Every once in a while, I’ll be curled up on the sofa with a textbook and a strange and wonderful idea will pop into my head. I really need to open a shop that sells t-shirts with purposely obscure wording! Yeah! Maybe I’ll also sell book bags and long beaded necklaces! Yeah! I’ll be the ultra cool owner with heavily pierced employees. Two hours later, I’ll come to my senses and realize that I only do work that brings in few to zero dollars. That’s what I do. That’s what my dad does. That’s our family tradition. I periodically have these moments of demonic entrepreneurialism.
In the past couple of months, I’ve been playing around with Amazon
ads on this blog. I’m not trying to sell stuff to my regular readers.
I’m pretty grateful that anyone shows up here at all. But visitors that
come here via a strange google search are fair game. I’ve got no
loyalty to them. In fact, some of those google searches give me the
willies. But, if they are here anyway, I might as well try to sell them
some shit.
I have few blog posts that, for some reason, are very popular with
the google searchers. If you google "[color of my hair] personality,"
you’ll arrive at this post.
A couple of months ago, I started advertising some relevant books on
Amazon and they’re selling. I get a buck a book. I am still wavering
about going all out and offering Playboy calendars on that webpage,
because I think that’s what the google searchers are really looking for.
I’ve also discovered that the amazon ads on the margin don’t get
many hits, no matter where you put them on the sidebar. If you make a
quick reference to a book or a movie with a hyperlink to Amazon,
readers won’t click on it. People will click on the link if you do book
reviews. Book reviews also bring in the google searchers, so that’s a
gift that can keep on giving.
Dooce has recently redesigned
her blog to bring in more advertising dollars. She has set up separate
pages for pictures of her dog and for crap around the house. Soft focus
pictures of Flor tile. Each page has its own ads for Kohl’s and
Verizon. She’s a smart, smart woman. And I do love her house crap, which has been photographed ever so nicely.
Apt. 11d 
Matt Mullenweg talks a bit about locating ads in one of his WordPress talks. He says that the best place for ads is on the page for an individual post that a user will arrive at via a search-engine. Your regular readers (and especially writers!) are there for the community — you don’t want to bother them with ads, and they wouldn’t click on them anyway. People who arrive via a search are already looking for something and maybe the ad link is more up their alley then your post.
So he recommends no ads on the main site page, none ever on content authoring pages, but post-specific ads on post pages.
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