My Seasonal Experiment

Since we're in the thick of the Christmas buying season, I got an idea for a blog experiment to try, good for practice if nothing else.

For weeks now, the Baby Alive doll has been the first thing my daughter mentions when she's asked what she wants for Christmas. Problem was, it was nowhere to be found by the time my wife and I started our toy shopping right after Thanksgiving day. (I ended up buying it from someone on eBay, since there are lots of them available there.) So I thought I'd set up a blog to list the places I found where you really can actually buy Baby Alive online. Since I'm not an affiliate for Amazon.com, or anything else that sells it, I didn't stand to earn anything from promoting these links...but I figured that whatever Google Adsense income this blog generated would be all profit. (It costs nothing to create the blog and see what happens.)

So far, however, it's been nothing but a waste of time. A whopping 20 cents of income to date, although it has only been up for about a week. It is getting some decent traffic though, without even being ranked on any search engines at all. All I've done is post 4 or 5 comments that included a link to my blog site wherever I found blog postings about the Baby Alive doll. And just by doing that I've been getting over 60 hits/day for the last few, which I think is pretty impressive.

What's disappointing though, is almost nobody is clicking on the Google ads. And I think I know why, but I'm not sure how to correct the problem. For one thing, the people that look at this are probably in a hurry and just want to quickly find what they're looking for. But the main problem is, the ads that are appearing often have nothing to do with Baby Alive dolls, even though I've mentioned Baby Alive over and over and over again thoughout the text. I've stumbled on several other sites that barely even mention the thing, but yet they feature Google ads that all have Baby Alive in their titles.(?!) How do they do that?! I understand that you can screen the ads that appear on your site to some extent, so maybe you can somehow specify the titles that you find acceptable? I don't know, but I'm sure I would be getting many, many more clicks if those Google ads were about the highly defined subject that my readers are interested in. I have to look into this more closely to see what I could do to get more appropriate ads to appear.

If you care to check out this little blog experiment of mine, it can be found at: www.baby-alive.blogspot.com (While it lasts, anyway...I've made it a pretty seasonal thing.)

The other mystery I've found with this blog is how it's been treated by Google itself. I submitted it to Google, and after about 3 days it already appeared in Google's listings if you searched for "Baby Alive", "where to buy". In fact, it was appearing on the 3rd page of results, at about 28th overall in the 400 or so results at the time. Pretty impressive...but then things got weird. The next day I checked the same search and found that I had been replaced in the exact place in the results by another blog of the same name, except for having "-xx" added to the end of the name. So I guess it was generated by some sort of spam blog creator of some kind, because it only linked directly to one of those multiple link websites that has no real content, just links to other websites. I even reported it to Blogger.com, and before long it was no longer appearing to be a valid URL. But my biggest question is, how did this other mystery blog not only replace me in the exact same position in the search results, but also have mine REMOVED from Google completely?!? I suppose I could pose the question to Google, but I doubt I would get much of a reply. At least Blogger took my report seriously and acted on it.

I guess the only way I'll make any money at all off of the whole Baby Alive craze is by using good old eBay itself. When I found a pretty good deal on there to buy for my daughter, I also bought an extra one for myself to turn around and sell! I just listed it the other day and then put a link to it on the Baby Alive blog, too. Already have a few bids with several more days to go. (eBay...what would I do without you?!)

John