Blog Business: guest posts, contact info and some ad changes

by Sierra on December 7, 2009 · Comments

in Uncategorized

As of this month, this blog pays for itself. It doesn’t pay me, but I’m no longer digging into the household budget to cover the costs of running it. Thank you, gentle readers, for coming back here over and over to hear about my wild children and other adventures.

Readers this week drew my attention to a few issues on the blog:

1. Floating/expandable ads making the content hard to read: I apologize for that. I never saw them, presumably because my own browser is set to block that stuff. Thank you, person who mentioned it. I think I’ve fixed it now. If an ad on this site is getting out of its box, or otherwise annoying or offensive, please let me know.

2. New ad placements: Firing the floating ads means giving up some revenue, and I’d like the blog to continue paying its rent. I’m considering some additional ad placements to make up the difference. Please weigh in on what would be least obnoxious for you.

What new ad placements would be acceptable on this blog?

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3. Contact info: By popular demand, I’ve now added a contact page on the upper navbar. You, your friends, your mom and your literary agents eager to offer me a six-figure book deal can now e-mail me at sierra@childwild.com. If I don’t write back, please don’t take offense. My e-mail response time is weak since the kids have figured out that I can check my e-mail on the iPhone.  Rio has started saying sternly, “Mommy! It is not time to work. Did you bring us to the playground to work? No. You came here to play with me. Push me on the swings.”

4. Guest posts and tips: It’s no secret that I get a lot of my best stuff from you. I’ve run a few guests posts recently from people I’m close to (in fact, both the guest posts were authored by people who live in my house). More reader submissions are welcome. If you’re interested in guest posting here, or have a news tip or story idea you’d like to see me write about, please drop me a line at sierra@childwild.com

These changes are being nudged by the blog starting to grow a solid readership. Again, thank you, beloved readers. I love you and your savvy, interesting, funny, infuriating comments. Thanks for playing. I promise to keep writing the funniest, deepest, weirdest stories I can; please keep reading and commenting.

Related posts:

  1. Good morning, Non-Consumer Advocates!
  2. Adding Disqus comments
  3. The dangers of bulk buying, and joining the Wise Bread staff
  4. Rio’s new business venture
  5. Farm Share Survival Guide: my new article on Babble

Tagged as: blogs, writing

What next?

  • Nica
    If you ever decide that you want to start a fight in your comments section, I will happily guest-blog for you an entry entitled "If I Ran Things" in which I will share my views on non-medical exemptions for vaccines, homeopathy, white-feminist-uncritical-appropriation of "native" stuff in the context of childrearing. :)
  • Erin
    I would read that guest post.
  • Congratulations!

    I read via RSS so I never see the site unless I come over here to comment, and I have various adblocking things in my Firefox anyway. But a (non-obnoxiously-designed) RSS footer would not be obnoxious to me; I'm seeing a lot of them lately, and I'm mentally filtering them out ;).
  • WoolPig
    I chose the right sidebar for ad additions, but mostly I want to find out how to make my browser block ads. I suppose its a Firefox extension/add-on that I need to find.
  • You also want the firefox flashblock extension. I find adblock (though awesome) is inconsistent about keeping up with Firefox revisions, but flashblock is indispensable. (Maybe it is called flash click-to-play? Hm.)
  • I thought about suggesting flashblock, but I don't personally use it and have not had problems with annoying ads. I did use it for awhile, but there are a few thing si need to do every day that use Flash, and it just got too tedious to have to click through all the time.
  • what you want (I think) is a firefox extension called "ad-block plus"
  • Rich Wilson
    I strongly suggest 'noscript' for security. It is a bit of a pain to 'allow' scripts on all the sites you trust, and most sites require some level of javascript these days. But 'noscript' can really save you from some nasty web viruses. http://noscript.net/
  • WoolPig
    Yup! That is exactly what I needed and it does, in fact, effectively block out the ads on your site (provided there wasn't something I was missing on the lefthand bar amongst the ads), and probably others as well, though I installed it as my internet use for the morning was coming to an end. Thanks!
  • pekmez
    I put down "other" because my browser blocks them anyway, so as long as they look like the ones you have now, ie become invisible to my browser, it works for me. ;-)
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