There’s a new addition to the site — I’ve been accepted into the Google AdSense program, so there will now be some small text advertisements on my pages.
I’d tried signing up for the AdSense program a while ago, but at that point was denied. Since then, I’d been debating the merits of trying again off and on — were the potential benefits of a little extra income (in theory, at least, if the ads generate enough clicks) worth putting a little more advertising on my site?
I’ve already had Amazon ads at the bottom of my pages for a good long while now, which (to be honest) haven’t netted me more than a few dollars — hardly enough to be noticeable. However, I’ve read of some people getting some surprisingly decent returns through the Google AdSense program, and while I doubt that I get enough traffic for it to make a major dent, I eventually decided that it was worth trying again — and surprisingly enough, this time they let me in.
I’ve tried to make the ads obvious without being terribly intrusive. You’ll see them in one of two places on the site.
As most new or returning visitors not coming in through a search engine or from an RSS reader will be hitting the main page, I didn’t want to bury the ads at the very bottom of the page as I have with the Amazon ad box, nor did I want them right at the top of the page as a standard banner — and while I briefly toyed with returning to a two-column layout that would allow me to place the ads on the edge of the page, I’m a bit too fond of the current single-column style to go quite that far.
So, for this main page, I’ve inserted the ads between the first and second posts on the page. Easily visible and likely to be seen, but not the first thing to greet a new visitor upon the initial load of the page.
For the individual archive pages I was a bit more concerned with not interrupting the flow between the post and the associated comment thread, so for those, I’ve placed the AdSense ads at the bottom of the page, just above the Amazon ad box.
Hopefully this strikes a good balance between visibility and keeping the ads as un-intrusive as possible.
And, of course, should an ad ever pop up that might be of interest, please feel free to click on it and pass a penny or two my way. It’s always appreciated!
iTunes: “Morning Will Come When I’m Not Ready” by Lionrock from the album An Instinct for Detection (1996, 3:49).