Hard times call for more inventive ways of doing things:

BBQ on the cheap.

Local autobody repairing vehicle at discount rates.

Who needs Bluetooth when duct tape will do?

Discount Skydiving

What thieves do when they can’t afford burglary tools.

One thing I can’t stand about the effort to drive more traffic to a site is the almost mandatory need to play suck ass to some high traffic megablog in the hopes that maybe, someday, somehow, they might acknowledge your puny existence for one microsecond and throw a fraction of their gazillion readers and visitors your way.

If I write a post I think is particularly funny, charming and relevant, I email a link to it to a couple of high profile bloggers, then pray, beg, sacrifice chickens and hope hope hopey o’ change hope that it doesn’t disappear into the darkest catacombs of that blogger’s inbox, never to be seen again.

Except that of course it does, because I am a speck of dust who can never evolve to the point that I could successfully grab their attention, though mostly I think it’s because I’m not a hot babe who blogs in her underwear (and leaves up a webcam to prove that she does in fact, blog in her underwear.)

Makes me feel like I’m in high school all over again, trying to get into an exclusive, elitist club that nobody wants me to be in, partly because they weren’t even aware of my existence, and if the time should ever come that they did become aware, then they’d rue the day I was born.  It seems that I can only inspire either indifference or sheer, unadulterated hatred.

All I can really do then is watch from the sidelines while these successful bloggers happily fondle each other and share links and traffic and readers, and yet I myself can only but trudge endlessly in the mud of Google irrelevancy.  It all seems so unfair, because really, all I’m asking for is a microcosm of acknowledgment, just a F*%&ING link or two from your millions-of-hits-a-month blog that takes all of two seconds to post, which would at least give me a fighting chance to succeed.  And I’m not even doing it for me, I’m doing it to help my sick, sick Mommy, who I can’t fully care for unless I can find a way to supplement my already heavily taxed salary.  A link for a life.  That’s all it takes, but noooooo, I’m not in your “speeeeeecial” club see, and worse yet, I’m not a half-naked chick prancing around my blog and uploading sultry looking photos of myself to Flickr either, so therefore I’m not worth the poopie poo on your shoe.

Well screw you big boy, and screw this ridiculous internet caste system we’ve made for ourselves.  A-list blogs and B-List blogs and C-list blogs and whatnot?  F&^% that.  I got my own label: the One-of-a-kind, All-night-long, I-am-your-Daddy’s-Master Blog.

And this club can only fit one member, baby:  Me. 

Having done just about all I could do to optimize my blog for banner advertising, I’m now setting my sights on contextual ad links.  There are a few networks out there for this type of advertising, but Kontera is one of the larger ones that’s been around a few years, so I signed up for them the other day.

You’ve probably seen these links before, as they are usually depicted by a double lined link, which pops up a small ad window when you hover your cursor over it.  Since I don’t use any underlines for links on my blog, the ad links here are denoted by one line instead.  That should help reduce the link clutter while still keeping the ads distinguished enough from normal links.  So far, it looks and loads pretty decently on my site, so I’m happy. 

I may continue to shop around for an alternative network though (such as Infolinks), since Kontera has a few caveats that annoy me.  For one, if you want to block certain keywords from converting into ad links, you have to email them.  If you want to block certain advertisers too, you have to email them.  If you want to limit the number of ad links that show up on a page, yep, you have to email them.  In addition, the ad links don’t always spread out evenly enough on a page, so one post might theoretically contain only one link, while another post contains over 20.  Three years they’ve been around you’d think they’d improve on this by now, but oh well.  If they pay me well enough I won’t complain, especially if I see ads like this:

Heh. 

That’s probably due to my blog not being completely analyzed yet for optimization, but still, that was funniest thing I’ve seen all day. 

Hmmmm….

Members of the East Central Narcotics Task Force arrested a West Hartford man was arrested after a short chase in South Windsor Thursday evening.

According to police, Almighty Supremebeing Allah refused to stop for a marked cruiser and was detained about a mile down the road after the initial stop.

Witnesses reportedly heard the deity cry out as he was being subdued by police:  “Infidels!!!!  FILTHY INFIDELS!!!  I, the Supreme Being am not subject to your human laws!  Release me at once so that I may continue to bestow my loyal servants with fresh supplies of my homemade white powders!!!  AND GET THAT FILTHY DOG AWAY FROM ME!”

Upon hearing the news, President Bush hastily called a press conference to declare victory and an end to the war on terror.

Barack Hussein Obama also commented on the arrest during a campaign stop in Moscow.  “This is not the god I thought I knew,” he said, while expressing suspicion that the charges may have been driven by what he termed “spiritual racism,” and made a public plea for donations to have Allah released on bond.

“We must learn to respect the actions of these deities, regardless of how evil their actions might seem.  Indeed, the only true evil that exists in our world today is the evil of intolerance.  And Republicans,” he said.

Several journalists reportedly fainted at the sound of Obama’s voice while he made these comments.

Meanwhile, Muslims have begun a worldwide phenomenon of praying away from Mecca and towards the prison center currently housing the Supreme Being.

I might have made some of this up by the way.

Does it really surprise anyone at all that Allah would be caught hanging out in West Hartford?

Just received a PayPal payment from one of my ad networks:

ONE PENNY?