Behind The Scenes Of Running A Journal

Q: I know this might be a bit on the personal side, but I have consistently wondered what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to running a successful journal. I am sure a lot of readers simply think you write up posts and conquer home improvement projects but from owning my own small business I know all about the “maintenance” (like taxes, health insurance, business licenses, etc). I do not know if it is something you are willing to talk about but I am sure there are a lot of other aspiring small business owners and bloggers who would like to learn about everything that goes into keeping YHL going. Thanks so much for the daily inspiration and all that “eye candy” as you call it! – Miranda

A: We thought this question was ideal for the ol’ blogiversary since there are certainly a lot of behind the scenes undertakings when it comes to keeping YHL up and running! The good news is that the “maintenance” as you call it is absolutely worth it – because we are doing what we enjoy and – pardon the corniness – following our passion. Sorry, I cringed when I typed that but it is true.

Back when we began YHL we did not have a business plan (read all about how our journal baby evolved here). We did not intend for it to be anything other than a hobby on the side to keep our friends and family in the loop when it came to our continuous house projects. So over the years as YHL grew and we slowly wrapped our minds around the fact that it could be more than simply a nights & weekends hobby, we knew we had to not only learn about blogging, but also needed to learn how to run a small business since it slowly snowballed into my full time gig and is now John’s as well. The strong thing was that it was not too intimidating because we simply chose to learn as we went- which is exactly our approach when it comes to home improvement. And thanks to people like our brother-in-law (who owns a small business) and our accountant (who we met through a close friend) we can certainly attest that it is possible to go from knowing absolutely nothing about saving for your own retirement and paying for your own medical coverage to becoming knowledgeable in all of those areas and then some.

First we will mention journal hosting. Gone are the days when we’d spend $180 a year hosting our site through BlueHost (that is an affiliate link). Sadly we outgrew them as our traffic slowly increased. They are a good starter web host because you can split the expense by sharing a server with dozens of other people. But as our traffic overloads began to crash our site last summer, we took dozens of other blogs down with us- oh the guilt! They eventually said we were too much for them to handle (in short they broke up with us – sniffle) so we set about finding another host with more room to spare. Happily we found LiquidWeb (that is an affiliate link) who placed us on our own jumbo dedicated server to keep from crashing (ourselves and others) when thousands of people click on a giveaway post all at once to enter. Whew. It was a bit stressful moving two years of files over to their server (let us simply say thousands of comments and hundreds of images went missing and we had to digitally restore them) but we lived to tell the tale! And the site has been humming like a well oiled machine ever since – even more so since we upgraded to an even larger server back in August. The only shocker was learning that we’d have to go from spending a couple hundred dollars a year to a couple thousand (it was quite the jump). But it is simply one of those hidden business costs that are all part of the equation of being bloggers- and we are so glad to have so many people stopping by to see us. You folks are worth every penny it takes to support all the traffic!

On top of using LiquidWeb to host our journal we also learned that it was helpful to use another company to host our images (it keeps the page loading faster and avoids the risk of having everything in one spot). For this reason we use an Amazon cloud server to host all of our images which charges us based on the volume of images we use (plenty) and traffic we get (also plenty) so it also adds up to a couple thousand dollars a year. We tried using a much more affordable option like Flickr or Photobucket (which are nearly free) but many of our readers lamented that our images were coming up as blocked when they checked the journal from work, so we opted to keep the site as accessible as possible. For anyone interested, we have also been especially impressed with their service and have never had an image issue since trying them on for size nearly a year ago.

Now for the taxes explanation. We pay quarterly federal and state taxes on every dollar that we make, so a good chunk of change goes right back to the government every three months. I am not gonna lie, this was certainly the biggest adjustment. It sucks to go from the every-dollar-I-take-home-is-mine mentality to the every-third-dollar-I-take-home-must-be-saved-because-it is-owed-back-to-the-government mentality. Of course we know that taxes make the world go round and that simply because people who work for a larger company get them taken out before the paycheck is generated does not make it any less of a hardship on them. But it truly is a mind shift to look at your bank account and know that the number is not truly what is yours because you have to save a fraction of everything and send it in every 90 days. We have hired an accountant (which we certainly recommend to anyone else who aspires to journal as a full time gig) to assist us make those quarterly payments four times a year. It is certainly more pricey than paying someone to do annual taxes (since they are filed four times more frequently) but it is such a lifesaver. Our accountant is the best, and he’s certainly especially knowledgeable about every single aspect of our business – so it is a lot easier than blindly trying to navigate this new way of living by ourselves.

