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September 13th, 2007 by Spud Oregon
Exactly six months ago to the day, I started Nice4Rice.com after thinking up the name in the shower and laughing at the prospect of calling myself Spud Oregon. It came at a time when John Chow was pulling in thousands of dollars from his blog, and everybody wanted a piece of the pie.
I was already earning a respectable income on the net and thought I could add to that with the addition of a blog. Before starting though, I wanted something that would make it different from all the other blogs in its niche. Everyone was crying out for backlinks at that time but it was really hard to get them, so I decided on the “free backlink rice giving idea” and called the site Nice4Rice. Smart thinking, eh?
Unfortunately not. Barely one month later, the DoFollow Movement took off, and before long, everyone was giving away free links. So, I made a promise to myself that if I wasn’t earning at least a dollar a day by the end of three months, I’d pull the plug on it.
I’m reminded of Darin Carter’s interview with Jeremy Schoemaker. Darin asked him what he would do differently if he could start blogging all over again, and Shoemoney replied “I would not have started the blog. Its a total time sink for the return.”
In my case, that couldn’t be more true. I would only write something once or twice a week, but it would usually take me hours to make each post, and I’d be thinking about what to write for days. In fact, compared to niche websites, it’s so much harder to monetize a blog - at least in my experience.
With that said, I’m going to swallow my pride and wrap up Nice4Rice here and now. This will free up my time and thoughts to focus on something more profitable.
It’s been a great experience though. I had to learn PHP to make my own Wordpress theme and write the functions for “rice-giving”. I wrote a few plugins and even got to grips with MySQL. All good skills which will serve me well in the future. Best of all though is the people I’ve met, the blogs I’ve been introduced to, and the friendships I’ve made.
I hope you’ll understand (I have a family to feed now), so thank you to everyone who has supported Nice4Rice, and I’ll see you around on your own blogs.
P.S. I’ll probably leave the site up until the domain name expires, but I’ll turn off commenting and rice-giving much sooner to stop spam. Update: Voting and commenting have now been disabled.
Posted on September 13th, 2007 in Announcements.
Comments: 27
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NO ………….. You Can’t GO !!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s sage person that knows when to quit and redirect that time to more important things.
At least you learned something.
Thank you for everything and good luck for the next 18+ years
Steve
Why not participate in my $500USD contest(end sept. 30). If you win, you could stay for at least another year.
Or do a few contest like that and you won’t need to shut your blog completely until the domain name expires. It may pay for the hosting till then.
It’s just a taught.
I suppose since I don’t know you that a “Don’t go” thing would be odd… however I just stopped by your blog for the first time today and enjoyed it very much… just wanted you to know.
Best of luck in the future!
too bad, so sad… but oh well… was good while it lasted and im sure you learned tonnes! anyway now you should focus on longcountdown.com as that is the money site! haha! actually its a great site and hopefully you will have more time for it… perhaps you can write about all the tom foolery with Rikuto! your net buddy 4 life!
Mike
Good luck on your other projects Nick! Everything in this world comes to an end one day, it’s too bad today is that day for Nice4Rice.
I personally think you could succeed with this idea, that’s why I had supported it from the beginning. But that’s just my personal opinion.
I think you know better, and maybe with more free time you can make something else that’s is more worthwhile.
Ades
We’ll all miss you, Nick. Will you be shutting down some of your other sites as well? Please say “no”, because I really enjoy reading your posts
Best of luck in the future, though. I’m sure you’ll think up the next big thing in no time.
Thanks Jason. I’ll still be posting on my personal blog from time to time.
Why not try to sell it for at least some money instead of leaving it until expires?
Make me an offer!
What is the selling price? OR I bet you there are a lot of people who would donate money for the hosting. Especially if you leave the ‘rice-giving’ section….what do you say guys…this is a great SEO resource with some great readings also.
The problem isn’t hosting costs, it’s time. If you combine all my websites and total up the visitors, Nice4Rice only accounts for about 2% of those visitors.
The hassle of selling and transferring the site makes me reluctant to sell unless the offer is substantial. But you or anyone else can email me an offer if you like. I won’t be naming a price in these comments.
[…] Today is sad day in the blogosphere … Nick (aka Spud Oregon) has decided to pull the plug on Nice4Rice. […]
Spud, this makes me sooooo sad. I understand. I really do but this is one of the coolest concepts out there. I love the little rice bowls and I just can’t imagine it gone. You did a great thing here and I look forward to seeing what else you might do. Good luck for the future.
Thanks for a great site. Being new to this webmastering caper, I’ve leaned a ton from your posts and others’ Reponses.
