New Google Referrals

A few weeks ago google adsense added a new set of referrals. These referrals are unlike the previous set, as they come from a much larger base of advertisers. These referrals are basically CPA or Cost Per Action ads, which means that the publisher is paid when a specific action is performed (for example sign up for a service). These ads can be run in conjunction with the normal ads, and many of them offer some serious pay outs. These also come with the advantage of letting the publisher guide his or her users to the ads through recommendations, which is a serious no-no with normal adsense.

I am hoping that these new ads (they are now rotating in the top right hand corner of the page) will bring in some additional revenue. I choose mainly gaming related referrals, two of them are for game design educational programs, and a few are casual games, and a computer hardware one. I can and will recommend you check out these services.

Site Changes

I made some changes to the template this morning, so I figure I'll go over them. I removed the site search... hasn't been used by anyone for almost a year, so it was basically just taking up valuable space. I also registered for feed burner, so you should see an icon for that on the right too, feel free to signup for the feed using your favorite feed reader. I also changed around the way the Google Adsense referrals are displayed. I found a site that uses icons next to the signup buttons to help draw attention to them. It seemed to work quite well for them so I decided to try it. Ultimately this should help draw a bit more attention to the referrals and help get more people signed up. I personally only use two out of the three services, but the two I use: Firefox and Google Adsense are great, and I would definitely recommend them. Google Adwords is supposedly good too, but I have yet to have a direct need to advertise for anything, maybe in a couple years when I'm trying to pick up more players.

Here are the icons I'm using, I had Qyae fix them up to work with the black background...




I'm also trying my best to use the competitive ad filter to start blocking out some of these ridiculous ads we get through adsense. I'm going to need to start writing about games again just to get better keywords for adsense to read :P Anyway, back to the grind.

-Toraux

Tags: Adsense, Firefox, Advertising, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

This for That

Tonight I ended up shifting my work from working on the map code to the blog. I found a free web stat tracking website that tracks quite a few things, hopefully it will allow me to optimize better and find out what brings me traffic. I also set up channels on my google adsense account to track which ads bring in the most profit so I can optimize those as well.

Tomorrow I probably wont have time to do much coding. I need to pack for my trip up to Vermont for the weekend and all that fun stuff. Come Sunday night and next week I will finish up the map stuff and move forward onto more features, I really cant wait to clear out this core stuff to move onto real code.

I think thats all for tonight, going to head to bed and read some more of the introduction to 'The Art of War'.
-Toraux