A Tale of Two Blogs

Time for some impulse shopping? -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
I actually have two blogs. Strange Fascination is of course the one you're reading. It's my original blog, and contains all of my original articles across many broad topics. I added a few advertising sponsors in the hope of making this labor of love a little bit profitable. My click revenue was pretty inconsequential, but I did observe something from watching others' surfing habits: women are more likely to click on the imbedded ads. I know how terribly sexist this conclusion is, and I must compound the offense by noting that women are also more likely to buy as well as click.

It's not for nothing that Banana Republic only gives the back 1/6 of its floor space to men's wear. There is method to Macy's madness in having women's wear filling up the first two floors -- men have to trek up two escalator flights to shop among lamps and luggage. The ladies like to shop. And so ... I created a commercially-oriented spin-off of Strange Fascination -- Avenue G. Avenue G has a subset of articles from Strange Fascination -- mostly dealing with cinema arts and some liberal politics. The presentation is different and the ad links are more woman-oriented (e.g., Linen's and Things).

Another major difference is that I use automated syndication material from Cinemablend and others. At first I was going to write all new material for Avenue G, but it was far too time-consuming. You could say the Avenue G is on autopilot -- it gets daily material from free syndication and monthly articles copied verbatim from Strange Fascination. The only other thing I did to punch up Avenue G was add links to show business sites like Jossip and Hollywood.com.

Now, here is the rub. Strange Fascination gets just a tiny trickle of visitors. Without prompting or alert emails, it gets maybe three unsolicited looks each day (not counting my own hits). Avenue G gets as many as 12 hits a day from all over the world. This has me wondering how much I need to focus the articles or filter where they display. It's actually a good thing -- I know the potential is there. There's gold in the hills -- blogspotter will just have to ascertain how to find it. If you have nothing else to do, check out Avenue G. Does it give you a sense of déjà vu? I hope so – it means you already read it here.

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