Ok, so I did some more fiddling with the blog layout last night. I decided that it was very annoying having the comments link right at the bottom of each blog post - because if you’re reading post, you might want to know that there are comments, and it’s not very obvious until you get to the end. At which point you might not be enticed to read them. So I moved the RSS/comment/trackback links to just under the post title. Now it’s easier to see what posts have comments and what don’t, and hopefully also encourage readers to add comments.

More tweaking is coming; a third icon is in the works, although it probably won’t be ready for at least another week, as this weekend will be spent doing auditioning for my upcoming show, plus some clothes shopping, plus finishing my finger puppet post (I haven’t forgotten!), plus meeting with a film maker about this super-secret puppetry work I mentioned recently.

The more tweaking will mainly take place in the form of fixing up the advertising on the site. You may see that I have a couple of different types of advertising; one is Google, another is Amazon. But in fact, there is a third. I recently signed up with an advertising agent, whereby people bid to have their ads on my blog. I get paid whether people click on the ad or not, but the ads must show to a certain number of visitors before I get any money out of it. The good thing about the service is that I earn money not on click-throughs, but on the sale of the ad space. The bad thing is that I don’t get enough hits to earn enough out of it, and the ads are usually extremely out of place on my site.

Comparing this with Google - their ads are context sensitive, which means they almost always fit in with the rest of my site, and I’m actually getting a lot of click-throughs. (Google pays based on the number of click-throughs, whereas my advertising agent doesn’t) This means I’m earning more money via Google; so I’m going to cut out the middleman and dump the advertising agent. It’s not working for me, and I’m rejecting more ads (I have the ability to decide what ads show with the advertising agent, but don’t have so much control with Google) than I’m approving.

This means more crappy Google ads to look at. Sorry.

But there’s anothe change. I set up an Amazon ‘aStore’ - the Puppet Books page - to try and get some advertising income that way. But there’s been hardly any hits on the page; in fact, I’ve worked out why. It’s because it doesn’t appear well in Google searches, because of course, I can’t add new blog posts to it, and therefore get it indexed by Google. So I’m going to dump that page. But don’t worry, the books will still be here. Because I’m actually earning a bit of money from Amazon, in a different way.

You’ll notice on the right side of every page, under the menu, there is one Amazon ad. These will also go; because that’s not where the income is coming from. I’m getting commission fees based on the books I blog about. The ones listed in the FAQs, in the how-to-make posts. So what I’ll do, once it’s all set up, is delete the book page, and add a new category for the FAQ. To that category, I will blog about puppetry books - only the ones I have in my own personal library, so you know they are worth the money, and you know they will be relevant. I will add a short review about the book, as well as the link to Amazon - thereby adding some really good content to the blog, as well as trying to earn some more advertising income.

If all that sounds complicated… well, it’s not really, it’s just a lot of fiddling on my side of things… You may be wondering why I keep making changes, and it’s simply that I’m trying different advertising techniques to work out where I can earn the most. I’ve got to start getting the blog to pay for itself; the more hits I get to the site, the more it costs to keep it going. So the tweaking is all a necessary evil I’m afraid.

Anyway, that’s what I’m going to try. Keep on coming back to the site, cause there’s a lot more planned and a lot more to do. Plus so much more to be written about puppetry!