365 Days Of Marketing And Me: Day Fifty-Three - 2/22/2021

One Creative Introverts Effort To Take On The Extroverted Marketing World…

Welcome to day number fifty-three of 365 Days Of Marketing And Me… where… yesterday… I may have shifted my thoughts on the use of advertising and am starting to see it as more than just a necessary evil… that’s required if you have any hopes of not having to hold down a day job… and creating text-based content is your preferred craft…

I often wish that the calling… that I can’t avoid… resulted in a physical good… that would be easier for me to market to be sold… over pushing surreal stories and idiotic experiments as the featured product of my sales pitch… but at the same time I really love what I’m doing… and when push comes to shove… I probably wouldn’t do a thing differently… which is why I’ve learned to live with constantly being broke…

A few months back… I decided to sign up with Ezoic after hearing how it uses AI to decide which ads to include to your site based on the end user’s taste… and where each ad would make the most sense on a page… while making changes as the AI continues to learn… Up until learning of their service… I had Google Adsense automatically place ads…

While Google was in charge… I wasn’t all that impressed with what they did for my site’s aesthetics… but I sure as hell wasn’t going to go through over three-thousand pages to manually place each ad… after signing up to try Ezoic’s free tier of service… I was satisfied enough by the fact that their AI placed ads in a way that made my page look less like it was filled with clickbait throw around with no rhyme or reason… but I was twice as impressed when my revenue more than doubled in just a couple of weeks…

Granted that doubling doesn’t show now… since I messed up my search engine rankings by making changes to most of this site’s URLs before learning how to properly handle 301 redirects… and from the site acting wonky for damn near a month due to technical issues that weren’t my fault… but… everything’s back and I’m happy but the above is only what loosened me up to accepting ads as more than just a necessary evil…

It wasn’t until this last time… when I had to turn the ads off for a little over a day that I felt like my pages looked naked minus all of the extra bits of flare… and was almost reminded of landing in Las Vegas for the first time… when I came back to check and all of the blinking and flashing ads were back… and making the site look more dynamic…

I may still take issue with some of the boring advertisements being pushed… but… I can at least now see how it could be cool in the future if the AI did get to the point where each ad could actually enhance the user’s experience… especially if each ad had something to do with the content… or… was for a product or service that and end-user might actually want…

The insights above conclude the marketing portion for today… so now let’s see how I handled yesterday’s theme…

According to the 365 Days Of Marketing book… yesterday was Single Task Day… which I’m guessing means to focus on one task at a time… instead of multitasking… but I took it to mean that I was going to go easy and only focusing on one effort for the entire day… that effort being… yesterday’s 365 Days Of Marketing And Me post…

Aside from that… took the night off from writing a Daily Breaker post… this is a letter to no one that I used to wrap up my day… I also skipped riding my exercise bike which I’ve been doing daily for a little over a week… keeping in mind that taking time off is scary to me thanks to my all or nothing approach to life… which comes in handy when I need to give up on a bad habit… but it’s a pain in my ass when I’m trying to develop a good habit and any time off to avoid burnout can lead to an unintended phase of nothingness…

Hopefully… by pointing out that I have a tendency to do this… I’ll be able to jump back into the old routine by the end of the day… I’m not all that concerned about getting back on the ball as far as the writing goes… but when it comes to being physically active… I move because I have to… not because I want to… so keeping that as a habit might be a little rough… but I’m confident that I’ll at least get back to it tonight…

In other all-or-nothing news… I’m still on track to skip this month’s one-weekend bender with boxed wine… and I still plan on taking the rest of this year off from drinking… in order to stick to an earlier theme from this marketing project… I figure this is a good place to make a quick update on that front…

And with that… I’m done sharing how I handled yesterday’s theme… now let’s see what the book has in store for me to work on today…

The 365 Days Of Marketing book says that today is Walking The Dog Day… and since I have my own little mutt and not a yo-yo… I’ll give you one guess on how I plan to handle this task… and it’s not going to be as easy as it sounds… since my pooch isn’t all that great on her leash because of her mobility issues… but she does just fine when she follows me around without her harness… so I have to wonder with her late at night or in the early AM… while there are no cars or neighbors to worry about… I’ll let you know in tomorrow’s post how this effort works out…

And to wrap things up… below are the statistics… keeping in mind that I had to disconnect from the ad streaming service… which is why the last two days are lower than usual…