Adsense, feeds, etc. 2
Great news for everyone who likes to follow this blog. First of all, I’ve hacked my way around wordpress to enable full-text feeds for people using RSS readers. You will now be able to read my posts without having to click on to the site. In a sense, this kinda sucks for me, because I love to see the hits rise up after a good article is posted, but I’ve had some feedback from several people that they’d much prefer full-text feeds, and so I’ve given in to that.
Another thing is, I added AdSense recently, after the slashdotting, to test it out. Turns out that AdSense is really not that great at the moment. I’ve made a whopping $4.56 over the last week. So I’ve made some tweaks to make it less prominent, following this article. Namely, I’ve made it so articles newer than one week won’t get ads at all. I’m also going to make some further tweaks so that people coming from Digg and all those sites won’t see ads either, since they’re unlikely to click on them anyway - but that’s not done yet. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.
Oh, and there were about 15 minutes of downtime this morning. That’s because the VM that Inter-sections runs on got moved to a new machine about 10x more powerful. Hurray for that :-)
Thanks for reading!
Please vote this article up on social news sites! Why?
|
|
|
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://inter-sections.net/trackbacks?article_id=adsense-feeds-etc&day=19&month=01&year=2008
Sounds like some interesting steps to please your readership, and that’s always a good thing.
I probably have 1% of the RSS subscribers that you do, but I’ve always used a full-text RSS plugin, so I don’t really know how subscribers would feel about receiving excerpts. When I installed it, I knew that I personally wouldn’t want to have to click through just to read a full post, so I just went with what I thought was best.
Let us know how the Adsense experiments come along, especially the through-traffic from Digg etc.
I’m relatively new with my blogging experiment, but I definitely agree that it is better to offer full text feeds at all times. It is just too annoying as a reader to have to click and wait for a page to load when interested in reading a full article. Instead I’ll often move on to other blogs and sometimes even delete said blog from my reading lists, because when you’re going through so many even a few seconds can add up to a lot when you’re trying to keep up on several.
As you can see, even though I read this post via a feed reader, I felt strongly enough about it to come to your web site anyway and post a comment ;) Bravo to you for catering to your audience’s wants. I haven’t had a chance to investigate it myself yet, but I understand that you can route your RSS feeds through the feedBurner service, and that through them you’re able to track statistics on how many people are connecting to and obtaining your feed. Not quite as nice as getting the web view stats, but still useful.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having ads on your blog - and think it’s silly for people to complain if you do. The paramount thing is that you clearly identify what is an ad and try to put it in a place that makes it easy to view/read your content - but still able to be aware of the ads. This way, if someone sees an ad that is useful to them, they can follow it and it’s a win-win. If there are no ads that interest you, don’t click on them. Don’t complain about coming to a site with ads where you are freely partaking of content that you’re obviously interested in. If you don’t like the ads, don’t click on them (duh). But don’t beat up a guy who’s trying to provide a service (useful articles) for trying to obtain compensation for it. The more compensation you’re able to earn for this activity - I’m sure the more it will reflect in your content, because you’ll have more time and desire to improve your content. Again, a win-win. Check out this post for a better articulated explanation of what I’m trying to express, read the section ‘Dealing with cynics’: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/02/blogging-for-money/.
>Happy blogging