Ads and blogging

Well, I've taken my blogging to the next level as an experiment and applied for ads via adSense, a Google thing. The descriptions of the payment and pricing have gotten more complex than I remember, but it still promises to aim for ads that are related to my posts somehow, probably key words. In my experience, that probably means that they will be fairly useless. Writer blogs tend to get a lot of ads for vanity press publishing, in my experience, and I really discourage going that route. I've heard one or two people say they had some luck with vanity digital press, but mostly all that does it prevent the collection of hundreds of books that most books stores won't take, from what I've heard.

About the only vanity press type thing I might try is a family cookbook/scrap book affair such that you didn't plan on making money, only to give it as gifts to the family. There are companies that will even assemble the cookbook for you if you provide the recipis, and churches and other groups use them as fund raisers, but you have to watch really close to see how much they'll allow in the way of, fro example, family or other personal pictures, a useful index (some are useless, no more than alphabetized lists of the dish names, so Aunt Mary's cassarole will be right after Aunt Jane's cookies, but there's no listing of cookies or cassaroles except for the table of contents header) and other features that make it a cookbook worth the giving. For more effort on your part and the help of publishing software, you can probably do better on your own at Kinkos.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. I'm not sure how much say I have over size, location and such and I may dump it if its too obnoxious. One of the pages implied that I would have a lot of say or at least be able to select from several options, but I didn't find a place that asks once I started the sign up process so we'll see. I was pleased to see it didn't require a PayPal account or anything because when I checked out their website I found it hard to get any real information. They were so busy trying to persuade people to use their services that they made it hard for those already considering it to get the answers needed to make the final decision. NOT a good way to drum up business, especially for an already well-known dot com/brand. At this stage, they can afford to let word of mouth persuade, and focus on being a good, functional site, don't you think?