Since I’m doing this raffle for the Travelers Network, I decided to start using Google Analytics to see how many and what kinds of users I was getting. But you get so much more information– where they’re coming from, where they go on the site, what they had for breakfast. I started watching the numbers change every day, and playing around with the little graphs and widgets.

But I have too few users, too little data! So, I looked into running a google ad. Look: I can specify to just spend $1.00 a day (since I make no money from the site), and my ad will go to thousands of users. So I set up my keywords and countries, built an ad, and set it free.

Two hours later, I checked: the ad had been shown to 2,209 people, and two had clicked on it, using up my $1.00 and disabling the ad for the rest of the day. I thought– Wow! My ad just showed up in 2000 people’s bedrooms and hostels and offices. And I started playing with all the little toys Google AdWords gives you: I set up multiple ads and goal actions to test their effectiveness and tripled my daily ad budget.

And now I’m can’t stop thinking of all the things I could do with a little money. I could produce dizzying collections of targeted ad campaigns, finance-equalized conversion metrics, and user-response reports. I could do experiments in eye-catching techniques and study the demographics of search term usage and online behaviors. I could make millions of screens the unwitting acolytes to all my projects, funneling people around the globe onto my once-lonely pages. The world opens itself up to be my oven, if I’ll just lean over to feed it a little more dough.