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Mangos
It is now over a week since I added the Google adverts to this website. I have been keeping a daily watch on our income so I don't get shocked by the size of the amount and I am pleased to announce that as of this morning I am richer by $0.12.
I have, what I hope, is one discrete advert on every page of the website so all readers should have noticed them, and Easter and Thai holidays aside, that is usually over a hundred unique visitors/day. So $0.12 is perhaps not what I might have hoped for. I can only assume, so to avoid getting too disappointed, that my readers are too discriminating to be lured by the appeal of Cambodian visa agencies, already know how to date sexy Thai women, are able to book their own hotels, and know where to buy Philips light bulbs without help. I have tried not to vet the adverts so far so the links to MBAs (given my hatred of the people who have these so called degrees) and the Bangkok restaurant where I was violently sick the two days after eating there, are staying for now.
It doesn't help at this time to read articles such as this, Your Blog Stinks, You Should Quit. That Blog is exactly the sort of Blog I try to avoid, and if it hadn't been linked to by a Blog I do read, I almost certainly wouldn't have even happened upon it. It smacks of those 'get rich quick' books written by people who are not rich or if they are became rich through embezzlement.
The nine points the former Blogger makes to 'improve' your blog traffic seem to me to miss the whole point of what Blogging is about. Whilst some of my favourite Blogs and websites which I list above have clearly defined subject matter, (yes, Great Opera Singers is about opera singers), some do not. The diary pages of this website, a Blog by another name, have no certain subject material because, a) I can't be bothered to write to a theme and b) a diary is not about writing to a theme. Other parts of this website have clearly defined subjects and admittedly I haven't updated those pages very much at all, at least not in the last year or two, but they still get a reasonable number of visitors. As to social networking I am quite proud that I have a friends that are not on Facebook, almost as much as the fact I have never eaten in a McDonalds. Twitter is for morons and the fact Stephen Fry is on there does not legitimise it, he also likes Apple computers.
I keep reading that I should add more social network links to SingMai to increase our orders and I have reluctantly added pages to Facebook and Linked-In but to what aim I am unsure. I guess if I was selling decorative party cakes there might be some point, but it is difficult to know who, in their right minds, looking for a PDC decoder IP core, would first turn to Facebook to find a supplier. If I want to know what someone is having for breakfast then that is the place to go; if I want to see some pictures of a carrot that look vaguely suggestive of a sexual organ, that is place to go; if I want to buy a video IP core, then that is not the place to go. As with that Blog above, I sort of feel dirty having to resort to these measures to get orders; what happened to just having a good product that someone wants at a reasonable price.
But if there is anything to be had from those empty suggestions, it is that I should make an effort to update some of the more focused pages of this website. The adverts will stay for now - I have not had anyone complain about them even through the new handy comments section of the diary pages - especially as I feel they are paying for all those students plagiarising my art history essays. Maybe some other bloggers may choose to add my site to their links: at the moment I am only aware of one person that has done that and he has just stopped blogging! But then I don't reciprocate so perhaps that is an unfair request. The reason is I try to only link to sites that I really do check out every day, that have interesting material, (to me of course), and that update on a regular basis, (and I don't mean once per year). I can't understand those sites that have a hundred or more links - do people have nothing better to to than vicariously live their life through another's blog.
So basically, this site will be more of the same and I just have to look forward to that day, some fifteen years from now, when my first Google cheque arrives in the post. But I will not resort to naked pictures of Charlotte Rampling or obtuse discussions about Thai lady boys to hasten it. However for all the mango lovers out there, here is a photo of Ploy collecting mangos from our tree.
