Selling Out

As you may have noticed, my right-hand bar is becoming increasingly cluttered with advertising and buttons. I thought I'd take a moment to speak to this.

I'm a sell out.

There, that was easy.

Seriously though, I read tons of wonderful blogs written by women (and men!) who have that special spark it takes to build a great readership and to generate some amount of income from ads. This isn't a lifetime goal for me, but it sure is nice to bring in a few extra bucks here and there.

Google Adsense was an experiment I tried with a friend of mine. He was very successful at it and I hoped I could be as well. To date I've made a bit of money, but it isn't really paying the bills.

Amazon.com Associates Program looked like a neat thing to me. Basically they way their program works is that I get a small portion of whatever people I refer to them buy. So far the only one who has found some neat books through this is me, and when I order I seem to get a small amount back in comission. I don't know whether this is technically a legal use of the box, but on the other hand, Amazon keeps feeding me good looking books that I wouldn't have bought otherwise, so I guess they win in the end. If you feel like sharing with me, access Amazon through my link and I'll get a small portion of your purchase for referring you. (This is also know as the "Poor me, final semester tuition, textbook fund.")


Finally, down at the bottom I've started with Project Wonderful. This is a new unique project that sells ad space on your site based on your statistics and an online auction formula. People bid on your ad space. The more traffic you get, the higher your stats, the more people bid. And you make a small profit from their bids. So far I haven't quite figured out how it works, or whether or not it will be lucrative, but I'm always up for beta testing a new product. And it's a major time suck at the office since I recieve new emails and bids and questions every hour.

So that's me, the sellout.