Going Commercial

For a while I’ve been getting email offers about putting advertising on the blog. Eventually, the process became easy enough that someone as untechnical as myself was able to do it. So far, I prefer the Amazon advertisements because I get to choose what to put on the post. I just do not care for the placement and am going to have to figure out enough HTML code to move it around to the space in the blog where I want it.

The Google selected advertisements have been fun to watch though. Because one post was titled, “Big Boy Bedroom,” the ads were all fro children’s furniture for days. After posting pictures of flowering trees in the Barton Creek Greenbelt, ads for tree-trimmers popped up. I understand a bit of the technology behind the key-word searches used to identify advertising, but it still strikes me as quite entertaining to see what key words are identified in my writing of different posts.

I have made reference to standardized tests before and I take career assessments and interest inventories for fun to see if I can manipulate them into telling me my chosen career of the day is indeed my dream career (more often than not, I can or I get close). I am curious to see what I can do as a commercial writer to drive specific types of advertisements to my page on any given day. I take it as a personal challenge to manipulate the advertisement without changing the writing I would  be doing on my own anyway.

The two views a day the blog gets certainly are not going to make me independently wealthy as a blogger; at the current rate, i’ll be celebrate my tenth anniversary as a blogger before I get my first check.  Still, as a capitalist, the idea of corporate affirmation just makes my heart go “cha-ching.” With enough amplification, it may even be loud enough to hear through noise-canceling headphones in a quiet room.