The Saturday Morning Post - Blogging

This summer I will pass 16 years as a blogger.  I started as a guest blogger for someone who was on vacation for a couple of weeks, didn't know how to update from the road, and didn't want two weeks to pass without an update.  It was fun.  I created Travel Penguin and moved forward.  There were a few lean years.  Then 6 or 7 years ago I decided to get serious and post something every day.  

I wanted my writing to get better, to be easier, to be more readable.  Writing is a challenge for me, based on how my brain works, things I have worked on since first grade. Yet no one had said, to get better at writing, practice, practice, practice.  Making a commitment to posting something everyday to the blog, forces me to write often.  

I don't do this everyday, most of my posts are created on Saturday mornings, and Sunday afternoons.  Some are in draft form for months or even years.  Once a week I make sure I have 10 days of postable content ahead of me. Nearly every post, goes up at midnight eastern time, because they are written ahead of time and scheduled.  (This post is being written on Saturday May 15th, to post on Saturday May 22nd.)  This avoids me needing to find time during a sometimes hectic work week to create content.  If something comes up, I can put something up right away, ether by rescheduling or by posting more than one per day. 

I recently uploaded my photo archive to a new cloud backup, it loaded about 70,000 images.  I love taking photos.  I love that the blog gives me a place to share them with world.  Most are average, a few are really great.  All of them are tied to a memory for me.  

I get questions about advertising on the blog. I use Google Adsense. No I am not getting rich, it has grown very slowly, and generates about $10 a month.  

Why do I do it?  Google makes money from blogspot. Blogs generate content, images, photos, for Google to link to and index.  They use my content to target ads to me.  They use your visits and comments to target ads to you. If they don't have ads on on the blog you visit, they use what they learn about you when you visit to target ads on any site that you visit, that allows Adsense ads. 

By allowing explicit advertising on the blog, I get a tiny fraction of the money.  If you click on the ads linked on the blog, a tiny bit more, if you buy from some vendors even a bit more.  If they do a good job of targeting the ads to you, they should be for things you are interested in.  

Online advertising is different than print, in that the ads you see on this post, are different than the ads the next person will see on the same post.  The ads are targeted either based on what Google knows about you, or if they know nothing about you, based on what the post is about to the extent they can figure that out. Google (Amazon, Facebook and others) are going to do this, if I am a part of it or not.  I think content creators should be compensated.  It is not much, but it is something to confirm that I helped feed the machine. Everytime Google makes another billion, I get another couple of dollars for my part of it.

Compensated or not, please keep creating content, I love reading it, I love reading your comments, even just saying Hi in a comment, lets me know someone has read what I created.