Let’s Talk About Ads

I have been blogging vigorously for seventeen years and I still love doing it. The only downside is that I have not been able to make just enough money to pay for the hosting and the domain name. I tried Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliates, text ads, and small graphic banners, nothing worked. I even tried support from readers. That hasn’t worked either.

Back in May, which seemed like ages ago, I started adding photography to accompany the blog posts on this blog. The photos don’t have to be related to the blog posts. My goal was to add rich visuals to the layout. It had been a fun experience selecting the photos and I could always rely on Unsplash Source to load up random images. I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog posts and looking at the photography.

Today, I am extending this concept with paid advertising after thinking about it for several months. Because of the prominent space, which takes up at least half screen of my site, I have to be careful in choosing the right clients and their messages. My ideal ads are from products or services I care deeply about. Although I am not limiting the kind of ads on my blog, I would rather promote things that I enjoy such as typefaces (with Vietnamese diacritics), books, brand recognitions, and digital products.

This is an experimentation. I am not sure if I can make it work, but I want to give it a shot. I emailed several type designers to see if they were interested promote their typefaces with Vietnamese language. As much as I felt uneasy cold-calling people, I was surprised and relieved to get their support.

If you have a product or service you would like to promote to Visualgui readers (over 170,000 pageviews per month), get in touch.