All About Me. Me, Me, Me, Me, Me!

All the Web's a stage,
And all the men and women merely Players;
They have their Egos and Alteregos,
And 76 percent of Bloggers blog about Themselves...

According to the latest study released by The Pew Internet and American Life Project, titled Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers, 37% of bloggers say they are their own favorite subject. About 76% claim their personal experiences as a reason, if not the reason to blog (although many of them do so anonymously), summarizes WebProNews's Jason Lee Miller.

Okay, so let's get back on topic: me and my blog.

My Blog and My Name
This month I finally accomplished one of the goals of this blog -- to push that embarrassing "I am a comment spammer" page off the first results page on searches for my name. It took 9 months, a blog, a Flickr account, a couple of profile pages, and some well-placed comments on or contributions to other sites. Obviously I could have done it faster, but I wanted to see how long it would take to happen "organically."

Monetizing My Blog
I got my very first check for money I made off my blog. It's a commission from LinkShare.com, whose ads I had placed on my site (in the previous "design") to give me better insight into how people interact with advertising. LinkShare is also the program my company uses for affiliates, so I wanted to sign up and understand the user experience, see how the creative was presented, and so on. Didn't sell anything for my company... well, actually... turns out I didn't sell anything at all. I signed up for Netflix using one of the affiliate links, and got paid a commission for that. (Is that against the TOS? I think that's fair; that's not like PPC click fraud since I actually purchased something, right? If anyone at LinkShare disagrees, let me know and I'll give you the nine bucks back.)

Shameless Self-Promotion
Keep leaving comments folks, and link to my blog, why dontcha. And if you don't have anything better to do, check out some of my photography on Flickr.

Labels: navel-gazing

Posted by Melanie Phung