Russell Beattie

So, anyone who's been reading this blog for a while knows that I'm not particularly concerned with traffic. I mean, the deal in my mind has always been that I use this space to expound, rant, bitch, whine, dump, brainstorm, and generally let it all out, and my readers who can deal with my occasional Turrets and vicious attacks on various factions of society that piss me off get to occasionally find a kernel of knowledge that they can use. The people who can't deal with my nuttiness, unsubscribe and never come back and that's been fine with me. Weeding out the cruft I've said before.

That's before I made $75 from Google ads in 3 days.

Suddenly I'm thinking "Traffic." I've been blogging long enough that my numbers should be higher than they are, but since most Republicans and Microsoft-devotees won't read my blog any more (unless they're mildly masochistic), my numbers are a quite a bit lower than my peer bloggers. This hasn't bothered me, until now.

Traffic == money.

Suddenly I'm thinking it's time to start watching what I say and start driving those numbers. This is very hypocritical I know. And it's not like I'm going to get rich off of Google Ads. But that $75 is more than I had 3 days ago. $25 more and Google sends me a check which will pay for my server for the month. Yeah baby. Keep just those numbers up and I'd be earning $600 a month. Bump up my readership and I could double that or more which wouldn't be bad revenue for a hobby...

My numbers go up and down on a monthly basis, but I just checked and I've had about 500,000 hits this month on RussellBeattie.com and about 150,000 on Mobitopia. Though I think the individual readership - in one of those weird twists - on Mobitopia is actually higher thanks to links from The Reg and other places. I'm going to take some time out and analyze those numbers in a bit, but those are the raw hits right now.

I gotta get those numbers up. Make some more cash. I've got to post more and post often. Lots of technical stuff that Google loves. Posting less insulting things to the half of the general population (e.g. "Republicans are lying sacks of warmongering dogshit - where's the WMDs, you assholes?"). Maybe I should start posting pics of beautiful women or other semi-pornography to augment the technical content of the blog... Hmmm.

Remember that first lemonade stand you made as a kid, and you earned like $1.50 and you felt super rich and started making plans to spend the rest of your life selling lemonade? :-)

Actually, most of what I'm saying here is a joke - but with a kernel of truth. Suddenly I'm thinking "damn, if only I shut my big mouth," like I have many, many times throughout my life... I could be driving a million or more hits a month through this site. Oh well. Truthfully, though, I think a few months ago, I was worried about Mobitopia overshadowing what I write here. But now I'm thinking "screw personal branding" and I'm going to start posting to Mobi like crazy. Why not? I'll just double post here more often. But the idea is to start getting more hits on that site. All mobile stuff, all the time. No personal opinions, stuff like that. Get some more hits and maybe I can make this hobby pay. Works for me.

Money, for all its bad traits, is definitely incentive.

-Russ