Advertising

I just received a cheque from Google. They pay whenever I pass $100, which in my case takes a while. But everytime the cheque arrives it is a happy moment.

The arrival of my cheque also triggered a chain of thoughts about advertising on my site. A little bit more than a year ago, I added the Google AdWords to this site. I simply took the existing pages, and looked where I could fit in the AdWords box. Since it was a test, I didn’t spent too much time tweaking my templates; I just wanted to know whether it worked. In the past year I have made some minor changes, mainly to try out the AdWords program.

As I said, I had some thoughts about this whole advertising thing. One of these thoughts is that I should rethink the design of my pages so that the advertisements blend in better. If I take advertising seriously, I should also give the ads a better position on my pages (above the fold) of course without taking too much away from the content.

I also want to try out Chitika, which I heard gives good results as well. I placed some Chitika adds on my site, like the one above, and will monitor it during the next weeks. As you see, Chitika’s eMiniMalls look far more sexy than Google’s AdWords. But are they also more effective?

Jeroen Sangers @jeroensangers