The deletion of my second blog

My second blog, The Encounter and The Tunnels was never supposed to exist. I had an old blog called The House of Blood. I attempted to change the name of it and then to delete it, but could do neither one at the time. I therefore started the second blog, which would have a new name and be geared toward horror, thriller, suspense, and crime noir fiction.

One problem I had in regards to both blogs is that I didn't know how to put up a picture of the book or DVD I was reviewing. I always wanted that since starting the first blog. I'm not the most literate when it comes to computers. In fact, I'm pretty dumb and slow at figuring things out on a computer. Call it old age. Still, I saw a link to Google on of my blog around News Year Day and thought to myself, "Here's a way to add the images of book covers and DVDs that I've wanted to put with my reviews." Wrong! I signed up to Google, but all it did was to put up ads of various products on my new blog such as hamburgers and free coupons to various things, which I didn't like. My blog wasn't about that. It was about books and DVD reviews.

After I'd made the mistake of signing up with them, I found a link to Amazon.com and became one of their associates. This enabled me to put up both links and images of the books and movies I was reviewing. Great! I thought. I then contacted Google within hours of establishing their link on my blog and asked them politely to delete it or to discontinue my participation in their program...that it wasn't what I'd been looking for. They wrote back and instructed me to follow their directions for cancellation. I did, but there was a Catch 22 involved. There hadn't been any impressions done on the links. No one had yet clicked on the images they had up on my blog. What could I do? I put a zero in the box, but they wouldn't accept that and therefore wouldn't cancel my participation in their program. I wrote them three or four times to cancel it, but it proved to be a waste of my time.

Blogs or websites that participate in this program aren't allowed to click on the images on their sites. The reason behind this is each click produces a few pennies of revenue for the creator of the blog or website, and Google doesn't want any hankie-pankie going on with owners and creators trying to increase their revenue by clicking on the images themselves, rather than visitors to the site doing it. When the creator of the blog does something like that, he or she runs the risk of being eliminated from Google's participation program. Do you see the light bulb going off over my head? I wrote to Google that since they wouldn't cancel my participation, they left me no choice but to start clicking on their images on my new blog. I did so with apparent glee. It seemed to create the result I desired...at least up to last night. Their images, however, were back on my blog this morning, so being a Scorpio, I got angry and just deleted the whole thing. There was a lot of man hours of hard work on my part in creating the blog. That was time away from my own fiction writing.

I replaced the new blog on Amazon with my old blog, which I'd been keeping up to date with current reviews. So far, I'm been pleased with the results from Amazon, though I make a few mistakes in linking images to some of my reviews. Whether anyone clicks on the Amazon images of the books and DVD covers is irrelevant to me. I'm just happy to finally have images to go along with my reviews. I think it helps the reader to have a picture to go by when reading a review of a product. So, I now only have one blog. The original name of http://thehouseofblood.blogspot.com is still there, though I have tried to change it to The Encounter and The Tunnels. But that's okay. I've got 69 postings on this blog, where as the new one only had 45. I also have my old blog up on Facebook, at least it was a few weeks ago, but Facebook keeps making changes in the profile format, so it might have disappeared for all I know. Anyway, this why you can't find my second blog. Thanks to Google, I was forced to delete it.