My blog is a weapon of education.
Over the last few months I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with this blog. What purpose does it serve and what are my goals for the site. I’m not sure that I came up with anything groundbreaking but I did make a few changes:
New Look: I updated my theme. I’m still sticking with free themes so it’s simple and clean but not anything fancy. Premium themes or hiring a designer would be nice but cost money and as you know this site doesn’t really generate any revenue (more on that in a bit). I also uninstalled a lot of plugins and widgets that were slowing the load time of the site down.
New Pages: I’ve added a few new pages to the site. I added a page dedicated to my commenting policy. The biggest change is basically that I’ll be closing down comments on posts older than 60 days. The only people who typically comment after that are spammers.
And I added a few pages to keep track of my annual predictions. You can see all of my 5 year predictions as well as my yearly Top 10 Predictions.
While we’re on the topic I’d like to remind you (and the FTC) of my disclaimers page and if you’ve ever thought about contributing to the site please check out the Blog With Us page.
No Ads: I toyed with the idea of running ads on the site. As is noted on my About This Blog page, I regularly use Amazon affiliate links when I link to books I’m reviewing or other stuff, but I don’t get carried away. I also syndicate this site through Newstex, which pays me a small amount through their network. I think I made a whopping $90 last year. Nothing to get excited about but it helps feed my Moleskine addiction.
I looked at doing advertising on the site. There are a few ad networks out there I like that I would consider, like Federated Media (FM), but traffic on this site isn’t quite at the level they’re looking for. I looked at FM owned Lijit, I was already running their search widget and may still put it back. Lijit also offers display ads you can put on your site. Not much different from most display ads. I also looked at a few other affiliate ad networks like VigLink. I even installed their widget over the holidays.
So why no ads? I’m not opposed to advertising, and the day may come that I do run ads. It might even happen later this year. But I think that if I were going to start advertising on this site it would need to add something beyond just revenue. That’s one of the reason I like ad networks like FM. They’re true networks that share info and learnings between their authors and extend that network to include brands and partners. Yes the exchange at the end of the day is ad revenue but I feel like companies like FM are doing more than that.
Lijit and VigLink are interesting because they’re also offering more. Lijit, incorporates search and VigLink pools all their affiliate together to get them higher affiliate percentages and they both incorporate some cool metric and reporting. But at the end of it all I just didn’t feel like I was quite ready to go that route.
Revenue is not the goal of this site, education is my goal. I write here to learn and I share that learning with you and in return I learn more from you. Any kind of monetization on this site would have to not just fit into that cycle but it would have to make it better than it is today, because honestly, I’m pretty happy with the things are today.
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