The advertising conundrum
I subject you to advertising here. And for that, I’m sorry. Really. You wouldn’t believe the conversations I’ve had with myself about putting advertising here. Of course, regardless of my level of regret, I seem to have made my decision haven’t I?
I don’t plan on doing this very often here, since I have another site for personal venting, but I’m going to spend a post on why I did it. The advertising, I mean. To know that, however, you need to know about my motivations for writing here. Which brings me to a word I learned this weekend: blego (culled from the recent ridiculous discussion at Micropersuasion…maybe more on that later) That is, blog ego. The post asks why did you start blogging? What do you offer your readers?
I’m sure I have a blog ego, but I’m equally sure it’s pretty subdued. I started blogging years ago, just so I didn’t have to write redundant emails to friends and family, since I inevitably left someone off the distribution list and then I’d have to resend and edit a bit. Blogging helped. Still does, since I’ve got lots of folks who check my personal blog pretty regularly, despite my recent inattention to it. I started writing Slacker Manager because I always have bits of management jive rattling around in my head, and it’s a kind of strange relief to be able to shake it out onto these virtual pages.
With respect to content, I want to say that I don’t pay much
attention to it, but I’m not sure whether that’s true. It’s certainly
not focused, aside from just general management stuff. I do pay
attention to what interests me and I write it down. Sometimes it takes
a long time to write it down, like those "Manage Your Boss"
posts. And I do have several lists of things I want to write about
that are floating around. It’s fun to think that I might be building a
"brand me"
but I’m not paying too much attention to that either. It’s also fun to
imagine that this could eventually lead into some paid writing gigs,
like Ensight,
but that’s a pipe dream too. I do pay attention to other webloggers,
though. I read their (your) stuff and I try to extend some
conversations and thinking here. I try to link back and trackback
whenever I can. Most of that is common courtesy, but a small part is
raw greed. I know that if I write interesting stuff and spread my
links around, I’ll get traffic and traffic clicks ads. Greed. Or
maybe not.
Now that you know why I’m writing Slacker Manager, you can be let in on the secret of why I’ve got ads up. We’re adopting a second child. International adoption is expensive,
and four years ago, when we adopted our son, we had a much different
income. Now things have changed, and I figured if I was going to write
Slacker Manager, I might as well see if I can offset some of our
adoption expenses with the thing. Isn’t that a better answer than
"gotta pay for bandwidth and hosting"? :-)
So anyway, that’s the deal with advertising on these pages. I’ll
probably be experimenting with various vendors, just to see what
works. Google’s Adsense does okay here, but I’m a little skeptical about the AdBrite
text ads. They aren’t targeted at all, and some of them are plain bunk
and I don’t feel good about subjecting folks to that. I do want to
offer people a way to advertise on these pages, though, and the AdBrite
network does that. I’ve looked at BlogAds too and I’ll probably experiment with them later on.
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POSTED IN: looking inward
