Both patshead.com and briancmoses.com earn money from affiliate sales. My blog earns me all the coffee I can drink, enough money to pay for all our hosting costs, and sometimes even enough to buy me a fun toy or two each year. My blog doesn’t earn me a living. Brian’s blog generates quite a bit more revenue than mine, but he’s not close to earning a salary, either.

Neither of us are exactly sure where Butter, What?! is going, but we have a good idea of which direction we’re trying to go. In our inaugural blog post, I mentioned that Butter, What?! would be a place for me to post things that don’t quite fit at patshead.com.

Deals don’t fit well with the content at patshead.com. The content there tends to be long lived. It is rare that I write anything that won’t be relevant in 12 months. A large percentage of my content from ten years ago is still relevant today.

Discounts can expire in hours. I’d feel silly having deals like that posted on patshead.com!

People follow Brian’s DIY NAS builds. People follow my virtual machine server adventures. If you’re looking to replicate what we’ve done, I’d like you to get the best value for your money when you’re buying your hardware. I suppose this is true of anything that I’ve blogged about.

I do my best to only recommend products and services that I personally use. I use Craft Coffee. I fly with a Taranis X9D+ radio. I use Ryzen CPUs. I have a cheap Android phone from Blu. If I see a good deal on these things, I want you to know about it.

If my blogging can provide you valuable knowledge, and I can save you $20 on your $300 purchase, and that purchase also manages to put $4 in my pocket, I’ll be pretty excited about it. You got a deal, and I get to buy a slice of delicious pizza! This is a win for everyone.

I’m still trying to get my bearings about which deals to share with you here. I’ve posted two deals so far. A 16 GB flash drive for $4, and a 2-pack of 64 GB microSD cards for $12.99. I’ve never used either of these specific brands or models. I would never have posted links and recommendations for these products on patshead.com without trying them for myself.

I did buy both of these products while they were discounted, though. Is that a good threshold for whether or not we should post a deal? If I’m going to buy one myself, should I share it with the crowd? I tend to do that in Discord already, so why not do it on the blog and social media at the same time?

There are tons of deal sites on the Internet. Why list deals here, too?

There’s the obvious reason. Butter, What?! will earn a bit of money on affiliate sales. If that were the only reason to list deals, then we may as well just list all deals, even if they’d slimy or shady looking deals!

The deals we post will be targeted towards the interests of our family of content creators here at Butter, What?!. Today, that’s just Brian and myself. We’re geeks. We fly FPV quadcopters. We drink coffee. Brian brews beer. We’re both useless in the kitchen.

We may be a lot like you. With any luck, most of the deals we curate will be relevant to you.

Speaking of things that I’d never write on patshead.com!

I would never have written a post like this at patshead.com. I try to avoid metablogging–blogging about blogging. The closest I’ve ever gotten is talking about my migration from Movable Type to Octopress in 2014.

That post is more technical than it is philosophical.

What do you think?

I want to post deals that are a good value. I don’t like to endorse products that I don’t use myself, and I don’t want to stray too far from that idea. So far, I’ve posted two deals that I thought were a good value, and I bought some for myself. How much farther am I willing to go?

Is it alright to post something that I think is a good value, even if I haven’t used that specific product, and I’m not ordering one for myself? I don’t yet know exactly where that line is, but I’m going to do my best to stay on the right side of it!

What do you think? I’m planning to include a link to this blog in every deal I post. Have I done a bad job? Have I encouraged you to buy something terrible without trying it? Am I doing a good job posting good deals? Let me know in the comments below. Let me know in the comments of the deal that made you look at this post! Stop by our Discord server and chat with me about it!