How my blogging has paid off… somewhat

As the great birthday tradition goes:

Your greeting is good, but I need cash.

For many people, this is true for blogging as well, but with a twist, depending especially on what is one’s motive for keeping a weblog. Yeap, comments do feed the ego and often prompts the flow of creative juices and that floats the boat of many a blogger. But for the more enterprising ones, their pages are ad-riddled in order to rake in more that random praises and kudos.

While I revel in the fact that the number of hits I get nowadays often exceed the number of fingers in my two hands combined, I’m still hoping to make my blog a tool for augmenting my meager teacher’s income. But for the last half year, my AdSense dollars have been pegged at the staggering amount of $1.62! Whoo-pee indeed! I have surfed many sites which dispense sound advise on how to “monetize” one’s blog but…

Anyway, blogging did pay me off, somewhat.

Last March, I wrote about Federer’s loss in the hands of Guillermo Canas. It was an amateurish take on the world of tennis, a realm I have come to love and be very familiar with while never having stepped on a court. Anyway, the post somehow caught the eye of a Tennis Channel staff. He emailed me if I wanted to write about the then-upcoming French Open and at the same time place an ad in my site. In exchange for the ad placement, he offered to send a goody bag of Tennis Channel. I did blog about French Open 2007 and placed a Tennis Channel link in my blog (for which I had to ignore the voice in my head screaming SELLOUT! after I deviated from my support-Philippine-causes theme). And when the Tennis Channel staff verified the post and ad’s placement, he was mighty pleased and asked for my contact details so he could send the goods over.

May passed. Then June. Then July. Enter August.

I actually forgot about this deal I entered. Until I received a notice from our friendly neighborhood post office this first week of August asking me to pick up a parcel.

My Tennis Channel goodies finally arrived! The package they came in was post-marked June 21, 2007, well within the usual 6-to-8-week delivery time of goodies from the US. I can’t help but wonder then where it was the whole time. But in any case, I now have my wristwatch, wristband, sunvisor, mousepad, and shirt to enjoy =]

Blogging DOES pay off. Oh joy!