AdSense: Adding Cents to Fivecentstencents

Since I started to blog in earnest in May 2007, I have discovered AdSense from surfing other popular blogs and starting to learn more about how you can monetise your blog by including Google AdSense advertisements.

AdSense as a experiment
I started it out as an experiment to see if I could sustain this blogging momentum and also to discover the writing skills that I have hidden inside myself. So far, the experiment has been an interesting journey of self-discovery as well as learning about new internet business models.

So far, I have managed to hit USD 100 earnings after blogging for 2 months plus and while I still need to keep my day job, the dollars and cents added from this blog allows me to explore alternative income sources and to learn more about the possibilities provided by the advent of internet business models. It is not the money per-se that motivates me to blog but it helps to incentivise and allow my writing to be more focussed to a schedule. I try to blog about five to six articles a week and aim to write articles that either allow me to express my views on personal finance topics or to comment on issues that I have some opinions through my life experiences or from what I encountered in my life.

Beyond financial benefits of blogging
Another aspect of blogging that I enjoy is the ability to share my different interests in life with you the reader. I enjoy the clarity that writing brings, because when you are forced to write a post about a topic, an experience or an encounter, you need to organise your thoughts in a coherent way that makes sense when read by you who may have never gone through the experience.

My favourite blog
Of the four blogs that I maintain my favourite blog is actually my national service memoirs military-life.blogspot.com. My army experience as a conscript in the Lion City had impacted me in many ways. Some of my attitudes in life and my expectations of my fellow man been tempered by the experiences I encountered in NS. When I write out my recollections and reflections about past-army experiences, it allows me to purge out some of the resentment and regret built up from the encounters I had with the people whom I interacted with during my active full-time as well as reserve service in the Singapore Armed Forces.

I see this as a form of therapy as I am able to slowly release some of the toxins that were built up in my system by the imposition of State control over my life in the name of national defence. I cherish the little freedom I have now having routinely been deprived of it for two or twenty-one days every year for the last ten years of life due to my national service reservist liability.

Monetise your blog
If you are currently writing a blog that has a ready audience, you may want to consider monetising it using AdSense or similar type of application as you add cents to your alternate streams of income and take further steps in your journey towards financial journey.

Be well and prosper.