Don’t You Just Feel Cheap Sometimes?

I don’t really want to advertise ANYTHING on my blog - but, what to do about that?

Here I am blogging like my life depended on it, because it does… and I have to find a way to monetize this silly thing so I can get a few dollars per day (I only need $8 per day to survive here in Thailand believe it or not).

To slap ads on my blog makes me feel like I’m prostituting myself… my thoughts, my style… my person.

I don’t want to blanket this blog with Google ads. Who needs that? You see that on every other site in existence. I make like $2 per day from Google on my other sites. That’s not enough to show Google ads on the masterpieces I create on this site (ha-cough, hack).

I love to write. I love to write about what I want to write about. I don’t want to review someone’s web site in a fake review that is all positive and that they give me $50 or $100 for. What a scam that is. You good people that come to my site see my review, don’t realize it’s a paid ad, and go visit the other site because you didn’t know I was paid good money to write 600 words of positive fluff about it.

I don’t want to have text link ads on my site either. Darren Rowse and others were a bit blown away when their Google PageRank died as a result of selling text links on their site. The whole concept of unannounced ads is wrong, they knew that! Text links that were blind advertisements to other sites that maybe Darren didn’t endorse or fee good about either… I don’t want to help someone else get more links at the expense of my PageRank or my self respect.

How to monetize a blog then?

Write a book maybe…

I was thinking, the only way to really monetize this blog in a way I’d feel good about is to write a book and then put some ads on my sites that advertise only that book. That might work to some small degree, but the book will only appeal to a handful of people.

Unless I write a book about something BIG. The WORLD is big. I could write a book about the WORLD and how screwed up it appears to be in my opinion… And I do have quite an opinion on that…even started multiple books with that focus… but, I don’t really want to write a negative book. I want to write a positive book that uplifts people, gets them revved up about jumping out of bed for some reason. Gets them IN bed for some reason… You know, something positive. Something well defined… concrete, non-ambiguous.

I could do a video book… or a video… or a podcast… or an audio book. Hmmm… I like my voice, it’s nice. I like to listen to it. I wonder if anyone would listen to me talking to myself, telling a story…

I did write a short meditation book that at first I charged something frivolous for, but then decided to give away. You can grab it here…

Short Meditation course >

I asked my girlfriend to write some Thai Cookbooks… she did, and those are doing well! But, what about me?

I wrote a huge biography about my life… the last 41 years of my life… and it’s 127,000 words. And it’s a monster of a bio… incredible stories and experiences in there. And you know what? My brother told me I needed to have a story… some fatal flaw that needed to be resolved as the book went on. I needed to have some problem that gets resolved… I was horrified. I thought bio is bio man, just write what happened to me over the years and put a cover on it - DONE.

No, says he. I defer to he.

Ok - so, that won’t be on the bookshelves anytime soon.

I could revive some of my books from the past that I’ve started and discarded. There have been about 9 of those. Of those, “God is Useless” is my favorite. I have to be in the right mood to write about religious matters though. I’m not in that mood today.

I’m in the mood to write about meditation as I just received a scathing critique of my meditation videos on another site of mine - seemlessness.thaipulse.com where I said that some meditation teachers, monks even, have told me that they believed I experienced levels of “jhana”.

Jhana are like the stepping stones to enlightenment. Levels or steps or something - whatever the Buddhists believe. I just know I had these cool experiences and recently found out they correspond really highly with (almost exactly with) levels of jhana as elucidated by the Buddha so many years ago in some of the Pali Suttas.

Apparently my definition of jhana disagrees with strict Buddhist interpretations and this guy attempted to rip me a new one without even having listened to everything or seen all the videos. He grossly misquoted me and took things out of context… He was just anxious to disprove it was jhana… to him jhana comes only to those that are devout Buddhists. Devout as in having studied for many years and able to quote all the rules of Buddhism… the scriptures and what not.

It’s funny because meditation is a physical act. You sit. You focus the mind on your breath. You watch what happens. It’s not hard to get it ‘right’. Experiences happen naturally - not because you’re Buddhist or Hindu or fat or blue. They just happen. Whether exactly the same experience happened to the Buddha or not - who cares? He was one guy that it happened to (maybe). Why do you need to follow exactly what he did in order for you to have a real experience? Maybe Buddha only reached enlightenment 101. Maybe you’ll reach 207 or 405 or some other pedagogical level.

I know what I should do. I hate shoulding on myself, but…

I am 65,000 words into writing a fiction novel about some Thailand characters. I am headfirst into the height of the drama and it’s exciting and all but I’m just not into finishing that today. ADD/HD is a serious disability man. If you’re not in the mood - you’re just not in the mood. That book might sit unfinished for a year or 10 if my past behavior is to be a predictor of future behavior in this instance.

Anyway… so that’s where I am right now. I’m feeling like a $2 hooker as I look over my AimforAwesome site and realizing that there are too many advertisements that are distracting from my message.

And I’m wondering… what to write.

A book?

Best of Life!

No ads on this blog post, brought to you by Vern’s current state of mind .

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