Blogs, Hype, Advertising, and Agility

As regular readers of Jaxn.org already know, I have been playing with generating revenue from my blog for a while (well over a year).� I am learning some things, and I think I am starting to think that "blogosphere" is proving to be too agile for traditional marketing techniques to work.

The agility of "blogosphere" mostly comes from the openess of the content and the variety in the delivery technologies.� It dawned on me the other day that I don’t really have a good way to know how many people read Jaxn.org each day.� I have a good general idea that I have between 200 and 600 unique readers to the Jaxn.org website on an average day (excludes spiders).� However, I have no idea how many people read the same content via syndication (through services like bloglines or tools like NetNewsWire).� As the tools to syndicate get more and more integrated into the browser, visitors may only visit a website the first time to get the feed and then revist only when they follow links from the syndicated feed.

What is working
Search engines are driving the sale of my political bumper stickers.� I have attained pretty great search engine placement for some search strings that seem to be pretty frequent and pretty relevant.� These search engine placements were done using some guerilla (viral) marketing techniques using blogs and syndication.� These techniques are probably "grey hat" and may not be a good idea for established businesses that have vested interests.� It has created a small revenue stream for me.

What is not working
Banner ads don’t seem to do much.� I have had Google AdSense for ~8 months.� AdSense has generated less revenue in 8 months than the bumper stickers generated in the first month.� I just don’t think web advertising is a good revenue stream because it doesn’t work very well.�

This seems to be particularly true for "blogs".� I think this is due to the agility of the content delivery.� New content delivery tools are being created and used every day.� Since many of these are not browser-based, the HTML support in the content delivery system is not� always very good.� the use of images and� text formatting� is not guarenteed.� Hyperlinks� are not even always available.� This makes it very difficult to deliver the advertising to every client.� My AdSense ads are not delivered to any syndicated sources.

What might be working
Affiliate advertising might be working, but I am not sure.� From everything I am able to tell, the success of affiliate programs seems to come from the particular blog’s readership.� I think this is mostly a product of how active the blog’s archives are in search engine traffic.� If the affiliate advertising is relevant and the archives are active due to search engine traffic, the blog is probably capable of generating revenue through affiliate marketing.