Month: October 2011

Long-time readers of this blog know that once in a while I attempt to monetize this blog. I haven’t built this site to earn me money, but, on the other hand, I’ve spent thousands of hours on building, updating, maintaining, designing, and programming this over the years. It’s nice to get some money out of it once in a while.

So far, I’ve tried the following:

• Google AdSense. Which is still here and which I tweak from time to time. This is the easiest way to cover my hosting fees. However it does just about that.
• Banner ads. This is are much more profitable, but it’s hard to find advertisers and the whole thing with following up on payments, banner placements, statistics, etc is just too much overhead for me.
• Consulting. As well as other side services. The money are good, but there is no constant stream of work. And anyway it is somewhat disconnected from the site itself. The blog is merely a point of contact, nothing more.
• Donations. These are still here, but they don’t work too well either. I’ve received only a couple of those.

Today (or, in fact, yesterday), I decided to try something else. Every week I am bombarded with the offers to place a text link relevant to the content into one of my older posts. I’ve never thought about it seriously before. But something changed recently. Maybe the offers went up, maybe the links got better. Doesn’t matter. I decided to give it a try.

Of course, this being my personal website, carrying my own name, I am going to be careful with what I accept and what terms. I will check the links before agreeing. And I will be checking them periodically afterwards as well. No SPAM, and only content-relevant links. I will also add a tag ‘paid link‘ to any post that contains the link for which I was paid.

So far, I have two posts with paid links and considering the money, I think these should work pretty good. Let me know what you think in the comments or directly.