If nothing else, this blog exists so that I can both talk about marketing – and put my marketing knowledge and theories into practice. I’m happy to say that we’re now averaging about 250 readers per week, and that’s enough visitors to start thinking towards ways I can monetize the blog. 

Why monetize? Frankly, I don’t expect to make a lot of money on this puppy…but I wouldn’t complain if I did. I’ve had friends suggest that I start charging for content. I’m convinced that charging for content would be the fastest way to kill this blog. Hey – if the Wall Street Journal can’t make a pay-for-access model work, how successful do you think I’d be?

That leaves underwriting and advertising. Since I’ve yet to find a corporate sugar daddy that is interesting in paying me to ramble, all that’s left is advertising.

Fortunately, Google’s AdSense program makes it ridiculously easy to become a corporate sell-out – sign up, add the code to your site, and you’re suddenly running ads, with the bonus of (potentially, anyway) generating some income.

That’s where you come in. 

In order for my master plan to work, people have to click on the ads. Now I’m not trying to skew the results, nor am I willing to twist anybody’s arm, but I’m keen to find out if I’ll make dime one off these ads. The deal is, I don’t have any real control over what kinds of ads they run, so I’ve no way of knowing how interesting or relevant the ads will be to our content. So what I’d like to ask you to do is to click on the ones you find interesting, and ignore the rest. I’ll report back regularly to let you know what kind of money I’m generating with AdSense, and my overall feel for how it’s going. 

So stay tuned…and hit me with some clicks.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 2:04 pm and is filed under advertising.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.