Advertising

I just received a cheque from Google. They pay whenever I pass $100, which in my case takes a while. But everytime the cheque arrives it is a happy moment.
The arrival of my cheque also triggered a chain of thoughts about advertising on my site. A little bit more than a year ago, I added the Google AdWords to this site. I simply took the existing pages, and looked where I could fit in the AdWords box. Since it was a test, I didn't spent too much time tweaking my templates; I just wanted to know whether it worked. In the past year I have made some minor changes, mainly to try out the AdWords program.

As I said, I had some thoughts about this whole advertising thing. One of these thoughts is that I should rethink the design of my pages so that the advertisements blend in better. If I take advertising seriously, I should also give the ads a better position on my pages ---above the fold--- of course without taking too much away from the content.

I also want to try out Chitika, which I heard gives good results as well. I placed some Chitika adds on my site ---like the one above---, and will monitor it during the next weeks. As you see, Chitika's eMiniMalls look far more sexy than Google's AdWords. But are they also more effective?