Remember when there used to be ads on this blog?  Yeah.. they were annoying.  I didn’t care for looking at them myself, and I knew that no one else wanted to look at them.  So, for the time being, they’re gone… but they did produce one interesting thing… a cheque!

Yes, unbelievable as it seems, I received a cheque in my mailbox last week from AdBrite.  You know how you’ve seen those ads on other sites… “THIS IS A REAL CHEQUE FROM GOOGLE!!” and it shows a hand holding a cheque for $35,625.21 for 1 month’s ad revenue?  Well I have one of those cheques!  And if I had a scanner, I’d show you a picture of it.  Honest, I would. 

And you’d probably laugh.  I know you would. 

$5.40 US!  Sooo…  about $5.90 CDN…

I could go cash it.  I’d probably spend a couple of dollars driving to the bank, and then stand in line for an overly long amount of time, and then sheepishly hand my piddly little cheque to the bank teller…   Or I could just do what I’m going to do…  tack it up on my goals board, next to my Lexus, and a few other things…   and tell myself that some day, these cheques are going to start flowing in on a regular basis… and in increasingly larger amounts…

But for now this $5.40 US cheque is a reminder that anything is possible… with a lot of work… and a little luck…  anything is possible…

I’ve mentioned watching the stats a few times.  I find it interesting to see what people are typing into a search engine and then clicking on the link to this blog.  I ran a report from Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2009.  The results were a little surprising.  There were over 300 distinct search terms in the report.  Keep in mind that most of these overlap to some extent.  There were probably 15 different searches that included the words “McDonalds” “Monopoly” “Sucks” in some form or another.  The same was true of the President’s Choice Children’s Charity Bear.  I didn’t want to get too involved with combining related searches, and simply cut and pasted the top 10 results into a spreadsheet.  Ironically, it seems that many people type the entire URL into the search engine. 

The top 10 list of search terms for 2009:

You may have noticed some additional clickable links scattered on the pages.  I found another ad network to try out, Kontera.  This one is SUPPOSED to have contextual advertising, which means that it should display a little popup ad based on keywords from the content of the post that it appears in.  So far, I haven’t seen great examples of that, but it’s still new on the site. 

The difference between Kontera and AdBrite is that AdBrite picks its ads based off a master list of keywords that I submitted for the website.  It’s pretty hard to generate a list of relevant keywords for a site like this, but I tried to choose some from themes that I knew were recurring.  I’ve seen a lot of Capital One ads pop up. 

I don’t plan on running both networks on the blog because it’s just too much, and really… it’s more annoying than anything.  I WOULD shut down the AdBrite ones while I’m testing Kontera, but I found AdBrite such a pain to get up and running, that I’m afraid to tinker with it.  So bear with me… I’ll get it figured out, and cleaned up shortly.

BTW…  I had to research which spelling of “bear” vs “bare” to use… I’ve been using the wrong one all along.  There are entire websites dedicated to this problem.  Some people have too much time on their hands!

I have to say that I’m not super impressed with AdBrite.  It’s supposed to be a viable alternative to Google’s AdSense, and I suppose that it IS an alternative, but whether it’s even in the same ballpark, well, I don’t know.

This is a personal blog, and it doesn’t drive the kind of traffic needed to make advertising a sustainable passive income.  I knew that going into it.  It’s no fault of AdBrite, because the same problem would occur with any advertising network.

But where I find Adbrite frustrating is how difficult it is to get the ads onto the site.  They’re not purely contextual, like Google AdSense ads are.  They don’t displays ads based on the page’s content.  Instead, when I set up an ad, I have to provide a list of up to 50 keywords.  That wouldn’t be such a big problem, except that it seems to take days before the ads start working.  That is a problem because they don’t always seem to work, so sometimes I wait for days and then decide to take down the ads, and redo the ad zone, and have to wait again. 

I’ve also noticed that sometimes when I check the site, there are NO ads displaying, even though they had been there earlier.  I’ve asked other people about this, and they’ve said “what ads?”.  So I don’t know what’s going on there. 

I’ve also noticed that they pay much less per click than Google AdSense does. 

All in all, I’d say that AdBrite is an interesting experiment, but I don’t think that I’ll be buying my new Lexus from the money generated through it.

Why is it so difficult to get into “the zone” sometimes?  If I’m out somewhere, or driving, I’ll constantly get flashes of things and think “This would make a great blog post”, and then when it comes time to sit down and actually put pen to paper (does anyone even say that anymore?) I’ll draw a blank.  Maybe not a complete blank, but enough of a blank that it almost seems painful sometimes to write.  It’s not like I have a ton of distractions around me.  I can’t think of any real good reason why I shouldn’t be able to find the zone, stay in it for a few hours, and pump out some kick-ass content.. whether it’s this site, or another.

Dunno…

Yesterday marked a milestone for the blog.  The 100th comment.  Sure, 97 of them are from people who know me, but I still managed to get some from other people who stopped in to read, and took the time to leave a few words.

Now setting my sites on the next goal!

I’m currently trying out a couple of different alternatives to Google Adsense, and have thrown them blatently in the middle of the right side bar, where they stand out like a sore thumb.  This is simply a test.  Please ignore them and carry on. 

Merci! 

OK, it’s not really Goodbye…  I’m just dedicating this weekend to locking myself up in my home-away-from-home office and getting some serious work done.  I have a few major goals that I want to accomplish before I go back to my day job, and this is the perfect weekend to get my butt into gear.  There’s a hurricane coming up the coast (Hello, Bill!) so it’s a great weekend to stay inside and block-out everything going on outside.

Until the power fails.  Then I’ll have to set the cats up on a treadmill-generator.