I’m officially on Nuffnang

If you didn’t already know, there’s something on the sidebar of this site, something that hasn’t been there before. Something that I’m not particularly happy to put on my site– it is — an Advertisement!!! (gasp!)

To be more specific it’s a nuffnang add, about 10 lines of javascript code that will for the next couple of months display ads to visitors of this sites. I’m not too familiar with ads, but from what I gather I have little control over who will display ads on this site, and that’s the part I’m not particularly happy with. Aside from the usual “No alcohol” and “No tobacco” options, I couldn’t really control who I would not like to advertise on my site.

So why put ads, especially when I claim the blog cost under $4 a month?

First the blog does cost less than 4USD per month, and second it isn’t about making money–but money is still nice to have — it’s about taking this to the next level.

What is Nuffnang anyway?

Nuffnang approached me last week, and suggested that I join their network. They described it as a platform and community for Malaysian bloggers to ‘unite’ and provide a social and communitarian aspect to an otherwise dispersed group of bloggers working in silos. Of course, companies have to pay the bills and the whole community/social aspect of Nuffnang is funded by advertisers who view blogs as another way to reach their target audiences. Over time, blogs will slowly creep into the mainstream advertising space to compete with print and televised ads (if they haven’t already).

The Nuffnang ad works on two levels. One as a way to monetize a blog per impression or per click of the advert. That’s straightforward.

The ad also captures data of your visitors. This is where the 2nd level comes in, based on information about your site visitors, Nuffnang can then start recommending you to advertisers for sponsored post. This is basically a post where you write about an advertisers product or service, THIS is where the money is. In a nutshell that’s what Nuffnang is.

Beside the money bit, there’s also the community aspect of Nuffnang, where they organize events for bloggers, you can check out their next event called blogopolis to get a feel of that.

Just like anything else, it’s always more motivational and effective to be part of a community rather than working alone. Communities re-inforce each other and that actually is a very good thing, especially for something as lonely as blogging. That’s what Nuffnang ‘could’ offer.

My personal perspective

From my personal perspective, I believe, that my blog has reached as far as I can take it on my own. Looking back it is quite an accomplishment to reach 8k visits/month less than 18 months from the start of the blog, and I’m really proud to have done it and win an award at the same time. However, given that the stuff I blog about isn’t quite mainstream (who gives a rats a$$ about cloud computing anyway?) and the fact that it’s just a one man show–I don’t think it’ll ever breach the 10,000 visitors per month if I just continue going about it alone.

So the question of course is–do I want to take it to the next level? It’s a legitimate question, there’s actually no need to take it to the next level, I can keep this blog as a hobby I do on the weekends, and just spend $4 a month for the next 10 years getting around 8k visits per month. That’s perfectly good isn’t it?

But… I promised myself sometime back, that I would go all out on blogging. Throughout my life there have been times where I would not do something out of fear of failure–those days are looong gone. Some may know, that I had a blogspot blog that focused on Malaysian politics as far back as April 2003, that blog dwindled out and fizzled sporadically. Reinventing this blog last year was one of the best decisions I ever made–and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t go all out.

I’m not saying I’ll excel or succeed–who knows what’ll happen. What I do know is that unless I do something to change things around on my approach to blogging, things are going to remain stagnant, and that’s a sure fire way to not go all out. It doesn’t mean failure, but it doesn’t mean excelling either–being neutral and stagnant is OK, for instance I haven’t improved my guitar playing skills for the last 5 years, that’s fine. It’s not something high on my agenda. But if I want to take blogging to the next level–if doing that is high on my agenda–I have to do something different and can’t rely on doing the same thing for the next one year hoping to get the same level of progress.

The bottomline is I want to take this further than where it is now–but I need help doing that.

So what now?

So it all boils down to 2 questions:

1. Do I want to take blogging to the next level?

2. Will Nuffnang help me take it to the next level?

After much reflection, the answer to question(1) is a definitive YES.

The answer to the question (2) …well I’ve started the Nuffnang process, I guess only time will then. I’ll keep you guys posted :).

*The nuffnang ad, just like Google adsense runs on Javascript. It’s used to track information on site visits, if you’re uncomfortable with javascripts on any site, you might want to download noscript for chrome or firefox. You can also bypass the problem entirely by using the TorBrowser for anonymous browsing so it doesn’t matter whose tracking you.

*While the previous disclaimer isn’t in my best interest, I believe in web privacy which is different from anonymity. Privacy is about sharing only the information you want to share and that’s based on an individual preference. If you don’t like someone tracking your IP and search information, then that’s perfectly acceptable. However, I should warn you that my ONE nuffnang ad here is no where near the amount of information you share with ads on other sites. Check out a previous post of mine which details how to track which sites are tracking you.