Andy Coates Blog

Over the past few days I have been tweaking my blog, adding bit's there, taking bits away, and generally moving stuff around. There have been a few changes to the sidebar, the first one was adding an adsense link unit, which I am keeping track of to see how many clicks it receives it hasn't had any clicks so far but I'm going to see how it does in the next couple of weeks and if it still is performing poorly I'll take it off.
The second addition has been the "Posts worth Reading" section in the sidebar. The point of this new section is to help increase the stickiness of my blog. By linking to some of the most popular articles I have written there is more chance that first time visitors will become repeat visitors. This means more possible word of mouth advertising for my blog which could potently encourage more people to come and so on.
For those of you who have visited here regularly you will notice i have removed my Viralinks button, I have been getting so may requests lately from people who joined Viralinks from someone else but are going around EVERY blog with a Viralink on requesting a link back. Also it seems like Viralink is slowing down and the space taken up on the sidebar can be much better used by my shiny new RSS button! I was thinking of changin this over a while ago but decided not to, just to see how many subscibers I get without one. Now that I have a lovey button that people will just be stumbling over them selves to press it will be interesting to see if there is any change to my RSS take up rate?

Other changes throughout the blog has been the positioning of the 300 x 250 adsense units, originally I had them left aligned but after noticing that other, more profitable blogs had them right aligned in the text i tried that, and guess what? It has made a change to my adsense earnings! So either putting your 300 x 250 ads right in your page understandably makes them more prominent to the reader and more likely to see an advert they are interested in, or it has just been a coincidence and my earnings a re slowly going up with my traffic!

And finally I have made my blog Mobile friendly, check out the post vial the link for this fantastic plugin which instantaneously makes your blog suitable for mobile devices! You can even post from your mobile which is also another neat feature of this plugin. Saying that I tried tis today but it didn't work so I'm going to spend some time trying to fix this if I can, watch out for spur of the moment posts with fresh pictures direct from my mobile when i do get the fixed!

If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!