:'(

I endorse this idea.

 

I also endorse Matts Google ads for Guests idea.

Someone with better organisational skills than myself should go sign up for a Google AdSense account and tell me what you need to inject into the pages (HTML, Javascript, etc) of the pages so I can add it to the pages.

I vote Peter.

Is the referal link still added to links posted? I'm sure it was then got removed, why not put it back for all those of us who forget to use it.

 

Probly worth bookmarking it too.
(added to my list of things to forget to do later).

Sorry, sorry sorry. I still haven't sorted the amazon affiliates thing. I will!

Good idea and one I also endorse :)

W3rd.

It's probably a good idea, as long as we never have to see them.

Hmmm, just to make things clearer: the £427 excludes any referral pots.

TradeDoubler requires a bank account, and I didn't want to put it all in my account until I got around to sorting out a Teh Bank Account, so simplest solution is to use that amount as the starting balance for next year, once I actually get the account setup.

Um, I'll do a diagram:




And that's also excluding the Amazon pot which milko is sorting out very soon, yes? :)


IOW, I don't think we should/need to bother with the AdSense stuff.


However, we should definitely either:

1) just restore the auto-referral links.

2) write a filter that adds a "teh referral link" option after any normal link, so people have a choice which one to follow.

3) same as 2, but in reverse (so main link is referral, and there's a "non referral" placed after it).

The referral stuff should be active, for Play.com and Amazon.co.uk at least. Unless the word filters are broken again, but I don't think they are.

With the Adsense stuff, I'm thinking it would help just to boost the income a little bit. I've seen a few sites go under just trying to survive on donations, and with Beehive becoming more and more popular I wouldn't want this place to start costing anyone (you) lots of money, especially if we start using oodles of bandwidth a month.

If you're worried about people being turned away by the presence of adverts we can always add a little foot note to them explaining how they'll disappear after you register sort of thing.

Xen linked something the other day that didn't have the referral bit on it, and I'm sure I've seen other similar situations.


I'm wondering about you specifying the .co.uk for Amazon there though?

Test...

http://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Building-Commercial-Quality-Plug-Ins/dp/0321228472


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eclipse-Building-Commercial-Quality-Plug-Ins/dp/0321228472

Neither have it in the preview...

As for the AdSense / hosting costs...

 

How much data transfer do we have? - I remember it being something huge like 500GB a month, and we'd have to have quite a lot more visits to reach that (I'd be surprised if we're even near 10% of that at the moment.)

 

I think pushing the affiliate stuff is more likely to boost income than AdSense - how many people actually follow AdSense vs affiliate links?

On checking the Amazon one had been switched from PREG to 'Match All' some where along the line, so you're right it wasn't working, but it is now. And yes, amazon.co.uk is what it's written to match. Is that right or does our affiliatee code work with Amazon.com as well?

As for Adsense vs. affiliate links, well you and Milko have the stats so I couldn't compare them to any Adsense stats, not that we have any Adsense stats anyway.

The only way I can see us pushing the affiliate links beyond how we do them at the moment would be to start listing them at the bottom of every page or trawl Amazon and Play.com for product names to match in posts that we then turn into affiliate links, but I'm not sure how easy that would be. Would certainly be easy if the two sites had feeds of their products.

I'd be inclined to think that we can do both without too much hassle. suitably sized AdSense adverts at the top of the thread list and message pane for Guests and Affiliate text only links at the bottom for all users.

Are you able to check that?

It doesn't as far as I know. I'll check when I get the moneys info.

If it is only .co.uk, based on the very quick test I did earlier, we might be able to simply switch .com addresses over - it used to be before they used different IDs, but it appears that they've unified that now.


As for stats... well nothing to compare against, but here are some anyway. :)
In the past 12 months, we've had:
336 clicks, 250 unique visitors, 27 sales.



Easy peasy lemon squeezy. :)

At least for Amazon, who do web services which can avoid the trawling - maybe we can add a button to the post screen "find amazon product" that does all the magic and returns a suitable link.

There's stuff within TradeDoubler related to product feed / product databases, but I'm not currently awake enough to figure out exactly what's what.

I always buy everything from Amazon through the drop down link at the top, don't tell me it's not been working properly?

The drop down link is fine.

This is for adding the referral id to Amazon links within posts.

Ah, that's alright then B-)