2019-07-29 update
I’m going to make a valiant effort to update a lot of content on here. Like decluttering your house, it’s hard for me to part with my old writings even thought they might be antiquated or worse.
I looked into AdWords for WordPress. I don’t think this blog is so beautiful, but the concept of crapping it up with ads is difficult to swallow. WP is honest; they tell you unless you have 1000s of pageviews/month you’re going to make little or nothing by doing AdWords. But on the other hand having anything but the most minimal WP site costs money per year.
(originally written in 2010; it seems strange I used the term “New Marketing”) I don’t know. There’s a big part of retro me that really resents the New Marketing. This is where you scramble, lie, cheat, and do whatever’s necessary to drive traffic to your site and sell stuff.* Yes, we want to sell tracks and CDs. But I just hate the concept that New Marketing is the way to do it.
I got a voucher recently for a $100 credit for Google AdWords. Just as an experiment, I decided to go ahead and set up an account and see what would happen.
Amazingly, it worked. Even with the clumsy choice of trigger names, it actually did drive traffic to this site.
Results of AdWords campaign
Here’s the number of visitors to this site over the period the AdWords campaign was running.
It didn’t really result in any sales that I can tell, but there’s probably other reasons for that.
*The King of Self-Promoters (no point in giving him yet more publicity by adding his name here) wrote a book which he titled “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman“. In an interview he said that he crowdsourced the title; that is, he put a bunch of adwords keywords out there and scientifically distilled the results to get a title that would be most likely to sell. Basically the content is irrelevant. Once you’ve sold a physical book, it’s highly unlikely you’ll get a return. Part of me admires his approach, part of me is disgusted by it.
last updated 2019-07-29
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