Loans and Lawyers
Posted on February 28, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
What has student loan consolidation or Houston criminal attorney got to do with writing?
I come from a very traditional background and as someone who tries to make a living writing that’s a hard acknowledgement to make. It’s also equally difficult to know what it is about yourself that hangs onto an outdated world view.
Mine is part professional. I belong to the world that allows people like me to write in newspapers and make the odd TV programme - all buttressed by advertising spend, all very competitive and all very ego driven.
But I only partly belong to that world. I never succeeded in it to the point where it defines my day. Over the past few months I’ve drifted into parallel worlds where people say, for example, it is important to touch people with your wisdom and insights. Impacting one life is as important as impacting a hundred. A community is a community even if it is very very small.
And I’ve drifted into this other world where in fact you need to have your cynicism very finely honed. That is the world of google ad words and effective blogging.
I hadn’t realised for example that student loan consolidation and Houston criminal attorney are both very expensive google ad words (in the 40 - 60 $ per click range late last year and in the $20 - 30 range now for Englilsh speaking countries). By way of contrast my own interests - virtual museums - are very low click value (less than $1).
Of course there is hot competition for those pricey ad words, less so for virtual museums. So far so obvious you might say.
I wonder though about the overall impact of this. It’s not just that I might opt to write about subjects I’m not familiar with, and that I’ll do that as effortlessly as possible. But I along with a few thousand others will be giving shape to the Internet and in our own way buttressing a new system.
In that new system we create content for google to sell ad words. We even buy ad words to get people to our site so they can go chasing different ad words. So the web is constructed around the auctioning of the words we use and it’s taking place on a global scale every second of the day. Logical. Logical.
But you can see why I am rapidly becoming aware of how old fashioned I am. I don’t think this system is sustainable. Somebody is going to lift the lid and say: do you realise what you are doing here?
So what is going on. Crafting content to hit a search engine’s sweet spot so the search engine can sell your words? So logical. The Houston criminal lawyer sat on the student loan consolidation file wondering if loan consolidation or hedge fund ratios were at the root of the crime.
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Those trackbacks look very spammy!
Unfortunately when adverts are added to a blog it can influence what you write about. Most of the time I don’t think about it much when writing a new post, especially as writing for adverts will just put off my regular readers.
Hi Donncha
I’m just slowly beginning to understand this area of blogging and how it influences the shape of the web. I try comparing it with regular media. Where are the parallels? Mainstream media is dominated by trash and niches so maybe it’s not that different - I mean that numerically. Look at the magazine racks, the trade press and what’s really striking is the number of products - and more and more of them rely on people writing for free!
[…] Loans What has student loan consolidation or Houston criminal attorney got to do with writing? I come from a very traditional background and as someone who tries to make a living writing that s a hard acknowledgement to make. It s also equally difficult to know what it is about yourself that hangs onto an outdated world view. Mine is part professional. I belong to the world that allows people like me to write in newspapers and make the odd TV programme - all buttressed by advertising spend, all ver […]
[…] Loans What has student loan consolidation or Houston criminal attorney got to do with writing? I come from a very traditional background and as someone who tries to make a living writing that s a hard acknowledgement to make. It s also equally difficult to know what it is about yourself that hangs onto an outdated world view. Mine is part professional. I belong to the world that allows people like me to write in newspapers and make the odd TV programme - all buttressed by advertising spend, all ver […]