I’m going to take another stab at “monetizing” the blog (i.e. loading ‘er up with ads and such). After the fiasco with Google Adsense, I got kinda soured on it, but it’s time to try again. Still figuring out the whichness of the whut on this, so it may or may not be a few days before things happen (if ever).
I’m looking at several different non-Google-Adsense companies for this. In doing so I did some searching on the general concept of how one makes money with a blog… along with ads, the usual suggestions are “sell stuff” (gee, ya think?), and “beg for money.” Hmm. Haven’t tried that latter approach in a while. Never really worked in the past, but what the hell: please send me money. If’n ya like the blog and the stuff I offer, hit that “Donate” button off to the right. If, on the other hand, you massively disagree with my politics or whatever… then clearly the best way for you to demonstrate your superiority would be to hit that “Donate” button and dump such a vast pile of cash on me that I become convinced that your way is clearly the right way.
Yeah. That’ll work.
By the way: I can jam an Amazon search box into any old post, like so…
But what I *want* to do is jam the same search box into the sidebar to the right. Efforts to do so have so far been spectacularly unsuccessful. It would be monumentally *lame* to just keep cramming this into posts, but at this stage I’ve become rather inured to lame.
7 Responses to “Monetizing the Blog”
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You seem to have a knack for finding Kewl Stuff. Why not try the Amazon Affiliates program? Utah is still in the program, true? You wouldn’t even need to link to specific products — just put a link to Amazon on your page and let people know that if they buy something through you you’ll get a reward.
(I’ve read claims that Glenn Reynolds pulls in obscene amounts of money through his links to things being sold on Amazon. Even mildly lewd amounts of money would be worthwhile, I’d think.)
> Why not try the Amazon Affiliates program?
Errr… I’ve been in on that for something like a year now. A link to the Amazon search box has been available on the main page for a long, long time.
> Glenn Reynolds pulls in obscene amounts of money through his links to things being sold on Amazon.
Hopefully his definition of “obscene” has been more successful than mine. I get maybe $5 a month from the AA program.
A link to the Amazon search box has been available on the main page for a long, long time.
Before I posted, I looked for it and didn’t see it. Perhaps you could make it more prominent?
> Perhaps you could make it more prominent?
As I just posted with a full-up post… an attempt to do just that caused the entire blog to simply vanish.
So… thanks heaps.
Sorry about that, Chief …
I was wondering why I couldn’t see your site a couple of hours ago.
On the other hand, I still don’t see the Amazon button anywhere. If other people also can’t see it, perhaps this could explain why you haven’t made a huge profit from it?
Where is it located on your page? I see other links in your “My Stuff” area, but no Amazon link.
> Where is it located on your page?
Where is it located on your page?
http://www.up-ship.com/blog/
On the left right under the “Unwanted Blog” sign, to the left of the red “LATEST DOCUMENTS AND DRAWINGS!” text.
I was trying to get the same thing stuck onto the base blog page (http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/) when everything went to hell. Over the last year I’ve managed to put that little search box into individual posts, but only by manually hammering it into the text of the post. Convincing the blog to accept it as something that should just go onto the right side of the screen with all the other links has proven not only unsuccessful, but costly and nearly disastrous.
Aha! Trouble is, I’ve got The Unwanted Blog bookmarked, and I hardly ever see your up-ship.com/blog main page unless I make a deliberate effort to go there.
One thing that Reynolds does (which apparently is quite lucrative — I’ve seen a claim that he pulls in about $80K/year) is to embed links to Amazon pages in his many, many product reviews … with his referral tag in the URLs, of course. If an official Amazon search box is too dangerous to implement, have you considered a simple link with tag in your “My Stuff” box?
Sincerely — good luck!