Being our own bosses also means that we pay for our own health insurance as opposed to having that covered by an employer, which has been another fairly major adjustment since we used to be covered by John’s office. It was not hard to find insurance (we simply Googled around for “freelancers insurance in Virginia” and got a few recommendations from other self-employed friends) but we will admit that it is not exactly lively to pay for it each month since it is a lot more than we were used to paying (let us simply say there is an extra zero). But in the peace of mind arena, it is priceless. Especially with Clara around.

We are also now responsible to save for our own retirement since we do not exactly get the remarkable company-matching 401K benefits that we used to. Instead of being called a 401K it is in fact called a SEP (Simplified Employee Pension) and we in short divert a specific amount of our income every month to that account in order to ensure that we can retire someday! It is funny how little things like retirement are not truly things that you have to research or think much about when your company does it for you, but it was certainly something worth learning about when we were tasked with looking out for ourselves. In fact it was in fact kind of lively to learn about how to Hands-on something like retirement. You know we enjoy jumping in and getting our hands dirty (so picking the right company and plan was semi-enjoyable).

Of course we also pay for a business license and to maintain Turbodizin as an LLC each year. There are in fact a decent amount of annual business fees and expenses since we are a bona fide two person “company” (even though the idea of being a company makes us laugh- we simply consider ourselves to be two people sharing our home improvement trials and triumphs on the ol’ journal). If you are looking to learn more about licenses and other “paperwork” items like this, simply check out both your county and state government websites for business info (we have also found that our accountant and lawyer friends are a wealth of knowledge on the subject).

Also in the column of behind the scenes maintenance, there are those occasional times when we have to hire programmers to fix any bugs or glitches that slow things down for our readers. We also occasionally invest in business equipment – like a faster/bigger computer or camera simply to keep up with the times so we can edit larger videos and take better pictures to enhance the site and our readers’ experience when they drop by. These few and far between expenses can be lively (who does not like a little update here or there?) but it can also affect the time that it takes for us to save up for major or even minor projects here at Casa Petersik. So although we might have been dying to tackle the bathroom remodel or the basement overhaul, we may have had to wait a few extra weeks or months until we had the funds to take that on since we simply got a new camera or paid a coder to fix some journal glitch to keep YHL looking up to par.

And speaking of undertakings like bathroom remodels and basement makeovers, we also take on non-stop projects here at YHL. It might sound silly to mention, but simply to keep the journal up and running with new content and info calls for regular home-related investments (sometimes we daydream about being someone like Dooce who blogs about her life without any necessary home improvement store purchases… but then we snap out of it and realize that we could not stay away from the paint and wood cutting aisles we tried). So we have gotten used to budgeting and saving up for every project that we tackle, both big and small. Even if we simply tackle one mini project (like making a pendant light fixture or whipping up some cork vases) that is still money that is going out, so we have learned that it is smart for us to save for and expect those expenses as well. It is all a part of being our own business, but it is worth keeping in mind if you are looking to maintain a home journal- the key is that you have to keep tackling new makeovers and projects (which means they’ll likely know you by name at places like Michael’s and Home Depot since they’ll see you at the register so frequently).

Whew- so there is a little behind the curtain look at how we keep YHL up and running. We can certainly attest to the fact that it is not something that “practically manages itself” (we wish) but it is so worth it because (corniness ahead again) we are living our dream. There is nothing we’d rather be doing and no one else we’d rather be sharing our adventures with. So a big wet kiss goes out to every single person who drops in to see what we are up to around here.

Update – Some of the most frequent requests that we get are for info about professionally blogging (how we made our site, how we grew our following, how we make money, etc) so we shared all of the details about how we began a journal, grew our traffic, and turned it into a full time job.