Am I having fun yet? I've spent the last few hours "monetizing" the shit out of my blog. It now looks like a gaudy Google Christmas tree. There is some humor value in tarting up my page, especially when a pro-Palin ad gets dropped on a screed about her gibbering bacterial culture of life. But the irony is short-lived. and then I'm back to being depressed. I shouldn't worry, I know. In order to sell out, I'd have to actually earn something. As Seth Godin writes, Maybe you can't make money doing what you love.
The pitfalls:
1. In order to monetize your work, you'll probably corrupt it, taking out the magic in search of dollars
and
2. Attention doesn't always equal significant cash flow.
I think it makes sense to make your art your art, to give yourself over to it without regard for commerce.
Of course he's right. I am focusing on what I think will make my site a "success" and draining the joy from writing it. Of course, I've only subscribed to Mr. Godin's blog to learn about marketing, but he's also a bit of a philosopher. He's not going to suggest a Crazy Eddie advertising campaign.(Remember him?)
I've discovered many useful tools: ScribeFire, for instance, which I downloaded in order to write posts more easily but ended up using to place ads. RankQuest is another good service which has a CodeCleaner function that appeals to my anal retentiveness, but also shows a reminder of my lowly Google Page Rank on its toolbar. I have Alexa's Sparky add-on and I pop over to SEOmoz regularly to check my page strength. For some reason it always compares me to Perez Hilton's site, like I can compete with him. (I like him better when he dresses like the villain in The Incredibles. Trying to look normal doesn't suit him.) I'd like to go off about the term "monetize" now, how it's stupid newfangled jargon. I wish I hadn't looked it up. Turns out it's derived from the Latin moneta and dates back to 1879. Knowledge can be so disheartening.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I need to concentrate on writing and not get mentally constipated about marketing it. Right after I ping Feedburner, Pingoat and Weblogs, that is.
