In the wake of the terror attacks in Madrid, Jeff Jarvis and Josh Marshall are advising Kerry to start talking about national security. They are right.
And Tom Friedman has a nice column in Sunday’s NY Times linking the two big issues of this election, offshoring and terrorism. I really like the way Friedman thinks. He reduces complex issues to their basic elements and that makes sense to me.
I bought some keywords this morning. I bought “venture capital” and “blogs”. It’s too early to tell, but I think “venture capital” will cost me about $0.50/click and “blogs” will cost me around $0.25/click. This is the first time i’ve bought keywords on Google so I am still learning how all this stuff really works. I am only spending $10/day to advertise my blog, so i doubt you’ll be seeing my ads all over the place, but if you do, please click on them. I won’t know how much i am paying until i get some clicks.
If you think legal downloads are the extent of the digital revolution in the music business, you are wrong. It’s going to get a lot more interesting. I just read this long rambling post at Scott’s Halfass.com. I think he’s on to a number of big trends here.
AsSense has been running on my blog for a week now. Here are some statistics and observations:
$$$ – I’ve made $38 this week. All of this is going to The Grameen Foundation USA.
Clicks – I’ve generated 91 click throughs to sites that are advertising on my blog.
CTR – 3.7% of the ad impressions have resulted in a click through. That feels very high to me. The relevance must be pretty strong for that to be the case.
But as Scotty points out in his comment on my last post on this topic:
I’ve noticed that most of your keywords seem to be “blog.” I don’t find that especially compelling, personally. Your topics are so engrossing, such as Venture Capital and Presidential Politics, yet you’re getting “blog.” Maybe it pays well, but it’s not really “on topic.” Sure, your site is a blog, but you don’t talk about blogs *that* much.
That’s my feeling as well. It seems that Google AdSense is getting more money for the keyword “blog” than the word “venture capital”. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I am going to go see what the big prices are for those words and will report back.
A good friend of my uncle’s called me yesterday to talk about blogging. This woman runs a very interesting business and she wants to use blogging to connect to an extended network of people she works and collaborates with. She had heard from my uncle that he and his brother and sister (my mom) all read my blog and talk about it even though they have nothing to do with technology and venture capital. That was pretty interesting to her and she wants to harness the power of this technology for herself. I told her, “go for it”.
Then she asked me how people will find out about her blog. I explained links. Links to me are the essential element of blogging. My wife, the Gotham Gal, blogs a lot, but doesn’t really link much. I love her site, but it may not really be a blog. Because she is really broadcasting more than generating discussion.
So here’s Rochel’s blog. I hope it turns into something great.
And I hope Rochel gives me a link back 🙂
From Tom Watson (no not the UK blogger), comes a dream ticket – Kerry/McCain. John McCain is the only Republican i’ve ever wanted to vote for President. If he would join Kerry on the ticket, that would be really be something.
I never met a genius until i went to college at MIT in the late 1970s. I met a bunch of them in college and i have felt since then that genius and insanity sit right next to each other in the mind.
I was reminded of that the other night when i went to see a movie called My Architect.
My wife Joanne, the Gotham Gal, has a good review of the film on her blog.
Lou Kahn was a genius, but he was also a lunatic. If you are interested in archicture or genius of any kind, i think you’ll find this movie fascinating.
For the past 50 years, advertisers have been running ads against TV sets and pages in newspapers and magazines, not actually the people they want to reach. Why? Because they had no other way to buy advertising. That’s changing. The revolution we are in the midst of is about marketing to people, because digital technology can allow marketers to reach people, not TV sets or pages.
Jeff Jarvis has a great post on this subject today.
Craig Danuloff tells me that my previous post on this topic isn’t right.
He says AdSense has nothing to do with page rank. Craig surmises that, “It is much more reasonable to assume that your blogging increased both your PageRank and your relevance to the term ‘Fred Wilson’ because so many people now link to pages on your site using your name as the link text. The increase in relevance is probably more responsible for your improved position than any PageRank increase.”
Well then I change my assertion to “Improved Google page rank is a nice side benefit to blogging”.
You learn by doing. That’s for sure. I wanted to understand how AdSense worked so i put it on my blog. It’s been fun watching the ads that are served up. They have been pretty relevant to me and hopefully to all of you who are reading this thing.
One of my readers, Dhrumil, commented that he’d heard that putting AdSense on your blog improves your page rank. So I figured i’d check that out.
I used to be at the top of the page rank back in the early days of Google when Flatiron was going strong and not everyone was on the Net. But that slowly changed. There’s a really talented artist named Fred Wilson. And one of the great chess gurus is named Fred Wilson. And then there’s this kick ass rock band in LA called Fred Wilson. And so slowly but surely I dropped down in the rankings. By last fall when i started my blog, i was around 10 or so.
Well, now I am at the top again. Go to Google. Check it out. And i am sure the reason why is that i put AdSense on my blog. They don’t advertise this fact. But it sure is a nice side benefit.
