South West eCommerce

We like this blog.  You’ll note that we’re adding articles to the site as well, which have been written by us in the past and which we’ve reviewed and placed in the library.

A little while ago we reviewed the site’s adsense earnings and while it’s not all about adsense, we thought that we should be able to make a little cash from it. Yuck, all these views of the page and not a single click.  The two captains of the internet sit down and review what should be happening here, and what’s not happening.

First thing we noted was that we’d decided to tweet our blog postings and that’s done automatically by the site.  It obviously works, 10 minutes after the site is updated we’re seeing more than a dozen views.  This automatic tweeting makes us more current in the internet than we’ve ever been.  At the start of this process a couple of weeks ago we were loading articles to our site and spacing them out over the days, but they’d go to twitter straight away, and we weren’t even able to manage ourselves, such was this new efficiency.  Clearly strategies were put in place to handle that very soon.

So an instant review was made to decide why we were seeing no adsense clicks.  Upon visiting a blog post I’d been fairly happy with, I found that the page was set up so that you could read all the way to the bottom of the blog and if you didn’t want to comment on it, you’d never see the ads.  A quick redesign ensued.  Now when you look at our posts, you’ll see the google ads rendered right alongside.

It may seem a small thing, but this is part of the cash flow for the business.  A few days later, we’re now making the princely sum of about 40c a day.  The total’s not that important at present, the point we’re making is that the site needed to be sorted out and we needed to have a look at what was working and what wasn’t.  With a click through rate of about half a percent, there’s more tweaking to be done, but we can achieve that and see many more page views as we continue to write.

Just having a look at what the reader sees is low tech, but it's what we need to do to be really on top of the business.  Don't take anyone or anything for granted.

It’s funny how some tiny steps seems quite exciting.