Freed by 50

In late 2013 my wife and I moved into our house during an especially cold Fall.  We’d just upgraded from a small condo to a large house, and we were officially house poor.  By hilarious coincidence, our closing date was just three days before we were scheduled to leave for a non-refundable Dominican Republic vacation we’d paid for half a year prior.  Since oil prices were at an absurd high, my number one fear at the time was that our house would be sitting there running the heat for a week with no one home (I’m weird like that).

I ran out and bought a cheap Honeywell wifi thermostat so we could monitor the house while we were gone.  It was a much more complicated procedure installing it than I had imagined because my home did not have a C wire for the thermostats, so there was no way to power the thing.  I had to scour the internet for information about how to power my thermostat and eventually found a solution buried on a Honeywell forum.

My whole vacation I kept wondering why it was so hard to find that information.  I also kept checking my house’s temperature.  I quickly became obsessed with the idea of automating my home.

That year, SmartHomeReviewer.com was born.  I had launched plenty of other blogs and websites in the past, but this one was the first with a defined purpose.  My goal was to focus on consumer smart home products, weed out the crap, and help people like me automate their homes.

For about two years I posted sporadically.  If I bought something new, I’d make a series of posts and videos about it, I’d throw it all up on the site and just let it go.  Although I’d tried a handful of affiliate marketing programs, I wasn’t getting much traffic, so it didn’t really matter.  I just kept automating my house, writing posts, making videos and occasionally sending articles to friends when they had home automation questions.

Then one day I was checking my bank balance when I saw a $75 deposit from Amazon.  I figured it was a refund for something that my wife had returned.  I looked everywhere, but couldn’t figure out where the money had come from.  Later that day I was writing an article and I noticed my traffic from the previous month had spiked, and over 1,000 people had read my posts.  I checked my Amazon affiliate account, and sure enough, the check had come from there.  My website had just turned a profit for the year!

As it turned out, I’d written something that Google ranked as a #3 search term hit for Phillips Hue lights and people that read it were sticking around my site to read more.  I kept on writing and reviewing, and people kept reading.  Soon, companies started sending me free things to review.  My traffic was over 100 people per day.  I could count on the website to spin off at least $120/month.  I was, and still remain, both shocked and grateful.

Today I continue to maintain the site, although work and my kids have eaten into a lot of the time I used to dedicate to it.  The site gets almost 30,000 readers a month, and it’s earning me an average of $275/month.  My yearly layout to run the site is about $180, and I tend to buy at least one new smart home gadget a month, which gives me more than enough to write about along with the dozens of devices I already own.

I never set out to make money from my site.  I always thought it would be a fun way to help people learn from my experiences and mistakes.  I wouldn’t dare count on the money coming in.  Any number of things could happen and the income could drop to zero in a day.  But it’s been a fun ride and I will continue to enjoy automating my home and sharing my experiences no matter what!