Morning Thoughts

Morning Thoughts

I have not been doing anything too exciting this morning. I took a few minutes to look at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online for business management book titles. I read some more of The Future of the Internet.

I read a little bit of the documentation for Opera. I also looked at Entrecard for a little bit. It has been a slow but steady morning. I even took a short walk around the neighborhood and bought a cup of coffee from the local deli. The coffee woke me up quite nicely.

Because everything is pretty quiet today, I went through and made sure all my links in my sidebar are still working. It is good to do this occassionally. Websites and blogs have a tendency to evaporate unexplicably. No dead links here if possible.

I also checked my Sitemeter to see where my web traffic was coming from. Most of it is coming from Google Blogsearch and Entrecard. There is a smattering of hits from Twitter, Yahoo, and Fuelmyblog, as well as a few individual websites.

I am doing housecleaning for the blog. If you want to, feel free to make any suggestions you think might help to improve this blog.

Ending Powells List

I have decided to end my Powell's Affiliate List. After four months nobody bought a single book from the affiliate list. I thought that people would choose from both the affiliate list and the embedded amazon images. It turns out that nobody bought anything from the Powell's list. People have bought a few books from the embedded Amazon images. I am going to keep the Powell's search box in case someone wants to buy anything from there.

It was an interesting experiment. I thought that if I put up a sidebar with an alphabetical list of titles, then wrote about each title with an embedded image it would draw sales from both places. I have learned a bit about how people put together blogs to sell various things.

The thing which seems to work best for me is advertising; adsense and project wonderful (I am up to 44 cents with Project Wonderful halfway to a can of soda.) Maybe if I found something more expensive to advertise I would be better off selling a few items. However, I don't think camera equipment and laptops would match with my blog. I'll think about it some more.

I have to ponder some more on what it means to have a blog site with advertising on it. It does not seem to be that effective of a medium for sales. I may try to sell some book and information related gadgets.

I am off today because I am working this Saturday. I was off yesterday because of Presidents Day. This is the benefit of a government job.

I changed my sitecounter to sitemeter from statcounter. Statcounter starts charging for statistics once your site reaches a certain amount of visitors. I am not into paying for things.