Sean
I would like to know how much money people really get in donations from their web sites. I'll bet not very much. That's one of the problems with the web. It's free, and web culture isn't oriented toward paying for what you find when you surf the web.
You would need to have a web site that gets millions of hits a month for a
sponsor to be interested in your site or advertising that generates any significant revenue.
I have six web sites and have spent thousands of hours working on those sites. It's a great hobby, and it's a good way to share with other members of the cruising community, but it's not a way to make money. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't believe anyone would pay a cent to read anything that I have put on the web. It's nice when people give you compliments. In fact, compliments are the coin of the realm when you have a cruising web site.
I have written five unpublished
books. Printing a 200 page book costs about $7,500 out of your own pocket if you self publish, and printing a book doesn't even get your foot in the front door. You then have to spend money promoting it, or the book goes nowhere. There are over 60,000 new book titles published each year in the
USA, and bookstores carry about 100,000 titles, and your chance of getting a book into a bookstore is close to zero.
I talked to cruising authors at boat shows, and every
single author told me that their
books sales at the boat shows did not even cover their
boat show expenses. Most of them make only a dollar or two if they are lucky when they sell a book.
Web sites, books, and blogs aren't making anyone rich that I know personally. And I can't imagine that anyone could support themselves living off an income stream from books unless they are Lin and Larry
Pardey - and they cruise on a thirty foot boat without a
head.
I believe that everyone should invest in themselves by becoming the best person they can be in their own profession. People of excellence are in demand everywhere around the world. In fact, it's hard to find people who are committed to excellence in the workplace. People committed to excellence standout like the light from a lighthouse in the middle of the night.
When we did our
circumnavigation, we met lots of people sailing around the world, working as they went. Some people cruised six months, and then returned to the states to work for six months during
hurricane season. US citizens freqently made their first work stop in
American Samoa which is a US territory, and they could legally work in
Samoa. Nurses and teachers are in great demand all around the world, and many of our friends worked in education and healtcare in
Australia and
New Zealand. Overall, I would say that most cruisers who sailed on a shoestring ended up periodically flying back to the
USA to top up their cruising kitty.
The USA is the most expensive cruising
destination that I had in my entire
circumnavigation. If I wanted to go cruising and still needed to generate income, I would be down in the
Caribbean working in
Puerto Rico or the US
Virgin Islands on my sailboat. I would be a
charter boat
captain or even
charter my own yacht. There are lots of ways to generate real income while sailing the seven seas.
But making money off websites and donations - that's a passport to poverty in my experience.
Cheers,
(known to have happened before 
) it will keep your stories interesting and enjoyable.
That will be how much????
no, I'm not talking about you wheels), I'm all for sharing and giving them a hand back up. BUT, why would I want to pay someone to tell me about something they are doing if that generosity keeps me from doing what I want to do, which in this case is the same thing. If I go to the gym, and ask a trainer to coach or help me with my workout, I should pay him/her. But if I'm at the gym, staring at the bench press, and some muscle bound narcissist comes over, pumps some iron and tells me about it, I'm not going to contribute to his gym dues....Am I making sense here??? 
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