Here's the full story:

My first personal site was Btcomm.com (Breakthrough Communications).  I started it in 1995 when I was laid off from NCR and forced into consulting. It was a way of convincing potential clients I was a legitimate business resource.  I never made any money off it directly, but it got me a few okay contracts and one really good one. It's hopelessly outdated now, of course.  I was also getting involved in the Garden Railway community, and - you know me - writing articles about the facts behind various controversies in this growing hobby.  About 1999, I started my own garden railroad, and documenting it in a "hidden directory" of btcomm.com that you could get to by typing family-garden-trains.com.  ("FamilyGardenTrains.com" was "squatted on" by a jerk with his own web page as soon as he heard what I was planning to do - I finally publicly shamed him into releasing the domain name to me.) About 2004, I was working for a textbook publishing company with a lot of downtime, when Garden Railways, a Kalmbach magazine, contacted me and asked if I would put ads for their magazine online. If I went through Commission Junction, they would keep track of every subscription sold and send me money.  

When I signed up for Commission Junction, that gave me access to many other companies' affiliate programs. I discovered quickly that very few garden-sized (Large Scale, G-scale) trains were available through affiliate programs, but many indoor trains were.  So I signed up for the affiliate program for Bradford Exchange (then called "Collectibles Today").  And I started putting little ads for Bradford Exchange products on my site.  I also added a site called "BigIndoorTrains.com" to hold articles about Christmas villages and the trains that would look right with them.  And, frankly, the Bradford Exchange's "Hawthorne Village" trains were a VERY good fit.  By about 2006 I was earning a couple thousand a year in commission, mostly on Hawthorne Village trains, which were then made by a legitimate company (Bachmann).  That was enough income to justify setting up separate web servers for FamilyGardenTrains.com AND BigIndoorTrains.com.  But I felt like the train market was too small, plus I liked writing articles of a more general nature.  So I tried to start something that would be of interest to more people - FamilyChristmasOnline.com.  Eventually I moved that out onto a separate server as well. I put Christmas-related ads on that site, and every year I make enough commission on those sales to pay the internet expenses period.  In other words, it's pretty much a "wash," financially.  However, links from FamilyChristmasOnline.com to my other sites helps THEIR Google rankings. Don't tell Google, because that's technically against their rules.  :-)  

In 2010, I had two simultaneous contracts and a critically ill father in another state, so almost nothing happened on the web pages and I skipped newsletters for months on end.  That year, the sites coasted along okay, financially, but by 2011, my neglect and the bad economy drove them just slightly into the red. 

In late 2010, I discovered that a site I had linked to frequently - the Nelson brothers' original OldChristmasLights.com site - had gone down.  In early 2011, I had a new job, but plenty of "spinning my wheels" time, so I set about rebuilding that site for its fans.  It was a VERY time-consuming and difficult process, but I wanted to have it done for the sake of the community as a whole.  Plus the people who really knew the subject matter and had helped the Nelsons put the site together in the first place were too old or too clueless or both to take it over, even with my help and encouragement.  I did most of this work in the spring of 2011, during which time, I usually get few to no sales anyway, so I didn't notice until the fall of that year just how much my neglect of my "paying" sites was going to be hurting me. 

I also worked under the constant threat that once I got the OldChristmasTreeLights.com ready to publish, the Nelsons' family would come back with a cease-and-desist order and legally seize all the work I had done. Yes, I tried to contact them, and kept a record of those attempts, but nobody would return my calls.  At the same time the Nelsons' collections were being liquidated on eBay by George Nelson's sons. (Sound familiar?)  Four years later, I think I'm safe, but at the time I felt like I was working under a constant threat.  By the way, unlike my other sites, there is no online market for used Christmas lights except for eBay, so that site has run in the red to this date.  I was just approved for eBay's affiliate program, so I've put eBay RSS feeds ads on many of the pages.  I doubt sincerely whether the site will ever pay for itself - except for its value in driving traffic to my other sites - but if it becomes slightly less of a money pit, that's a good thing.

Worse yet, without any announcement ahead of time, Bradford Exchange reorganized its company and broke all of their links, so that any individual link I had buried in any part of my sites had to be redone - and that took countless hours.  That's one reason, so many of my pages now have banners for OTHER pages I own instead of individual products. This way when a product goes away or a link breaks, I only have to fix it on one page instead of thirty.

By the time OldChristmasLights.com was ready for "prime time" and I had fixed, replaced, or removed all of the broken Bradford exchange links, my other sites were well into the red. I have a "day job," but I "finance" all my site expenses through a credit card, so I can keep everything separate for income tax and sanity's sake.  I didn't think at the time that it would be a huge problem, but I underestimated how slowly the market for "luxury goods" like commemorative trains would recover.  Most years, I'd go "into the red" about $1000 by August and completely make that up by December.  In 2011, I didn't make it up.  In fact, 2012 was worse.

In the meantime, I also realized that "Papa" Ted was lying abut how sick he really was.  I started CardboardChristmas.com as a place for the putz house people to hang out and invited Ted to participate.  I also asked permission to post an archive of his site on CC.  He gave me permission, but would not provide me with a CD of the site files, since he had already promised his nearly-useless "webmaster," that HE would "own" the site once he died.  So I rebuilt Ted's site file by file, graphic by graphic, the same way I did the OldChristmasLights.com page. And at the time there was no financial incentive for doing that either.  Even after Ted passed, his relations and his old "webmaster" made a point of telling me that THEY owned the site, including my painstaking reconstructed archive.  The only way I could keep them off my back was to insist that my archive would stay static "for historical purposes," and that every page would have a link to their "real" site.  Again, three years later, that's not an issue, since they let the domain name expire. I think when they realized there was no money to be had, they gave up on the thing. I DO wish they had given me the rights to the domain name though, instead of letting some squatter seize it when they let it expire.  But again, that was another huge effort that detracted from my ability to keep up with my other sites' content and advertising. I have since added a little advertising, plus links to my other sites, to most of those pages.  So it's no longer a "money pit" at least.

In 2013, I started getting back in touch with the other sites' content and updating some of my ads. I "broke even" that year, which is to stay that I started 2014 owing VISA as much money as I started 2013.  But this year I finally turned the corner and started the new year with $1500 "in the bank."  (Yes, if I didn't have a day job, I'd be in serious trouble, but hopefully that's a sign of better things to come.)

But the sites only make money if I keep adding things and publishing newsletters.  The former keeps them rising in Google searches; the latter keeps readers coming back and hopefully clicking on ads. 

I am of an age now where backyard trains are less appealing than they used to be (blame the back), and I've returned to one of my other earliest loves - folk music.  My site CreekDontRise.com contains many odd bits and half-finished articles about music- and Americana- related topics.  By sheer vacuum of "competitors," I have more or less become the internet's expert on 6-string banjo, train songs, and a few other VERY minor topics.  So I've been writing music-related articles as well as train and Christmas articles.  Yes, that diminishes my income potential from the other sites, and the music sites are years from paying for themselves.  But its fun, and it justifies me claiming strings and things as "business expenses."  This year I decided to do the same thing for musical instruments and supplies that I did for trains and accessories - break them out into a separate site so I can put ads on my article pages without fear of them all becoming obsolete overnight. So I started a site called RiverboatMusic.com, which is STRICTLY a collection of "buyers' guides."