Learning how to share

When I posted the paper online almost two years ago, my intention was to shift away from one-off contacts and instead build a sustainable degree of traffic to criticize and comment on the paper in advance of its submission in consideration for a scholarship. While this site did succeed in opening the paper to a broader audience and facilitated unexpected opportunities, its success was still relatively muted.

I have always been interested in the intersection of business, policy, and economics. This portfolio is but one of many papers that I have written over the past few years. With each I have utilized contacts with relevant experience to share the paper in question or have reached out to authors whose thoughts I'd read online or in the media. Again, while generally successful, the effort is time consuming and builds little momentum. As this paper's blog has shown, it is difficult even to share one's ideas online.


Enter an experiment. For the next two weeks, I'll be using a $15 placement on Google Ads (see image) to advertise the paper and to track its ability to turn related search queries on education reform into pageviews. If successful, the blog will have generated much more pageviews (and potentially new criticism) at a fraction of the cost in time and effort one would otherwise exert. In effect, I am paying Google to get others to read the paper. I value outsider's thoughts so much that, if successful, I will extend this approach to share my other concept papers.

As of 4pm today, after starting in mid-morning, the effort has produced 175 impressions (views of my blog's advertisement), but no clickthroughs. Of those 175 impressions, 132 were on Google's website (where on average they appeared as the 3rd ad); and 43 on outside websites. I'll keep you posted on the experiment.