About Me and This Blog, Plus 2011 Disclosures

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I have some new visitors, so I thought it would be a good time to reiterate my disclaimers and disclosures, and provide a little more background about me and this blog in particular.

It’s important to me that my readers understand who I am and what I’m about, so as to preempt questions of impropriety or motivation. But most of all, you deserve to know if I’m a capitalistic mad scientist, or just a starving writer. Spoiler: it’s the second one.

I’ll probably do reports like this again in the future, semi-annually, and of course dependent on the continued existence of this blog.

About Me

You can read a little bit about my background on my welcome page. I describe what originally got me interested in these subjects, and what I hope to accomplish – to increase awareness of health issues and the empowerment of others.

I graduated from The Florida State University with a B.S. and M.S. for Information Science. If you are not familiar, this field is an offshoot of the more traditional library sciences, and focuses a good deal on information resource management, information analysis, and research methods. I also studied topics related to web development and information architecture.

Before finishing school, I went to work for the same university as a web programmer and engaged in that profession until moving to Colorado and focusing more time on this and other website projects.

About This Project

I started this blog originally as a way to collect my thoughts about health/fitness and what I was learning, but it has since evolved into a sort of resource on these topics. Rather than just post articles about what I ate for dinner or how my latest workout went, I decided to focus more on providing useful and actionable information to my readers.

The quality of this resource is obviously up for debate, I’m human and not infallible, however I hope that typos are generally the most egregious of mistakes I make with my articles. I’m in favor of transparency, and will admit when I’m wrong. However, simply disagreeing with me does not qualify in that regard.

I constantly endeavor to provide citations and references for the assertions that I make, and wholeheartedly encourage my readers to follow those links so as to better acquaint yourselves with the literature with which I am basing my articles. I don’t think people should ever take anyone’s assertions on blind faith, especially not mine, and you should try to look over sources whenever possible.

Disclaimer

As far as any advice I may suggest, it is paramount that you work with your doctor in overcoming any serious health problems or determining if you are healthy enough for certain physical activities. I am not a doctor. Shocking, eh? I hope you aren’t surprised by this revelation. Taking this into account, it is important you recognize and understand that my suggestions should not be construed as medical advice. Take what I write with a grain of salt, think about it on your own, talk to your doctor, then do whatever you like.

My disclaimer is linked to on every page of this website, and I don’t just put it there for legal purposes. This isn’t monkey-see, monkey-do, people.

Disclosure

It’s also my responsibility as a blogger to disclose any financial relationships and methods for collecting revenue through my website. You should know, that as far as the revenue collecting part goes, I’m not particularly good at it. For the year of 2011, I grossed $1542.58, with revenues of $2065.50 and website related outlays of $523.92. Other than my writing activities, I have had no other personal income over the past year besides gifts, and mainly relied on my personal savings to contribute to my share of the domestic obligations.

Now would be a really good time to come up with an awesome and useful product to sell, wouldn’t it? Stay tuned.

Anyway, I hope sharing my finances helps to alleviate any concern that my blog is up for sale to the highest bidder. If it were, then obviously the bids indicated a fair lack of interest on the part of my evil corporate conspirators.

These revenues came from a variety of sources, but the biggest ones were product sales on Clickbank (paleo guides), Amazon Affiliates (book sales), Paleo magazine (writing fees), Google Adsense (generic banner ads), U.S. Wellness Meats (product sales), and a small assortment of other minimalist shoe related companies like VIVOBAREFOOT (product sales).

One way I collect revenue for product sales is by the use of a service called VigLink. It automatically affiliates relevent links to companies which have an affiliate program. So, if Terra Plana has an affiliate program (it does) and I link to their site, if a reader of mine clicks that link I may get a small commission if that person makes a purchase online. I only affiliate link to products which I would use, so in a way that constitutes an endorsement on my part.

I also utilize Google Adsense (I may disable it in the near future), and it generates a meager but useful amount of money to feed myself with. The banner ads which appear on the right sidebar are mostly from Adsense. These banner ads are automatically selected by the Google Adsense program. I have little control over what gets displayed by those ads as they are selected by Google’s algorithm based on context and keywords found in my articles.

This does not constitute an endorsement by me, or a business relationship with whatever company appears in that ad, as I usually don’t know what you’re seeing (everybody sees something different). In my case, I usually see ads for ING Direct and Google Adwords, since I visit those sites frequently.

Purpose

Ok, so it has been fairly established that I’m not particularly gifted at making money off of blogging. So, why do I do it? Well, for one my wife is incredibly supportive and understanding, so that cannot be ignored. Hopefully I’ll be more successful in 2012. If not, well I’m not willing to compromise my principles to make money, and I’ll get a real job. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep writing a little if possible.

So obviously, I’m not really doing this for the money. I write, and I share, because I love learning. I absolutely get a thrill when I discover something new that I didn’t know before. Hands down, Wikipedia is my absolute favorite website because of the shear ease with which one can bounce from topic to topic, discovering incredible new things.

Along with that love of learning comes a love of sharing, and teaching. I probably inherited this from my two wonderful parents, who are/were both actual teachers in the public school system. Regardless of whether you think knowledge is power, first and foremost knowledge should be shared. I will continue to share with you all that I learn, to the best of my ability as commitments allow, and with the highest degree of character and propriety which my fallible mind can engender.

Thank You

Thanks for reading this blog, contributing to the discussions, sharing my articles, and buying stuff that you think are cool or useful. I couldn’t do this without you, because honestly it would be just a diary instead. I wish you all good health and happiness in 2012.