So, it’s about a month since I tinkered around with the blog, and started displaying a couple of advertising banners down the right hand side. Eventually, of course I’d like to get to a place where I can earn even a little bit of revenue from all the hours of love I pour into the blog, and so this was my first attempt at exploring the art of the possible.

I think it’s fair to say it hasn’t been a rip roaring success, mainly down to the fact that the adverts have largely been shit. I mean, I’m not allowed to click on my own advertising banner, so I have no way of knowing what lays beneath the headlines. However, when I look at a cartoon picture of a badly drawn banana, accompanied by the suggestion that I should avoid this and four other fruits if I wish to preserve my levels of testosterone, I have to say I probably wouldn’t fall over myself to make further enquiries even if I was allowed.

Nor would I have been tempted by the advert for Metal Supermarkets, Government solar panel funding or some file converter free download thingy. Yesterday they even had the cheek to offer a click-through opportunity to meet  Russian singles, I mean come on. All I needed was an advert for Snake Oil and I would have had a full set of dodgy. There’s clearly work to do, and I don’t think even the most persuasive marketeer could convince me that these morsels were hand picked to tempt my discerning readership.

Hardly surprising then, that over the month I appear to have earned the princely sum of 47p. It seems my dreams of imminent retirement were a little premature, dammit. So, I started looking around, and thought maybe I’d give Amazon a try. I mean that’s a reputable site, right? They sell pretty much anything and their affiliate programme is supposed to be quite good, so I decided to can my first attempt and write my 47p loss down to experience.

Thirty minutes after I submitted my details to Amazon I got a polite thanks, but no thanks. I quote:

I have reviewed your application. When selecting Amazon.co.uk Associates Programme participants, we try to determine why a customer would seek out the website in question.

The programme is not set up to simply advertise Amazon.co.uk and third party links within websites, or make mini Amazon websites.

Since your website does not appear to be finished, we encourage you to resubmit your application after creating a unique site with original content.

Chuffing cheeky knackers! I lost it at that point…original content??? I’ll give them original bloody content…how about the blog posts I’ve written every single day for the last 8 months? There’s one hundred and fifty thousand words’ worth of original content right there for starters. I was beyond mad. So, they got a Dee special email by return… 🙂

Anyway, it turns out when they bothered to look again that I’m welcome after all. Sorry Dee, human error. Yeah whatever, I felt like telling them where to shove it to be honest, out of principle and sheer bloody-mindedness but I’ve never been one to cut my nose off to spite my face, so I didn’t. Anything’s got to be better than the dross we’ve been served by the other guys, right? So that’s how come you’ll start to see Amazon branded ads…I’m mixing it up a bit to see whether it works any better for me, and of course for you guys.

Better..? 🙂

By the way, just in case any of my subscribers are wondering why your skinny mail appears to have stopped, there was apparently some bug in the system but I’m assured you’ll start getting them again from tomorrow. I just don’t have much luck with subscription feeds do I?!

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