It depends. . .(a post all about advertising...really)

I so enjoyed every comment on my recent "underwear" post. Hubby and I sat here cracking up at each one of them.

But wait! It gets better!

I've been intending to share this for a few days and this is a great excuse. Back in October, I added Google Adsense to the sidebar of my blog. I always cringe when I see these Google ads and NEVER click on them. So I've always thought there was no way I could ever make any money by having them on my blog and, most especially thought they would give a bad vibe coming from my blog as one where I am out to make money (which many of the blogs that are full of ads are just out to make money).

Anyway, before I finish babbling about Adsense, I wanted to share with you what I spotted on my blog today that has me laughing. Apparently, Google crawls through your posts and finds related material to place in the Adsense ads.

Check out what it found to relate to in my latest "underwear" post? One day later, my blog is advertising bladder control products! Ha ha! Oh no! And now I'm making a second post about it and the crawlers are going to reinforce that this blog is about bladder control and probably continue to advertise it more! He he he. Oh my. I'd better watch what I blog about, right? Are you laughing as hard as I am?

So, I want to thank everyone who is clicking on these ads. I put them up on the sidebar of my blog and supposedly in the "feed" for the blog and apparently someone is clicking on them. I installed them back in October and then never went back to log into my account until just the other day. Wow! What a surprise I had waiting for me!

Now, however, I'm having to jump through all kinds of hoops just to get the money sent to me. They sent me a pin number by snail mail that I had to enter, I had to fill out tax forms online, I had to allow them to call my phone and then I entered a special key number into their site, and now I'm waiting for them to make a deposit into my account so that I can go back to their site and tell how much they deposited. Seriously, I had to go through all this kind of stuff with Paypal for a week and I'm not sure which site is "ostensibly safer."

Go ahead. I double dog dare you to click on that bladder control ad and not laugh! (and tomorrow's ads may now be about dog bones.)

I'm playing around with a search engine bar that is supposed to be a type of ad also. It is at the very bottom of my blog for now until I get it working right. It is supposed to search my site only, but at first it was not working. Then I had to learn how to add a "site map" to my account. I had NO idea what I was doing. I've seen that setting before in the Google Webmaster Tools, but never could figure it out. By George, I think I finally got something working the other day. It's really supposed to help people find my site to have a "site map" but a SEO I am not!

By the way, for all those non-techy people, did you know that SEO is not what you think it is! I learned this about two months ago (but was too busy to blog about it). I always though of those big-wig people who made a lot of money in big corporations, but did little work, and wasted their money on high class living whenever I heard the word "SEO." Apparently, a "Senior Executive Officer" is a less common use for the abbreviation. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and people make a career of being SEO experts.

There are crazy things one must do for a site to get it indexed for search engines appropriately, such as using the right keywords, but yet not too many of the same keyword, in your writings on your site. Uh? That's like the legalese of "included, but not limited to" phrase. Is there really any right answer?

I also signed up for AdWords back in October and I see that I paid them $5 to purchase ads. AdSense and AdWords can be confusing. AdSense is you making money by having other's ads on your site. AdWords is you spending money to put your ads on other's sites. I'm afraid to log into my AdWords account to see if it was a waste of money or not. Hopefully, I won't forget to deduct that expense off my taxes. I'm betting $5 didn't go very far or bring anyone to my site. Maybe I should take my AdSense income and turn around and use it for AdWords?