go down over time.  As a result, we have a finger in a bunch of pies --- web design, graphic design, videography, photography, grant-writing, ecological consulting, and our beloved Avian Aqua Miser.  (The photo here is Mark mailing a premade unit and a bunch of do it yourself kits.)

For everything except the Avian Aqua Miser, we operate entirely by word of mouth --- I'm nearing the point where I'll have to turn folks away after just a few months of building up a client base.  But the Avian Aqua Miser is a very new type of income source for me.  It's a physical product which requires hundreds of different customers --- word of mouth won't get us very far there.

And so I've started to learn a little bit about advertising.  Three and a half months ago when we went live with our automatic chicken waterer, we blew $450 on a banner ad at the Backyard Chickens Forum.  When the ad expired this month, we had barely broken even, so we decided to try a slightly different method.  I set up a Google Adwords account and started customizing.  A couple of weeks in, we've gone from spending 50% of our gross income on advertising (terrible!) to 13% (passable, but I plan to keep improving.)

I also decided to try some of the tricks for free publicity that I learned during my nonprofit days.  I wrote up an article about the making of the Avian Aqua Miser and submitted it to Backyard Poultry Magazine.  Mark and I danced around the kitchen hugging each other when we got an email back that the magazine would print our article in their June/July issue.  Free advertising doesn't get any better than that!

The moral of the story?  Mark was right --- we can make a living doing things which feed our souls.  I'm glad I didn't let fear keep me in a job which had gone from a passion to a pain.

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.