I mostly wanted to say I've enjoyed your blog in recent weeks, but only through your HN submissions (I'm not one to "follow" a blog).
I know very little about monetizing web sites, so even I would not follow my own advice without having someone smarter than me look it over.
Google AdSense is easily defeated/filtered, and technical users tend to be more inclined to use filtering. Similarly, users who do not employ technical means of filtering have generally adopted "mental filtering" of AdSense. In short, they ignore it since it is often misleading.
Pushing your own book on Amazon doesn't hurt, but I sincerely doubt it will help very much.
A working solution is potentially more work. You could use amazon affiliate links to * RELEVANT * books/products mentioned in your posts. For example, the following blog post mentions IDL:
When your advertising is essentially part of your content, as well as complimentary to your content, it should be more effective (in theory). You are the one who knows your content best, so allowing others to decide what to advertise on your site is a dubious proposition. Unless advertising is effective in its goal of making money for you, then there's no point in having it on your site. If you have to do more work to make it effective, so be it. --That's why it's called "work" ;)
As for why "IDL" (Interactive Data Language) jumped out at me as a great example is because I had a "WTF?" moment caused by only knowing the other "IDL" (Interface Description Language).
Your link to the correct wikipedia IDL page was helpful, but there was no reason why you could not also include affiliate links to relevant books/products.
Since I'm admittedly ignorant to monetizing websites, hopefully some of the pros around here will have better ideas and show me why I'm wrong.
I know very little about monetizing web sites, so even I would not follow my own advice without having someone smarter than me look it over.
Google AdSense is easily defeated/filtered, and technical users tend to be more inclined to use filtering. Similarly, users who do not employ technical means of filtering have generally adopted "mental filtering" of AdSense. In short, they ignore it since it is often misleading.
Pushing your own book on Amazon doesn't hurt, but I sincerely doubt it will help very much.
A working solution is potentially more work. You could use amazon affiliate links to * RELEVANT * books/products mentioned in your posts. For example, the following blog post mentions IDL:
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/about-that-cru-hack.html
It took a simple google search to find out there is a book on the topic sold through amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Programming-IDL-Interacti...
When your advertising is essentially part of your content, as well as complimentary to your content, it should be more effective (in theory). You are the one who knows your content best, so allowing others to decide what to advertise on your site is a dubious proposition. Unless advertising is effective in its goal of making money for you, then there's no point in having it on your site. If you have to do more work to make it effective, so be it. --That's why it's called "work" ;)
As for why "IDL" (Interactive Data Language) jumped out at me as a great example is because I had a "WTF?" moment caused by only knowing the other "IDL" (Interface Description Language).
Your link to the correct wikipedia IDL page was helpful, but there was no reason why you could not also include affiliate links to relevant books/products.
Since I'm admittedly ignorant to monetizing websites, hopefully some of the pros around here will have better ideas and show me why I'm wrong.