I thought you had a good model going, but I guess your final lesson for me is that a net-savvy audience aren’t the best demographic to make money from… I suppose they’ve just clicked on too many banners and google ads in the past to fall for those old shenanigans that make us our money.
For better or worse, I guess newbs and rubes seem to be where the most bucks are.
All the best, and thanks for everything!
Thanks Aussie. Yeah, it’s a tough niche to crack, not that I didn’t enjoy trying!
Spud, we will definitely miss you. I have become your loyal reader:) it’s sad not to be able to read any blog post from this blog anymore. But if you can’t picture doing this anymore, you got to let go.
Finding niche and profitable market in internet is really challenging and sometime a bit of luck too, and I think blogging for money topic market is too crowded now and leave little money on the table:) It’s a smart move to pull the plug now if you don’t enjoy it and start taking up your time. I’m sure you will have better ROI if you start doing some other things. But this is just the beginning, I”m sure I’m will hear from you again:)
Cheers Ken, I do enjoy it, but just because you enjoy something doesn’t mean you can make money from it. I have about ten websites and this, despite being the most fun, takes the most time and earns the least money - go figure!
Thanks for reading!
LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
“LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL”
What this is about:
I was a regular reader of Bruce’s blog. He even asked me once to write a guest post for his site. Then I wrote about 9/11 and Bruce disagreed so strongly with my opinion that he made this comment:
He then deleted every comment I ever made on his site and wrote a blog post declaring how pro-American he is.
Well, Bruce, while I’m sure you’ll never come back here to read this, I just want to say I’ve got nothing against American people - or you for that matter. If I choose to voice my opinion about the U.S. government on my own blog then I should be allowed to do so.
Although you don’t want me to visit your blog, I’m going to anyway because I like what you write and I wish you success with DayJobNuker.com.
Well if you are going to continue to take the high road then you are going to force me to apologize.
Alright, I apologize.
But you are a Brit (nothing wrong with that) living in Japan (really nothing wrong with that because I sometimes wish I could go back there) and so I think those two things really limit your ability to accurately comment on the US government.
The US government has a lot of faults and I hate them from time to time (as I wrote about them taking away my online poker income) but they did not blow up buildings and contribute to 9/11.
America is the one country that has a big problem with immigration because people want to get IN from all over the world. You or others can hate it (I know you said you didn’t hate it) or hate the government, or hate anything about it but you have to admit that people want to get IN instead of OUT. That is because people are more free in America than anywhere else in the world.
That is why I am proud to be an American. You should be proud to be British and your wife I am sure is proud to be Japanese.
I will unblock you if you would ever like to comment on my blog again. I apologize once again (I was out of line to make those exact comments) and wish you good luck. You had/have a very nice blog and I can only wish that someday I will have one as nice as yours.
I hope Al Quada never attacks the U.S again, or England or Japan.
I’m glad you guys made up, but I don’t think anyone should ever underestimate the value of an outsider looking in and critiquing the systems, values and mores that insiders learn to live with and accept as ‘truth’.
Consultants have made an industry out of challenging concepts that insiders take for granted, because some of them actually do it incredibly well and help change businesses for the better.
Authors like American-born Bill Bryson do a fantastic job of critiquing other countries’ values and idiosyncrasies. He was right on the money with all the (insightful) pointing and laughing he did in his book “Down Under”.
The other thing I have to say on DJN’s post is that your conclusion of ultimate freedom is based on a completely incorrect premise. There are PLENTY of countries that people are clambering to get into, it’s not a problem unique to the US… and they can’t all be the most free places in the world
.
I realise America does have a huge problem, due to its proximity so many poorer countries, but there really are a number of us with immigrants risking life and limb to get a piece of the freedom our various countries offer. Australia has to turn around a continuous stream of people crossing the pacific in unsafe boats as illegal immigrants.
Freedom’s also highly relative… my Californian girlfriend left the US, tripled her relative income (doing the same work) bought a house she could never have afforded in the States, gets massively increased social benefits (like the free health care provided to all Australians by the government) and feels more free to say and do whatever she wants here than she did in the US… but I recognise that others might not feel the same way.
I’d also recognise that saying my country is the best at anything as abstract as ‘freedom’ really would be quite an insular, short-sighted and denigrating statement to make in the faces of the rest of the world.
Ohhhhhhhh
I really enjoyed your blog… Sad, but then again - if you have no time to blog because you must think of your family, then family is the right choice 
All the best to you and your family
Hi Nick, try to post a SitePoint auction http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/ Maybe someone will buy it.
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