For the first time since I started blogging many moons ago, I finally put up Google’s Adsense on my site. This I do, 4 years after its release, with the Internet now completely saturated with these types of ads everywhere you surf, during the worst advertising slump since 2000. I’m brilliant.

Oh well. I’m obviously not going to hold my breath waiting for the money to roll in, but I do think the process of learning how to place these ads on my blog has been a good learning experience for me. Some experts say bloggers should wait until they start drawing significant traffic before they start placing advertisements on their blogs. But because monetizing your blog involves so much more than simply slapping an ad in the header, I think it’s important to learn as much as you can early on, so by the time your site does generate respectable traffic (if it ever does), you’ll have already learned the most important aspects of what makes for successful online advertising, and how you can make it work for you.

Personally, I’m treating this as an experiment to see where it might lead. If the stats show people clicking on the ads despite the low number of traffic I get, that bodes very well for the future. On the other hand, if 6 months goes by without a single clickthrough, it’s either a sign that this particular ship has LONG since sailed, or that I need to try another approach. Regardless of what happens though, the bottom line is I’m never gonna know for sure unless I try. Success is usually a trial and error process, and I’m finding that I can learn a lot more through my mistakes than if I had signed up for a $2,000 seminar that offers little more than the common sense knowledge your mother should have already taught you.

The good news is that I’m venturing into an area where you don’t automatically have to be first to succeed, just one of the guys who makes it all the way to the finish line. Blogging is a marathon more than anything else, and most bloggers eventually either give up or burn out within a relatively short period of time. If blogging is something you think you can do blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back for the next 20 years, then the future definitely bodes well for you. Endurance is the name of the game, and very few people truly have it, especially when it comes to blogging. Even I burned out and stopped blogging altogether for almost a year, and I’m the kind of guy who loves to write.

Even doing what you love though can be a laborious pain at times, but then again, nothing worth having in this world is going to come easy. It’s usually a long and arduous process, but I’m confident those who believe the laborer is truly worthy of his hire will eventually reap the rewards they’ve worked so hard to obtain.

I only hope I’ll be one of them.

Today’s blogosphere consists of a huge network of blogs linked together a variety of ways, most commonly via blogrolls or with the use of linkbacks. Normally, in order to fully assimilate and become a part of this blogging collective, you would need to surf a considerable number of blogs and regularly comment on the latest postings, either via their commenting system, or by blogging a post on your own site and referencing the material in question there (which is where linkbacks usually come in).

I rarely do this, which is part of the reason why my traffic is usually so low. Because I’m not putting myself out there, my visitors usually come in via Google or by word of mouth. But if I’m interested in getting more hits to my blog, why don’t I invest the time necessary to give it more exposure by participating more actively in the blogosphere community?

The truth is, gosh darn it, I just don’t like you people. Most of you are lewd, rude and appallingly crude. And you’re ugly. And you probably smell bad too.

Since I’m a loner in real life, that seems to have translated in some respects over to my blogging life as well. When I reflect on this, I realized part of it is because I just can’t stomach hanging out with people who are A) airheaded morons who have about as much common sense as a drunken Barbra Streisand or B) morally corrupt individuals who enjoy waking up in strange places after a night of inebriation and snorting up white powder. Then there’s the occasional C) self anointed intellectuals who use an inflated vocabulary to argue or discuss anything from politics to relationships, when half the time their fond use of lofty words used by only 2 percent of the population merely disguises the fact that they are just as much a bunch of dumbasses as the entire cast of contestants on The Bachelor.

Evidently though, just finding a circle of people who have a good head on their shoulders, follow a reasonable moral code, and refrain from talking like 80 year old law professors so they can show people just how diddly darned smart they are seems to be a tall order these days.

Oh well. I guess that’s the price I pay for being unique.

I wrote a lengthy comment to a post on the Volokh Conspiracy that offered some advice to those about to start law school, and after rereading through it, I felt it was coherent enough to merit posting here (with some grammatical changes). Even though my law school plans have been scuttled this summer, the least I can do is offer some suggestions and insight to those of you who are going on without me. Hope you find it helpful!

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