I am trying SO HARD to be a grown-up, and the world just keeps socking me in the face.

For one, I decide that 2009 would be the year that I start advertising. Since I’ve been making minimal money, I’ve been spending minimal money — and what I’ve been doing so far is buying nice gifts and meals for my most intimate circle. That is appreciated but I want to do more, and I’m finally at the point where I’ll be able to afford a little more spending.

So here’s the plan for the month:

This month, I do nothing but come up with some CRM solutions and begin an ad campaign. CRM stands for "customer relations management," which is grown-up talk for "stop losing business cards and forgetting people’s birthdays." If I put addresses in the computer all during November, fine. If my ads run in January, fine. But it really is time to stop running everything off the Post-its stuck on my computer (today, four) and doing things either instantly or never.

I actually started with the idea of the ad campaign first. I frankly was not prepared for the magnitude of spending involved in being an adult businessperson, though. I already get some Los Angeles to New York traffic, so one idea that I had was to advertise on a popular Hollywood blog. What does that cost? Well … $5,000. That gets you seen for about a week — a price, frankly, that is comparable to print.

Now, coming from print, where I ran a real estate section that was touted as a great ad environment, I’m not so sure that it always works either, but those nice Internet folks don’t even promise you a certain placement on the page.

No, in the Web world — or at least the world of the site that I want to advertise on — you pay for "impressions," or how many times people load the page. So you can’t even tell if your target audience is reading your ads or not.

Suddenly, paying a computer guy $80 or $100 an hour to fix me doesn’t seem so bad after all, but you heard it here first. There’s a deadline, and it’s Nov. 1, to go beyond Post-its.

Alison Rogers is a licensed salesperson and author of "Diary of a Real Estate Rookie."

***

What’s your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor. To contact the writer, click the byline at the top of the story.

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