[Web] Making Geeky Cents

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about further monetizing the Geeky Guide. While I doubt I'll be making any serious kind of money anytime soon - the Guide just isn't that popular yet - but as always, I'm just curious to see just how far it might get and as a another way to see just how far the Guide can push given its limited success in its first year.

Then there's the fact that I'm not alone here in the Guide, so it might not be entirely fair to think about making a bit of cash off this blog since part of this is for their efforts. Thus I don't want to deny them what may be due to them, should the Geeky Guide's income levels reach that point. I'd be happy just to recover maintenance costs, hehe.

Yeah, I guess it's just not quite as simple as I thought it might be.

Of course the Guide is currently supported by Google AdSense given I do have ads on the site. Of course, with most of the readers relying on RSS feeds in terms of accessing the Guide, that doesn't really do anything. I don't want to cross that line in terms of truncating my RSS feed since I hate it when people do that to me, so why should I do it to them, right?

In case any of you are curious, allow me to clearly state that I have yet to cash in on an AdSense check just yet - in fact, in more than a year of operations, the site has only earned a little over $20.00. Seriously - this is not a serious money maker.

So what do I want? Hard to say - I don't want to go mad about money and turn this blog into something less than what it should be in terms of content and just some post and link hungry whore of a monstrosity. I try to stick to the principle that I blog for myself and the Guide should reflect that independence. At the same time, I want to see if the Guide can accomplish something in that manner.

This is why I started looking for unobtrusive monetization solutions. It started off with my friend AJ talking about his initial foray into the realm of PayPerPost and its somewhat more direct compensation model. It's nice that they don't absolutely force you in terms of writing direction, but of course it still involves topics that you might not normally write about but choose to discuss because of the income. I'm still waiting for the Guide to be approved, but it seems that they're pretty picky about the PageRank of the blogs who contribute and I know that the Guide isn't quite there yet in terms of achievement.

Then remembering Chase's blog, I did a back check and eventually signed up for Text Link Ads, but despite how inviting the FAQ seemed, it turned out that the Guide didn't meet their advertising criteria so they wouldn't let me try for advertising. Now I have a useless account there that I can't seem to delete. Stupid, I know. I already sent a strongly worded email to their technical support queue requesting they delete my account.

So how about all of you, outside of contextual ads and actually taking blogging assignments from advertisers, what non-invasive monetizing methods have you tried employing? I'm curious to hear your thoughts, ideas and suggestions in terms of this particular item, if that's not too much to ask. Who knows, we all might learn something new.

Photo linked from speedye's photostream.