I am not a mommy blogger. I do talk about my grandchildren a lot and feel it is necessary to share their amazing beauty with this deprived world. (That is an "I" not a typo) And a few years back when nine people lived here and I was in a fog, I did write about my children some times. But now I write about me and politics and idiocy and stuff. Which may be the same thing mommy bloggers write about.
Well, maybe I got this attitude from starting out my internet communication mania pre-twitter by using Goodreads and Amazon forums. On both of those it is clearly stated that it is bad form to promote yourself or spam, that is, hide a sneaky link to something within the boundaries of your blog so people do not know they are reading an ad. They have specific self-promotion forums where you can go nuts if you want.
That has gone out the window. There is Google Ad Sense, and I used to have ads on my blog. Once I wrote about my canaries and an ad for birdcages appeared in the margin. I thought that was terribly clever and technologically advanced. I even had a balance of $1.72 in my Ad Sense account which I never collected because they don't cut you a check unless it is a certain amount. I don't have ads anymore. I have asked them why because the spaces are there. My readership is much higher now so maybe I would earn more than $1.72 a year, but they keep telling me my blog sign-in is not my Ad Sense sign-in and they don't answer questions; they just send you to their circuitous forums and I never get the right answer. Their loss. They could be raking in a bundle off my back.
Anyway, I noticed lately this "Buy my book" "Like me on facebook" "visit my blog", etc. EVERYWHERE. Everyone still says you will lose twitter followers if you just keep linking to your book. If someone reads my blog, they see the links to my book and can click or sample or whatever. (Damn, I wish they would BUY. I'd be shitting in tall clover.) And "agents" will not ALLOW their clients to write on twitter or anywhere about their books. So it is a subtle game. To draw attention and not be spammy. But now I have signed up to several blogs that have given me lots of hits, and some of them are interesting and amusing. But many of them are purely ad based. They try to relate it to their family, but it is buy this or that. And one that is usually about her family suddenly drops one that is purely an ad. I am new to this, so maybe everyone else knows that is the purpose. I am just trying to figure out how to get their links off of my facebook because they breed like bunnies.
I know that I will lose a passel of hits when they read this and take me off their linkys. They probably already know I don't get it because I have been commenting on their blogs about the content instead of the products they are pushing.
I hope everyone is not laughing up their sleeve at me, that that is the real purpose of Blogger and Wordpress and I have been totally disillusioned that it was to bring my literary bon mots to the attention of the world for their enjoyment and intellectual betterment.
And I hate that fucking Raffle Copter.
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Keep the entertainment coming Virginia, it's far better than adverts any day.I follow plenty of blogs but it's a rule that I only comment on those where the post is non-advertising, unless it's for a cause.
ReplyDeleteI come online to be entertained, amused, educated even but not to be bombarded with sales pitches.Twitter is for that and I'm guilty of using it for book links but on my blog I try to make people smile.