Taking the Fall: Adding Ads

Posted by Jacob Santos on June 27, 2009

Yes, I took the jump at being evil, but I think the small opportunity to make a little bit of money is a little overwhelming. I doubt I’m going to be making that much, but I want to experiment with it a bit and see what works well. That way, I can go to other people and tell them, “Hey, this works and this doesn’t on a blog.”

I’m going to reorganize my site to where it looks and functions better as a blog and as a personal site. The problem is that this site has too many topics combined together and one of my projects will be to separate and brand the site better. I was thinking it would be better to just use another domain and work on that, but having tried that, I just don’t have the motivation to write on other sites. If I have to go to this blog to write this content and then another site for other content, then I’m not going to write content on those sites.

How I write, is to just write what I’m thinking at the moment. If I’m thinking, well, that would be great to write out a chapter of a fictional story or satire, I’m going to do it at that time. If I’m thinking about some programming subject that has been irking me or something I’ve been thinking about, then that is what I’m going to write about. I don’t think, well I have to go to this blog if I’m going to write that content. I’ve tried that, didn’t work too well.

Methods

  1. Ad Networks.

    I signed up to the LinkWorth web site for text ads and I’m going to try that for a few months while I get the other systems in place. The really cool part about this, is that the ad networks already have a lot of advertisers who are looking to place their ad on your site. So I might attempt adsense, but the reason why I haven’t is that I don’t currently have a system for which to display it intelligently to the visitors.

    Google has this ad system that will manage your ads and I think it will be cool to take a look at that and see how it can be integrated into a plugin.

  2. Banner Ads.

    I’m thinking of testing with unpaid banner ads to see what the click-through is and go through several months of testing to see what people click on. One of the problems I have is that, on the websites I work on, the banners show to everyone, all the time, and the same banners all the time. Why? What is the point of continuing to show a visitor a banner after they’ve clicked on it? Sure, they might click on it, not think they like the site and then leave immediately without bookmarking the site. Well, it is going to be several days or weeks before they’ll want to go back.

    Therefore, an idea I’ve had was to remove that banner and perhaps have enough banners to bring another one in. Something else I would do, is limit how many banners are shown and rotate through them. That way, when an ad is removed by someone clicking on the banner, then another can just show up and the one they clicked on will go away for a few days.

  3. Sponsor Posts – I’m not going to do sponsored posts. Don’t ask.

    The problem is that even through I don’t have any influence (that I know of), I don’t want to lose respect for myself, by doing something I don’t agree with others doing.

With #2, I hope to actually use my own plugin (most of the code I plan to use in other places), and work on it. I believe it will be fun over paying for another or building off another plugin that might not be written the best way.

Organizing the Site

What I have is ton of worthless posts that no one will ever read. Those are for me and I want to keep them where I can look over them, or not as the case seems to have been for the longest time. It will require going through my blog and looking over all of my older posts. I can do it one of two ways, one way is to use a custom taxonomy, which I think will be wise while WordPress Mu is being transitioned into WordPress and the second way, which will be a bad idea right now, is to use the blog ID and create separate virtual blogs, like Mu.

Using the custom taxonomy, will allow me to physically separate the content in the theme. I have wanted to do this for when I wrote stories and scripts. Also, it will allow me to keep plugins and projects separated, but still on my blog. Actually, I hope to move my plugins under the dragonu.net umbrella and have absidongames.com, as a news site for the browser game development. This will limit my blog to just programming topics, stories, satire, and personal life (however, I’m doubt anyone will be interested in that). Any miscellaneous topics can also be on this site.

Not every topic is going to have ads. Having ads on posts about my personal life doesn’t seem ethical. Also, the only people who would be interested are my family and friends and they won’t be clicking on ads. That said, having ads on the computer, programming, and WordPress topics seems like a better place to put them. It is more reasonable and logical, because I would have ads on other sites for those topics. I just wouldn’t put ads on personal topic posts.

Ah yes, I also want to work on the photo albums and tag those as well. Some of those are going to be private and others are going to be public. The issue is that most of those will be of my family and won’t be public, unless you are my family.

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