Google pays us!!

It was in the month of May of 2007, I was travelling to Bangalore and bought a ‘Money’ magazine to read. In it, I read about the new phenomenon that is sweeping across the world called ‘blogging’. I was surprised to read how people are making a living out of it and that caught my attention. Rest is history.

While living in the US, I had my own personal blog but I thought then that to have a blog was meant to maintain a personal diary in public. What I learnt in the money magazine was that people maintain their own blogs and if they wish, fortune 500 company ‘Google’ places content appropriate advertisements on the blog. Google pays the blog owner when a visitor clicks on an ad.

As you may be aware that we run a small orphanage in India called “The HOPE House” to care for 15 girls, and I decided to convert my personal blog to the hope house and write on it (blog) on the topic that has become a passion of my life now – Adoption. Slowly pennies started coming in for my writing and that inspired me to write more. Google policy doesn’t pay out until 100 dollars are accumulated and it took 15 months to accumulate the first 100 dollars. Since we live in India, they send out money in Indian currency.

Below is the image of a cheque that we had received from Google for you to see. Click on the image to enlarge it to read the details.

In the first few months of blogging itself I learnt that it is the content and the quality content alone is the secret to success. I knew then that I couldn’t do this work all by myself so I started to invite others also to write. Now I am beginning to believe that this could become a movement where people write on a topic of their choice on our blog and support the hope house operations (caring for disadvantaged children) as well.

It is my hope and goal for the future to make this a premiere blog (or a web site) for family related issues including adoption. If this inspires you to join this (to write on our blog) work, we say welcome with open arms. Read our FAQ section to learn more about the work.

I still can’t believe that we got our first payment and it would be an understatement to say ‘Thank you’ to all our blog authors. Let’s continue to write. With this experience I also learnt that to operate an NGO doesn’t mean to depend on government grants and others donations alone but we can also be creative enough to do our part to support the operations. This gave us a newer understanding of good stewardship of others resources.