AdSense Wisdom From ProBlogger

Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) has posted two great articles summarizing some of the best reasons to use or not to use Google AdSense:

Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs @ 45n5.com

Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs

Mark Wielgus from 45n5.com has built a great Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs, a manually populated list which is automatically updated with Google PareRank, Technorati and Alexa ranks.

For one, it’s a great source for new blogs to read. Being rather dynamic, this list serves as a benchmark and helps owners of such blogs see how they rank along (don’t want to use against here) each other!

Have a look at the Top 100, you’ll probably want to bookmark it!

Google buys FeedBurner for $100m

FeedBurner

For all of us FeedBurner users, exciting times are coming: looks like Google indeed buys FeedBurner for $100m!

I think the following things are going to happen rather soon:

  • feed stats will be improved and extended
  • Google Analytics users will probably see FeedBurner stats integrated
  • more monetization options will arrive: Adsense for Feeds will get a rework and will become part of standard FeedBurner services
  • more feed optimization options will become available

Amazon Updates aStores

I've recently started using Amazon's affiliate program, particularly the aStore. It has proven to be a rather interesting way to help your visitors buy selected products from Amazon, and I'm fairly happy with overall aStore performance.

I've just received an email from Amazon, stating that aStore feature has just got a whole lot better:

With this version of aStore you can now:

  • Build and maintain multiple aStores under one Associate ID
  • Feature up to 54 products in each category
  • Create custom categories containing products from multiple Amazon categories
  • Create multiple instances of individual Amazon categories
  • Control the display order of the products on each page
  • Specify products to feature on Category and Subcategory pages
  • Populate products to categories using Listmania lists

I think the best new feature is multiple aStores under the same Associate ID. It will save you a lot of trouble if you're supporting a number of aStores for your websites. The next best feature is probably custom categories. And the last feature I really like is abilitiy to control the display order of products on each page.

I'm going to test these new features on my Books on Personal Development aStore in the coming few days, and will make sure I post a follow-up with my impressions of all the new features of this upgrade.