Day: December 19, 2010

Boy these blog things are a lot of work, aren’t they? I’ve always been a big believer in typing my way into reality and I think they’re worth it, but boy, they’re high maintenance. You have to feed them, care for them, buy them stuff to eat, take them out for exercise…..

I hope this blog is blatantly commercial-that it seems to be mostly about Things for sale. I’ve had the same kinds of Things for sale throughout most of my career, so I get a chance to concentrate but it turns out there’s always more information that could be useful, particularly in terms of “tags”.

The tags turn out to be important to search results, the search results, to sales, the sales to how long I can just loll around and sleep all day.

And right after you get done realizing your tags will never be finished, you realize blogs can make money in other ways, like advertising.

Here’s a Google Ad:

You see them all over the Internet. This one is supposed to “adjust itself” to my content (we’ll see if it does that). If you click on it, I accumulate some credit and will eventually get paid, partially by the guy who bought the ad. So unless he steals my sale, I like that, which is why you see them all over the Internet.

So I need to think about how much space I devote to that type of thing, and Google is only one example. On top of that, I need to try to control what kind of ads might be shown (I’d be not-so-enthusiastic about anti-hippie ones for example).

Right after I start to “get” that, I also start to “get” out to construct my OWN Google ads, but that’s probably another topic.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the traffic I get although I notice it takes a minor miracle to get somebody to stick on a page longer than two seconds once they arrive at it. And I have reason to believe that so far I send very few people to any of my pages where they can buy stuff (they get to those pages but not necessarily through the blog).

I suppose that’s probably because there are a lot of good bloggers out there and I’m not really one, but if I can JUST learn to move Things out of the Preview category once I’m done previewing them, and point them to the pages where they can be converted (sold), or to the Postviews, I hope to make the whole thing a very handy tool in 2011, so please stay tuna’d