A plague update is in order. Yes, also in my part of the world Corona was crowned ruler. And at the date of this post, Covid-19 is making a small come-back. Again! But how has this affected me and this pathetically small website?
I’s been a while since my last post, I intended to go back writing in Dutch, but I changed my mind. English is perhaps a better choice to communicate, especially with so much going on in the world. It’s been an interesting two years.
I pretty knew the Trump administration was utterly incompetent and I thought things couldn’t get worse. Then Covid-19 hit. And boy, did Trump showed an even bigger level of inaptitude. Here in Holland things went a bit more professionally. From early March 2020 everybody who could work from home should do so. As did I, and I still do.
It gave me a new perspective on my daily job. It could easily be done from home, but without the colleagues the job was rather boring. The plague showed me what part of my job actually added value to the bank. And it wasn’t a daily and frequent interaction with the colleagues.
That wasn’t the only Corona told me. After an unsettling dip in my portfolio it recovered remarkedly. Having assets that are well spread really helped. That part went well. The sky rocketing of unemployment all over the world due to all the lockdowns, reminded me why I’m doing this website.
Financial independence is still my goal and having my own income stream is still important. In 2020 and 2021 I took a good look at my webstores. Getting more growth in sales is back on the menu. Every year I want see some positive results. A stock portfolio get you only so far and a job can disappear any moment. So start a business and make money.
Plague lessons
Talking about my job, last two years taught me a lesson. My boss encourage the employees to develop and do courses and the like. In 2020 I did a whole bunch of courses on machine learning. Great fun but also very taxing. The question is will I ever use that knowledge at the bank. Since most machine learning jobs go to young new colleagues. Should I invest so much mental energy and time in job that has little growth prospect? What if my boss axes my job?
In 2021 I decided to concentrate more on skills that are more practical after life in the corporate world. That means creative skill that I can use for my web-shops. To give you an example, at the moment I’m learning Blender. This a first result, the infamous donut exercise of Blender Guru.
Besides Blender I intend to brush up on my drawing skills. I need more IP for my webstores. But most of that is talked about in my commercial website Digital Homestead.
On a side note, I revamped both this website and my commercial website. The commercial one I did earlier this year. The theme is twenty twenty-one, I followed a tutorial on YouTube. It’s a bit image heavy and I’m not that happy about it. This website uses the same theme, but I organized a bit differently.
It’ll be a kind of A-B test between my two websites. I’ll tweak now and then the design and see what works. Because at the moment I have too little traffic. Which caused me to lose my Amazon Affiliate account. This will be the goal for this and next year. The websites need to recoup their costs and get me more sales in my shops.