Better Ads
November 25, 2005 – 3:57 pmFor quite some time I have been using Google’s AdSense ads. Today I tried changing some of the individual and category archives to the beta of theYahoo Publisher program and also tried out Kanoodle’s BrightAds. In two words … they stink. While the Google AdSense at least had ads on blogging and creating your own blog, Yahoo and Kanoodle had what is normally found in spam - mortgages, degrees and generic Vonage ads. So instead I switched everything back to Google.
However, while doing that, I was thinking about whether I can use the category, title or tags on the post to help focus the ads. So what I came up with is simple but breathtaking - I used Amazon’s associates links for the book search to get listings of books relevant to a specific category or tag. Suprinsgly it works very well - for example, if you look under the Linux category - you will find plenty of Linux books. The rss tag has books on blogging and building RSS feeds. I almost never got such good results from Google itself. Plus the commission that Amazon pays is much better.
How did I do that? Simple - take the code from Amazon’s Associates Program links section for featured product search and use the MovableType category name tag (or in my case the MTArchiveName tag) to pass it to Amazon as a keyword instead. The results are stunning.
