It has come to the attention of my household financial manager (that would be me) that I don’t make enough money. Such is the state of my life. Highly educated but not so skilled in ways that make money.
So my friend Heddi of the Resource Center and I got inspired to Google AdSense our way into financial solubility. First on the agenda was revamping her wonderful Quilting with Children website. This is a website she did in the infancy of the Web, stuck up there, and left. When I got my hands on it, the website announced that she was pregnant with her second child.
Her third is now almost four.
This is the way mom ventures go. But the way the Web goes, you can’t beat good content. So even though the website was about as low-tech as one can get (if a website can be said to be low-tech!), it had great Google ratings and lots of other sites link to it. In the way of the Web, it was a highly educated website that didn’t make any money.
Sounds familiar. So I redesigned it (had to give it more modern clothes to face the world with) and added Google ads. Heddi is going to develop a technique to create more time in the day so that she can update some of the content, but even before that, it’s a wonderful, comprehensive website.
With ads. This is the irony of my doing things on the web for money: I hate advertising! I’m an advertiser’s nightmare. I never look at them. When occasionally I am attracted by a beautiful image, I never remember what company the ad was for. Back when I watched TV, I muted ads. Many years ago I bought a wonderful invention: a VCR that had a 30-second forward feature. Skip the ads!
But the reality of modern day, so the New Yorker tells me, is that people don’t want to pay for content. People who fifty years ago would have paid the equivalent of a pretty good meal for Heddi’s book on quilting now want that information for free. But they don’t mind that it’s now flanked with ads.
Once I was done with Heddi’s site, it was on to my blog. You will see, if you look to the left, I have now installed ads. I have sworn on the life of my next-born child that I won’t ever click on them. But you may. As they say, “Click early and click often!”
I was pretty impressed with the context-sensitive ads that came up on the quilting website. Not so sure about the ones for my blog. I might have to do some fine-tuning. Let me know if you see anything truly offensive!
I guess this is my sort of apology for moving into the crass world of making money. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this blog, enjoying the little bits of time when it turns into a dialogue rather than a monologue. (Hint, hint!)
So click if you feel inspired to; mute if you need to. But I hope you keep coming back!
