I have decided to remove a few things from a few sidebars…

i.e. .. the Performancing Ads in the sidebars of PetLvr.com/blog/ 1800HART.com/blog/ HART-Network.com and callHART.com/crazy/ respectively.

I signed up at the end of last October 2006 (or was it early November?) and these ads have been on my sites ever since. No Sales – but that’s okay. But for some reason, that 4th ad bugs me .. A LOT! Why? Because it’s a different ad – that’s why. I understand the need to ‘shake things up’, because readers’ eyes tend to go blind to advertising and for stuff that never changes .. but this morning (doped up on Tim Horton Coffee all night) all I see is a different ad for Performancing! Not a link to a place where future sponsors can possibly advertise on my sidebar. Maybe it was the mouse over that blocked a link that I was trying to click on.. I can’t remember actually

Remember that Walter Cronkite skit on S.C.T.V. with Dave Thomas ? Basically it was this. There was a sign behind on the wall that said $Dialing For Dollar$ and Walter would pronounce it as “Dialing For Dollars”. A psycho called in to correct him .. it really is … “dollar sign diailing for dollar dollar sign” .. and Booooooy that bugged him (and you hear chains in the background). Well, it was quite funny but, one of those things you had to see I suppose!

But .. I digress. You know how it is .. you try somethings .. you try some other things .. some things work .. some things do not work .. I just don’t think that this was working for me, and – just like an impulse shopper – (booooy it bugged me) .. I went and took myself off the market over there and deleted my blogs in that account. I also removed the ads off of my sidebars.

You could say that my mind was in the “MOOD” of monetization .. because while catching up on my bloglines .. I can’t begin to tell you exactly how many times I read stuff similar to this last night ..

“Google Now Allows Other Contextual Ads” via Problogger from Jensense .. (poor Darren and Jennifer for everybody creating content like that // oops! So did I now). I have yet to sign up to the Yahoo version, and I don’t qualify for most of the other options out there that require over 50,000 per month traffic.

In the month of December – one of the best shopping months of the year I might add – I only earned $5.23 USD and lifetime earned about $75.00 since October 2005 when I signed up. But, I finally reached $100.00 payout of Amazon USA affiliation .. although I wonder if they will pay me this quarter, because being a Canadian Citizen they will be deducting a fee according to their website, and that fee will bring the gross below this $100 threshold.

I need some monetization that works, but I hate relying on Google Adsense.

I do have a few other things happening with one of the stores I run and one of the 2 cafepress stores that I forgot that I had created .. and I think I am making progress in the “social” aspect of blogging .. promoting HART (1-800-HART) around the ‘net. I surf MyBlogLog a lot now .. and still in the process of setting up a MySpace account .. and have a few things in the backburner cooking for 2007.

So .. back to “less is more” .. I’m in the process of cleaning up my white space and sidebars around the network and slimming down my plugins and trying to look at the big picture.

Meanwhile – I should say that I have signed up to two new monetization sites .. LINKWORTH and BLOGKITS.

Linkworth.com is basically a site similar to Text-Link-Ads .. although I get to choose the value for my blogs. As a benefit to the advertiser, extra text description is added to the text link in my sidebar. For now, I have just signed up the Battling-Series of blogs, and the LVR-Series of blogs (minus PetLvr blog) and call HART crazy. The ads will appear in my sidebars.

Blogkits.com is basically a site similar to an affiliated site like Amazon. Advertisers only pay when a sale is made. The program ads a rotated code at the end of each post, and there might be a box ad in the sidebar. Currently, I am using this only on the Battling-Series of blogs.

My plan is to try and make the Battling-Series of blogs financially worth the effort for a wanna-be blogger to take over from me and share in the revenue generation and help build up the blog (PS I’m still looking).