Monday, July 19, 2010

Ads on the Blog

My regular readers, who only know me from this blog and not my other social networks, will probably not know this. But I've been laid off. Prior to now, I taught social studies at a small private school here in Roswell. With the economy the way it is, the small school got smaller and they had to cut staff for the upcoming school year.  Since about 3000 other teachers were laid off from the public schools at the same time I was, job hunting has been less than fruitful.

Rather than lay on the floor and cry over it though, I've decided to see this as an opportunity to do things I've always wanted to do, but had trouble doing so because of my teaching schedule. The biggest one is getting my Master's degree. I'm also looking at part time jobs with flexible hours, so look for a post with happy news there in the future.

However, despite the best face I can put on things, we're still looking at a drastic cut in our household income after I receive my last paycheck at the end of this month.  So I've decided to monetize this blog.  I've never really taken the whole blogging thing seriously, which is why Northside Food has a small audience. However, things being what they are, I really can't ignore a potential source of mortgage payments.  So you'll be seeing some ads here now and some links to Amazon if I'm talking about a product you can buy there.  Don't feel obligated to click on anything (In fact, by my service agreement with AdSense, I'm not allowed to encourage you to click on ads.), but do understand that they are here to support me in my state of underemployment.

The upside of the ads is that now that they are here, I feel sort of obligated to stick to a reliable update schedule and make an effort to build my audience.  So you'll be hearing from me more frequently now.

2 comments:

D.T. said...

Okay, so can I email you stuff I'm thinking about buying on Amazon and then have you write a post about it and then click on the link in your post to buy the thing I was already thinking about buying? This is BRILLIANT and not too complicated at all!

Jennifer Liang said...

One thing I can do is put an Amazon search box on the site and then you (or anyone else that wants to) can use that to find what you're looking for. I get the commission from sales done that way too.