It seems Google has deemed that I’m a pornographer.  I’m not, of course, but because they decided that I am, they won’t let Google ads appear on my new website. 

Here’s how I got to be a porn queen:  I built an online magazine for business women called Vjournal (www.Vjournal.com).  It’s a news and networking resource dedicated to helping women become effective, confident, healthy, wealthy business leaders and bosses.  (See www.vjournal.com/about-us to learn more.)  To make the site edgy and compelling, and with the popularity of movies like “Sex in the City” and best-selling makeup with titles like “Buxom Lips”, I chose to use double-entendres for the magazine’s departments.  For example, the section on women in leadership is called “Women on Top” and the personal finance section is called “Ample Assets”.   The area on helping you advance your career is called “Assume the Position”. 

The content, however, is serious business.  Although I want it to be fun, Vjournal's main purpose is to educate and empower.  In focus groups and questionnaires testing the concept, a lot of women and men indicated they thought the website to be sassy, empowering, and funny.  But the Google bots who crawled all over the website have no sense of humor and don’t get the DOUBLE in double-entendre, so they won’t let me participate in Google AdSense, the program that allows millions of websites and blogs to earn revenue by showing Google ads alongside their content. 

The way Google AdSense works is simple:  if you’re an advertiser, you can choose to have your ads appear on this huge network of websites and blogs that match what you have to sell.  So if you’re selling cameras, your ads can appear on the gazillions of websites dedicated to photography and camera reviews if they’ve signed up for the AdSense program.  AdSense a major key to how Google makes money, and they need more and more sites to offer up to their advertisers, so basically the only ones they don’t allow into their AdSense program are fraudsters and porn kings and queens, like me.   This is frustrating because Google AdSense was an early way to populate the website with advertising rather than sell ads direct, which I have every intention of doing at the appropriate time, but not a mere few weeks after getting it live.

Let’s start with why I chose to focus on women in business:

1.    I believe that there is a profitable niche of women who DON’T want celebrity gossip, weight-loss tips, crying about their relationships, and recipes, which seem to be the ‘recipe’ for every other woman-oriented media property from iVillage to Yahoo’s new “Shine” portal, to glam media, which has rolled up nearly 600 fashion, shopping and celebrity blogs so they can sell advertising on all of them. 

2.    I am a successful high-level female executive who has faced the full breath of situations Vjournal will be focusing on, from fundraising, to managing a team, hiring, and health and wealth management so I know my intended audience extremely well;

3.    I have been in the start-up world before, so I know what building a business from scratch entails and what I’m doing to my personal and family life to get this done; 

4.    I have gotten accolades for my leadership style from members of both genders, meaning that my success came without being a b*t*h as far as I know, so I consider myself a ‘b*t*h expert’ of sorts.  This is in fact a critical component, as I love men and don’t want this to become some feminist man-bashing exercise but rather a place where both sexes can understand more about how gender differences impact us in the business world – because they do.  It could be as basic as the filters we use when making a decision – but there are proven differences that show up in academic research and I’ve been troubled that the information rarely makes it into the mainstream, except to perpetuate silly stereotypes.  I have a unique background that allows me to address the academic research and provide a bridge into the business world (see http://www.vjournal.com/about-Natalee-Roan)

It’s hard work, but ultimately I think Vjournal has a real shot at becoming a high-quality media property aimed at an affluent niche audience that few have been able to round up.  

As far as the Google AdSense issue , in truth the website has very little content as it barely went live, so I will resubmit it in a few weeks when more articles have been posted for the bots to chew on.  I’ll let you know when and what happens. 

This case study is the real deal, and to keep up with the double entendres, I hope you enjoy the long, hard ride.  And the more the merrier, so invite your friends and associates.  I'm aware of one MBA class that's signed on - welcome!  You won’t get a better chance to see the entrepreneurial mind at work. 

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