Going After the Easy Money – Monetizing My Blog!!! Readers as Clickers!!!

A friend tells me that her sister, TLH, recently “monetized” her blog. Putting aside for the moment this exciting new word that so enriches our language, let’s consider, instead, the consequences of monetizing her modest blog and how I might profit by her example . . . .

As my friend tells it, immediately, on TLH’s blog, two ads appeared for Google and . . . something else. A bit unsightly, to be sure, but it wasn’t KFC or an ad for one of the those time and effort saving devices like chairs that exercise you while you lounge about, so no real harm done.



TLH received $1.14 from Google for the access to her blog space. Initially, I had thought that someone at Google, using fancy math, determined that the company should make an investment of $1.14 in TLH’s blog on the assumption that one of the readers of her blog – a blog mostly devoted to the intellectual amusement park known as “contemporary literary analysis” with the added attraction of a few peeps into TLH’s exciting life – would see the Google ad and suddenly remember something that needed to be googled and insofar as TLH’s blog wasn’t riveting enough to keep the reader anchored (imagine that!), away he went to Google for whatever it was that seemed more compelling at the time. (What, no interest in current controversies surrounding Derrida’s critique of 19th century French diarists?) And then, of course, he bought something advertised on Google.

But no, Google doesn’t make an investment. How absurd! They wait to see how many people visit a blog . . . it’s all based upon the number of clicks on the blog. (Hence, TLH, the $1.14.)

So . . . do you understand what I’m getting at here?

Clearly, I gotta get after some of this easy money. After all, I have nearly 9 million readers (as scientifically demonstrated by demographic studies using algorithms with which we can confidently extrapolate 9 million readers from my 25 “followers.” (See “Blog Readership vs. ‘Followers’: A Demographic Study Using Algorithms to Extrapolate Readership from ‘Followers’” in the May, 2009, issue of “Journal of the Institute of Blog Studies.”). So I should be able to attract a sizable amount of clicking out there. In fact, if you’re reading right now, stop. Leave. Come back. Stop. Leave. Come back. Stop. Leave. Come back. Eventually, you’ll finish whatever it is you’re reading.

See if you click . . . a LOT, I will earn enough to write more than once a week. Everybody wins!!! Based upon TLH's experience, I should earn $1.14 . . . per click!!!

But I see difficulties with this easy money scenario. Chicken/egg difficulties. At least that’s what I’m told by another young friend of ours who is a VP for a Madison Avenue advertising and PR firm. I told her about TLH’s blog and her meager earnings (TLH: Are you reading this? Stop. Leave. Come back.) and that I may need a PR campaign to acquire more readers thus seriously monetizing my blog. Nine million is nothing compared to the Home Depot blog, the blog of the Swiss Cultural Exchange program, Godzilla’s Bike Training blog, and, well, so many others.



Of course, I knew what my bigwig VP friend was going to say.

She said that to attract clicks (readers are now “clicks” for my purposes) I have to post blogs not once a day, but two and three times a day . . . AND, she continued “you have to find blogs you like and comment on their postings,” and then there was something about a “tag” that easily takes readers from other blogs where I have posted comments to my own.

Two or three times a day?

Okay, I can’t say that I’m “on it.” I have a day job!



So what she’s saying is that I have to write every day so that I can leave my job and write every day, but I’d have to leave my job to write every day and I don’t have the money to leave my job (by the way, I “get paid” at school; my work is not “monetized”).

Buzz ruined!!!




One friend, in the ed business like me, suggested I post every bit of advice I give to kids and parents every day in my work as a Dean. Talk about diminished utility! Writing about problems people don’t think they have! Who gives penicillin to healthy people or someone with a broken toe? Only we teachers think that everything we say is so universally prescient and timely all at once.

So I’ve a conundrum. I write only once a week. But isn’t that enough? That’s good enough for your favorite show on television, for the Sunday New York Times, for Saturdays in the park!

“Whatever happened,” I asked my PR exec, “to ‘less is more’? ‘Leave ‘em wanting more’? And, anyway, are there really people out there with so little in the way of ‘having a life’ that they read and comment on (!!!) blogs all day long?”

Basically, how do I find those losers?

And can I comment here about how remarkable they are! Total strangers reading my musings! Even the musing that just called them “losers”! (You, dear clicker, are clearly NOT a loser. It’s some of the other clickers I’m thinking about.)

Are you still there?

Amazing!!!

Stop. Leave. Come back.

You know, my own wife doesn’t follow my blog. Says she's busy.