Wanna buy me a coffee?

What you'll get from me...with thanx!

Say, hey, everyone!

So this is the story of my (probably disastrous) attempt to allow readers of this blog to, er, “tip” me. I mean, support explosive-ago—a.k.a. this blog and associated efforts—with little monetary gifts. Not much. And not all the time. But now and then.

It’s kind of embarrassing, really. I don’t need the money, particularly, although money is always welcome. It is more an ego thing. It is old saying among creatives that you should never give away anything that you create. If it is free, it means that you don’t value your own work. (Someone once brilliantly insulted me by saying that my blog was “free, and probably overpriced at that.”)

So, it would be a bit of an ego boost for me to at least give people the option of leaving a tip if they particularly liked a column, image, video, or whatever that I would post here. That seemed simple enough to do. There are scores of services out there that allow you to add a “micro-transaction” function to your webpage.

I hurried off to sign up with a couple of them…and discovered my first problem. To wit, their idea of “micro” and my idea of “micro” was very different. Specifically, one of the first services I looked at required a minimum of $5 per donation. That is, if you liked the stuff I wrote or otherwise produced, the least you could send me was half a tenspot.

Like, whoa.

I was thinking more like 50¢ to 75¢. Tops.

The second shock is some of these services charge you big money, upfront, for the privilege of using them. Some are free and just take a small percentage out of the donation — BuyMeACoffee.com seems pretty good in this respect. And I may use it for other projects — but some require you to pay a rather substantial membership fee—more, in fact, than you could probably make from donations over any reasonable period of time.

Again, like…whoa.

Finally, I settled on a more or less jury-rigged arrangement using Gumroad.com. I have set it up so that you can click on a link at the bottom of any blog posting and it will take you to a Gumroad page where you can make a donation of any amount. It can be $0, if you like. Or it can $1…or more.

(The one thing it cannot be, infuriatingly enough, is 75¢ or 50¢ or anything between 0 and $1+. For some reason Gumroad’s system won’t let you do that. Zero is fine. $1 is fine. $1.01 is fine. $100 is fine. But not just cents. In a word, phooey.)

But, the point is, you can now drop something in ye olde tip jar. And, as a gift, you’ll get a JPG Thank You card using one of my images.

Let me stress that I don’t expect you to donate. And I certainly don’t expect you donate every time you read or watch something of mine. I just want to make it possible for you to do so, even if you don’t.

Makes me feel…gosh!…like I’m a genuine Internet entrepreneur!

No. Really. Stop laughing.

Well, all right. You can laugh as much as you like.

Just don’t chortle.

It’s the chortles that hurt.

Particularly when they’ve got backspin.

Until next time…

Onward and upward.

~mjt

And here’s the notorious link:

Care to help out? If you like what I write or the videos I produce, and feel you could make a small contribution to support my efforts, please go here:

https://michaeljaytucker.gumroad.com/l/lzumj

Thanks hugely in advance.

~mjt