Become a patron

With Google's black box control of AdSense, being a conservative blogger with 8+ years of frequent posts, nearly 1.5 million page views as of today you'd think I'd have made more than $300 from this blog via AdSense. Nope.  There's no issues so far as AdSense has found. Granted I haven't invested in SEO optimization but with only $300 in revenue, why would I? It would remove eight years of paltry profits with one attempt.

So I've decided to try a different route.  Today I joined Patreon.  If you like my content you can donate at your leisure.  There's a link in the upper right of this blog. And of course don't forget to refer your friends.  If this goes reasonably well, I might try to purchase some production software and make the jump to a Youtube vlog and producing some videos.

Become a Patron!

Blog thoughts

I still need to make some repairs to my blog - the column layout isn't great, and the news slider is busted among other things.  And I'm still not happy with Google/Blogger making significant changes to my search traffic results just because I happened to remove the Blogger banner.  My blog has had a dedicated URL for some time but despite the ads, it's not really a money maker.  Then again I'm not in it for the money (mostly, a bit would be nice)- I believe in what I write.  But I'm beginning to wonder if the free blogger hosting is worth the price.  Having a hosted solution would certainly give me more freedom to design the site without having to conform in order to generate search results.  

Blog economies of scale

I am a contributor over at Left Coast Rebel.  It's a great site, more libertarian than conservative (I hope that's a fair assessment). But I guess I have enough in common in terms of viewpoints that the blog owner over there, Mr. Left Coast Rebel himself, was gracious enough to invite me to be a contributor.  Mostly I just cross post my posts from here over there because I've been too busy over the last 6 months to be able to create enough content for one blog let alone two.  As a result of posting some of my posts in both places I have noticed there are some economies of scale* between the two blogs.

Nonsensible Announcement

With a headline like that anyone other than regular visitors can be forgiven for assuming I was talking about an Obama announcement on aid to Egypt. I'm not really.  It's not about him.  It's about me.

A quick blog self analysis

I've been looking back over my blog statistics and made a few confirmations/discoveries of things that I already intuitively knew.  There have been 3 period that I had a lot of visitors to my blog.  The first period was when I was new.  I was writing a lot more essay style posts than at other times.  I have to say, that's what I'd prefer to write - more insightful, researched posts.  I had my greatest readership success at that time.  I'm not sure whether it was because I was new or because of what I was writing, but I was getting noticed.