Using the awesome and very promising OIOPublisher Direct plugin, I can now sell ads and other services directly to potential advertisers without the need for a middle-man, which means I’ll keep 100 percent of the profits I make. WOOOOO!!! I’m gonna be rich! Filthy, stinking, disgustingly rich out of my greedy butt, depraved mind! BOOYAH!!!!

Well maybe.

It’ll be interesting to see how I fare with this, but at the very least I’ll finally have total control over what gets placed on this blog. There’s a lot of bad hojos and jojos out there looking to bam-bam your jam-jams with their scam-scams, and advertising networks like Google’s Adsense have done very little to stop them. With this solution I’m hoping the quality of the ads and goods that get served here will be far better than what most readers and visitors usually see elsewhere, and will help to complement this site rather than detract from it.

Well, I can dream anyway.

If you’re interested, I’m offering rock bottom prices right now since my traffic and readership is um, *ahem*, not quite where I’d like them to be right now. You can choose from link ads to paid posting to video ads, and more.

Click here for details, and if you’re interested in installing OIOPublisher on your own blog, let me know and I’ll give you some pointers. Initially it was designed for WordPress 2.1 or better due to its native cron support, but after working with the developer for a few days, he was able to come up with a solution to run cron jobs on Wordpress 2.0.X blogs by using the WP-Cron plugin. Muy coolio.

Oooooooooo, me likey! Scroogle allows you to use Google while at the same time preventing them from tracking your searching habits. A great solution for people who want to stop Google from sniffing their cookies.

Looks like Google’s PageRank is being replaced.

Romance Tracker recently grabbed my attention with their list of three simple ways you can use your blog to get a date:

Hey, being addicted to blogging is a lot like being in love, which we’ve covered on Romance Tracker before. But regardless of how great a relationship you have with your blog, it will never hold your hand or snuggle with you at night . . . and while you could try kissing your computer screen if you want, we sure don’t recommend it.

NOW you tell me? *sigh*

Anyway, the three suggestions were 1) using the blog to meet other people interested in my niche, 2) improving my communication skills by interacting with my readers, and 3) monetizing my blog so I could buy the lovely dinner.

I actually made enough now to accomplish #3… assuming we go to McDonalds that is… but what’s ironic about this whole thing is that when I first started blogging, I did it almost solely for the purpose of finding the girl of my dreams. I had hoped that by writing in the quirky manner that I did, it would draw attention to myself, and maybe one day soon some hot Christian girl would stumble across my site after doing a Google search, post a comment, and 3 months later we would be in love and planning a wedding in Bora Bora.

What I’ve learned however in those sad, pitiful days, was that such magic only happened to other people. Cuz you know what? One day a hot, Christian girl DID come across my site after doing a Google search, and just like I hoped, she began commenting and regularly following my blog too.

So what happens? She meets the man of her dreams through HER blog, and the two get married and run off to live happily ever after.

I’m not bitter about it though. Being the strong, brave man that I am, I was able to easily recover and move on from that heart wrenching devastation… especially after I started spreading rumors around the web saying her husband was gay and was secretly having an affair with a Latin lover named Juan San Pablo. After seeing that marriage subsequently go down in flames, I finally started to feel better about myself again.

This second go around is proving to be a more daunting task for me though. For one, I still don’t know what my niche really is or should be, and two, all the readers on my blog seem to be either male or married. Really, why would I want to interact with you people? Get the @#$% off my blog and find me some girls for crying out loud. I mean if you’re gonna stick around, then make yourself useful for pete’s sake.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

After a little over a year of this blog being online, I have finally reached my 200th post!

I have to admit that’s kind of sad. After a year’s time I should have had twice as many posts by now, and if I had stuck with posting at least one entry a day, my traffic would be ten times what it is now. Maybe.

Oh well, the good news is that when it comes to blogging, it’s all about endurance, and I just have to keep at it, even if I still don’t know what the heck this blog should be about. I went from thinking this blog would be based on my experiences in law school (and ultimately the legal field), only to end up griping about how online dating bites the big one, and how my health problems has been sucking out the life out of me, and how I think God is to blame for every little thing that has ever gone wrong in my life since I came out of the womb.

Still, I’m beginning to see the value in posting at least one entry a day. It’s helping me find my rhythm, and as the writing continues to flow I think I’ll eventually find my muse as well. It’s just a matter of time. Meanwhile my more frequent posting has already had an impact on traffic. I seem to be ranking highly in Google again, and as a result more people are coming from the search results they’re finding there.

I’m reminded of the Scripture, “Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.“

And I guess that’s the important thing. No matter if I haven’t found my niche yet, or how bad my writing can get at times. Just gotta keep at it… keep going… let nothing break my stride, and just keep on movin’…

Previously I wrote a piece about my suspicions on a series of websites I think are scams. So what happens? After proofreading my post, I happened to noticed that Google was displaying contextually relevant ad links… to one of the VERY SAME SITES I was writing about and suspected of being a scam.

Only me.

I immediately went to my Adsense account and had these sites’ links filtered out. Adsense however only allows you to filter out at most 300 links. And there’s what, a bazillion illegitimate websites out there? So what’s to stop another scamming site from advertising on my blog, especially if I’ve maxed out my blacklist?

Here’s Google’s answer: Absolutely nothing. Even worse, Google makes mad money off these seedy advertisers and businesses, so they’re not going to be in any hurry to clean up their links and do some form of serious quality control. It just wouldn’t make any business sense to them, ya know?

Unfortunately, the type of ad links that get displayed on my site is going to reflect on me, whether I like it or not. If a guy clicks on an Adsense link he sees on my site and purchases a product as a result, only to end up being the victim of a scam, that’s on me. I do feel I have a certain responsibility in granting advertising space only to those businesses I feel offer quality products and operate with at least some measure of integrity. That’s part of why I dropped Go Daddy as an affiliate, since they refused to even look into these websites that I suspected were trolling for suckers they could rip off.

So, after a little bit of soul searching I decided that I will no longer use Adsense, and will be removing all the code for it from my blog by the end of the day. My readers deserve better… (all three of you).

In the meantime, I don’t suppose anyone knows of any other service that also serves contextually relevant ad links, but where I have far more control over what gets served? …….. yeah, didn’t think so……