Amazon Association and Adsense

I've become an Amazon associate. Actually, it adds functionality to my site, since I talk so much about equipment, now you can immediate click through to see Amazon's page including price, user comments, etc. Since I do most of my comparison shopping at Amazon, I find that super useful. They even have this nifty feature where putting your mouse over a link will pop up a picture and price quote for the item. Suppose I'm extolling the virtues of the Tamron 17-50mm F/2.8 (Canon version)... stick your mouse over the link and you'll see a picture and quote. Amazon does the hard part of generating the html code for me, all I had to do was copy and paste the HTML in and add the preview script to my template. I used this function a lot in my last post, and I'll go back and update previous posts as I have time.

Amazon also provides code for a widget that shows the image and price right in your text, like this:



(that's the Nikon version, BTW, so I don't leave anyone out). I find those quite intrusive, so I won't use them often.


In other news... I made another penny today from Adsense. Apparently you get fractions of a penny from just having the ad appear on your site, or something like that. I also did a bunch more fooling around with Adsense and added channels to track the performance of each ad (doing so in blogger isn't easy but it isn't that hard -- I got a description of how to do it from here). I also added a few referral ads to see how they work.

I'll be experimenting a lot over the next few weeks with placement, managing ads, etc. My goal is to get ads on in an unobtrusive but useful way. If you have an opinion, let me know!