Things are getting a little busy now that the month is about to change… where did the time go.

I have taken some of my earlier Tag and Ping info and created a free report. Feel free to give this away to your lists, or offer it as a bonus or incentive, or just read it and enjoy.

Here in Canada our GST (a value added tax) is being reduced from 7 to 6 per cent on July 1, which means many of us ecommerce folks and webmasters of ecommerce folks will be busy on Friday night resetting tax rates on our software to match the lowered rate. Thank the Government for blessing us with more work.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, so this might be an old commercial, but I just saw a tv spot for Mac computers that had a young guy representing a Mac, and a middle aged business man representing Windows.

The gist of the ad was that Macs come bundled with all sorts of cool multimedia apps, while Windows comes with calculator and clock.

Have these people purchased a name brand computer with Windows pre-installed recently? You spend more time uninstalling bundled software than you’d expect. My last computer came complete with MSN, Napster, AOL, a million and a half Norton security apps, Microsoft Works AND a 90 day trial of MS Office 2003, MS Photo something or other, RealPlayer 8, and who knows what else. I spent over an hour uninstalling stuff I didn’t want or need.

When the start menu was down to a minimum, I installed Gimp, NVU, Open Office, Photoshop, Acrobat and a few other apps, and finally had the computer I wanted.

If Windows installations came only with Calculator and Clock… and maybe the Character Map for good measure, I’d be a happy camper. It would sure save a lot of time.

I have just signed up for a new service (currently in beta testing) called Text Link Warehouse. The concept is simple. You paste some code at the bottom of your web pages, Text Link Warehouse sells text links to other publishers, and you and TLW split the revenue.

The appeal:

To publishers, the appeal is simple. Anything that will add a source of monetization to your site without causing you a whole lot of headaches and work is a good deal.

To advertisers, the appeal is having lots of text links pointing to your new site, speeding up indexing (hopefully) and boosting traffic.

BUT…

There’s the Google PageRank issue.

Lots of people are under the impression that a high Google PR is a super great thing to strive for. I personally haven’t seen PR correspond to revenue or traffic, but the fact is that people will pay for high PR links. They won’t pay, at least not much, for low PR text links.

So, one question that needs to be addressed by TLW is whether advertisers will be able to buy only high PR links, or whether they just buy impressions… and the related issue of whether publishers will get extra revenue from their high PR pages or they’ll just get a flat rate per impression.

This, actually, is a vital issue, since if it’s not handled well, and publishers can get more from selling their own text links on their high PR pages, then they’ll only list their low PR pages on TLW, which will make the service less attractive to advertisers, which will lead to fewer buys, and less income all around.

The second issue that needs to be addressed is how much control publishers will have over the ads displayed.

Google has made clear that it will be penalizing sites that link to ‘low rent’ areas of the web, which means that it could seriously hurt your site to link to online pharmacies, casinos, and many of the other types of sites that would be common advertisers for TLW.

Also of concern is the issue of the service leaving a fingerprint… since Google frowns upon buying and selling text links.

SO

While I’m interested in how this will work out, and may add many of my higher traffic and high PR links in the future, right now I’m only going to play with TLW on this blog.

Stay tuned if you want more unbiased, common sense reaction once the links start showing up.

Yesterday I made a few changes to the layout and display of Adsense on this blog. Prior to that, my CTR for Adsense blocks on this blog.. no matter what size, shape or color scheme, has always been horrible. And by horrible I mean less than 1%.

But the new layout on the front page — and most of the progress is on the front page– has helped. A lot.

No, I’m not getting double digit CTRs, and I probably never will on this site, but after a decent amount of traffic today, it appears I’ve achieved a bit better than a 600% increase.

Still not rolling in dough, but at least it might be worth testing and tracking a little more, rather than abandoning Adsense here altogether.

Of all my sites, this blog is the hardest place to get a decent Adsense CTR. I’ve tried all sorts of placements, all sorts of color schemes, but I think the problem is that people actually want to read the posts…. that’s the problem with content, I guess.

And so, Adsense appears and disappears from this site regularly, and I test to see if I can boost clicks, or whether removing the ads raises my overall earnings, or whatever.

But for now, since my overall CTR is awesome, I thought adding this low CTR blog to the mix woudn’t hurt too badly.

But till now, the ads on the front page have been very…. bloggy. And by that I mean not about marketing, but about blogs and blogging.

So, I thought I’d exeriment with section targeting. According to Google, you can focus your Adsense ads by adding the tags

<!-- google_ad_section_start --> to the start of a section and
<!-- google_ad_section_end --> to mark the end of the section

Or, if you want a section to be ignored, change the starting tag to this:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

So, my thought was to add the tags around my technorati tags, since they’re supposed to be the keywords for each post and are probably more targeted than any other random section of this blog that I could automate.

All I did to accomplish this was to add the tags around the tag needed for Bunny’s Technorati Tags on the index.php file of the template:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<?php the_bunny_tags(); ?>
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Did it help? I haven’t figured that out yet. Are you seeing targeted ads, or are they still the same old how to blog tags?