*Yawn* 

Can’t believe I woke up at one today.  12 hours of sleep and I’m still tired, and on top of that I had to wake up with a neck cramp too.    Now I can’t turn all the way to the left without pain shooting into my eyeballs and screaming like a wild animal.

Ah well, at least I finished my latest blogging errands, including signing up for the Pepperjam network, which will probably mark my last attempt to see if I can garner any kind of success with an affiliate network.  Yeah yeah I know I said I’ll never be an affiliate marketer, but like I also said, I’m willing to make exceptions for products I actually use myself or are of high quality.  And since a lot people have reported great success with Pepperjam, I decided to give it a try as well and signed up for a few programs.  Right now I have them rotating in a 125×125 banner on the top left sidebar, so feel free to check them out.  A few of them are for sites offering camping, military and law enforcement gear as well.  Things like backpacks, pepper spray, Kevlar vests, scopes for snipe rifles, etc.  You know, fuzzy wuzzy stuff. 

I’ll probably wean out these programs over time if I don’t see any results with them, but I suspect the best performing one may turn out to be Whitesmoke, an All-in-One Writing Solution that might be the perfect complement for blogging.  It will correct grammar, spelling and even suggest better adjectives to help enrich your writing experience.  If I wasn’t such a superb writer already, I might actually spring for the software myself. 

I also signed up for two new advertising networks to fill my ad vacancies, since Project Wonderful has done a really poor job of filling my spots lately, and most of the requests I’ve gotten were always for craptastic webcomics that only start making sense to you after you’ve had about 5 beers.

As soon as I set up my site to receive the new ads, WOW what a difference.  I was now getting my ad spots filled from major, high quality advertisers, most of whose products I was already using too.  It was perfect.  Not only that, I could set the rates at whatever prices I wanted, though obviously I can’t set it too high or my spots would never get filled.  Still, where before I was only making 15 to 20 cents a day with Project Wonderful, I’m now making around $1 a day with these networks. 

Probably won’t last though. I know my luck. 

Phil from the Advertising Blogger recently wrote up a complimentary post about me and my advertising page, so in exchange for scratching my back I guess I’ll take some time to shave his.

I actually know of Phil via one of his other blogs called the Romance Tracker, which has been on my list of feed subscriptions for quite some time now, even though the info still hasn’t helped me manage to get a date. Damn you Phil! Damn you and your little blogs too!!!!!!!!

But, *ahem*, back to the advertising discussion…

Ironically enough I spent all of last weekend actually cleaning up my advertising page some more, as well as adding a few more ad blocks for sponsors to choose from. (You may have noticed the new HUGE 300×250 block that I’m throwing in your faces now.)

I also decided to drop the peel away ad as it really didn’t fit my site too well, and the clickthrough ratios were actually worse than any of my ad blocks put together. Forget that then. I am however going to offer stripe ads instead, which I think will be more effective (and far less annoying) than the peel away ad.

Since I’m using Openads, (oh I’m sorry, I mean OpenX… stupid developers and their branding identity crisis,) I was able to recode most of the ad zones using IFrames instead, that way if there’s ever a problem with an ad loading, it won’t affect the load time for the rest of the page. I’m already noticing a speed difference too. This new setup also allows me to experiment with different advertising networks with relative ease. Previously I had Adbrite ads being delivered. Now I’m trying my hand with Project Wonderful instead to see how that performs, and then if that doesn’t do well, I’ll try something else. Sooner or later I’ll stumble onto a winning combination that will make me gobs of money and win me fame, prestige and an ocean of hot babes.

Ok, maybe just one hot babe. At least one please? Please?

And now that I’ve lost all credibility, this would be a great time to make a plug for advertising on my blog! Remember, if you don’t garner a clickthrough rate of at least 1 percent, I’ll refund 25 percent of the costs. So please sponsor me today!

Really, please sponsor me, I’m really getting tired of all these calls from my bill collectors. They’re always so mean and nasty too.