Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
So you want to start selling advertising on your blog or website?
There's always Google AdSense, which doesn't pay all that much. And there is NO customer service. I had a client blackballed from the service for doing something I KNOW they didn't do, and there is no recourse.
But looking around, it appears that you can do this outside of Google and make a lot more money.
Michael Hyatt says if you have 10,000 unique visitors per month, you can make it happen. And it looks like he used the Boston-based BuySellAds platform to help him do it.
Things he did included:
If self-help and career/life coaching is your thing, MichaelHyatt.com is all about that. He also offers a podcast and a bunch of products like e-books, print books, audio books and even a WordPress theme.
Not having spent a lot of time at his site, I imagine that Michael thinks of a blog as part of the overall marketing/monetization strategy in your life (or your business' life, I suppose).
Does this blog have 10,000 unique visitors per month?
Even I was asking that question after reading this. The purpose of this blog isn't direct monetization (or its content would be a whole lot different instead of "whatever the hell I'm thinking about" and "here's what I'm putting on social media").
I don't really pay much attention to the traffic. I don't even have a "real" analytics setup. I just rely on the AwStats functionality that my web host bakes into my account.
I usually get between 4,000 and 7,000 uniques per month, but I host a few other things on the stevenrosenberg.net domain, and I had a huge spike in November 2015, doubling the number of uniques to 14,000.
It turns out the spike was due to Los Angeles County election results that I host here for my employer. I should definitely move those to a company server, and I actually do have one now that can handle it (it's all Bash scripts, chewing gum and super glue). For the next election, I will.
I'm not saying I will never sell advertising on my "personal" blog, but I don't see it happening. I might do it if I started one or more "specialty" blogs that had some focus, but this isn't that blog.