All of us writers have heard this golden rumor that we can gain an income, or at least subsidize our writing, by monetizing our blogs. And indeed there are professional bloggers out there who I assume are doing quite well for themselves. Some of them have given glimmers of how they do it. Basically it comes down to two things:
- Your blog needs ads on it. Preferably AdSense.
- If you really want to be successful also sell something off said blog.
Let’s tackle the second one of those hints first because I am going to admit right here and now that none of my blogs are particularly consumerist based. I’m not shilling self-help seminars or trying to get you to buy a boat. I’m not building up hype for anything. I’m not really requiring anything from my readers. This of course puts me at a vast disadvantage but here’s the thing – I do have a ton of content, probably close to 1,000 blog entries by now on a vast array of subjects. That’s good because the more content you have theoretically the more people are likely to visit and maybe use some of those ads. And there’s always that chance something I write will go viral simply from being so weird.
So I was willing to try this whole ad thing. I already had a number of blogs that I ran for free off of WordPress.com. I thought a free site was a great place to start! But here’s the thing – it wasn’t. WordPress.com really just uses the software from WordPress.org and they make money by charging you if you want to upgrade. What is included in the upgrade? Your own domain name, which is standard fare, and the ability to put up ads! That’s right, you cannot put up ads on their free blogs. They won’t show up. Worse still I learned after upgrading they still don’t allow the industry’s heaviest hitter AdSense but only their own much shittier and less profitable ad system. So after paying to upgrade my blogs I then had to pay to have them moved to “independent hosting.” I used BlueHost. They had WordPress software they did not charge more for and my blogs were easily transferred to their very own domains. Those that weren’t popular enough to merit paying for I just made as subdomains off of my main writing website TheophanesAvery.com so they look something like this:
https://theophanesavery.com/cluttered-thoughts-from-a-deranged-mind
It’s not ideal – ideally they would have their own actual domains like my two main blog Catching Marbles and Tales from the Birdello but I’m not made of money and there were six of these lesser known blogs. So it was a compromise. For now. And if they do take off… we’ll reconsider this whole thing. The great thing about this set up is that I was able to make them all still maintain their own identity by making them appear like their own websites with their own layout and themes. I did this downloading WordPress’ multisite tool. And yes, this all took a lot of Googling because I have no training in website design, coding, or anything IT. And since I was still paying for the main domain they were branching off of I was able to put AdSense up on every one of these blogs. And AdSense itself was allowing this even though these blogs had “not enough content” because they were subdomains and together they were mightier than just one. Win win. For now.
Putting AdSense up consisted first of signing up for it and hoping they’d approve my websites. Catching Marbles was approved right away as was Tales from the Birdello but my main website Theophanes Avery dot com was flagged for having explicit content. Took me a while to figure out what the hell they were talking about – I had put up a satirical article on the history of condoms and I guess they couldn’t sully their good name by allowing their advertising to be displayed next to jokes about frog pants and vulcanized rubber. So I had to take it down to appease my overlords and only then did they approve all three websites.
From here I had to take a snippet of code they gave me and insert it into the blogs where I wanted it. In my case it was usually in the sidebar and I was able to copy and paste the code directly into a custom HTML block under the Appearances>Widgets menu. Slightly terrifying at first but in the end very simple – right? Well….
Everything did well for two or three months in the sense it was working. I could see through the AdSense website that I was getting traffic and the occasional click but it was so much less than I expected. I made 4 cents that first month. On month three, for no real reason I could tell, I made $12. Someone must have bought something on one of those ads. It gave me the hope to keep going. Maybe I just didn’t have enough traffic yet. Month four I was back to earning cents and as time went on it just never picked up. I’m now more than a year out and there’s only a little over $13 in that account (they don’t pay it to you until it’s over $100.)
But it’s also been many months since this error keeps showing on my AdSense account:
Great more techno babble. I didn’t know what it meant and Googling it wasn’t exactly helpful. All I learned is that something is wrong and that’s why the ads are technically working but only bringing in a few pennies here and there. So I put that code with all my ads in their little HTML widgets. I did not understand I needed to make a whole new file for the damn thing… the txt file it mentions. I didn’t have one of those. I didn’t know it was required. So I figured out how to do that in “Advanced Settings” which was…. terrifying. But I did it! For all three mentioned websites. And I waited. And waited. And waited. It’s been a couple weeks now. The error alert remains. I am at a total loss now. I started looking at the stats that AdSense allowed me to track and realized my heaviest traffic website Catching Marbles was receiving literally no revenue from AdSense. It must be because of that stupid error. I think the only other option I have is to unregister Catching Marbles from AdSense completely and re-sign up, always a risky prospect because they don’t always approve websites the second time around. But I really think the problem is fixed so it’s either keep waiting for them to figure that out or do this cold reset and hope for the best.
In the beginning I had hoped I could make a little extra money off all my hard work… and then I said I’d be happy if it just paid for itself (the price of hosting and domains) so I could have a free hobby… now I am back to just lobbing wads of cash into the fire. Sigh. C’est la vie.
Still I am hopeful. If Catching Marbles had the most traffic and yet wasn’t working correctly that would explain why it hasn’t raked in anything worth mentioning. And the traffic to all my other blogs is rising as I continue to add to them soooo…. maybe this isn’t a lost cause just yet. Maybe.