Change is afoot at bookofjoe as spring approaches

You will notice over the next few days or weeks that a couple things on the site will have changed.

I can only hope this isn't a rearranging-the-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic maneuver.

But I digress.

Specifically:

• The Amazon box will rise from its position near the bottom of the right-hand column (on permalinked pages with Google ads, the second-from-right-hand column) to the top of its column.

• The Small Parts box currently under the Amazon box will disappear entirely.

These changes are happening because it appears that bookofjoe is finally beginning to show a steady cash flow from the Amazon Associates link, around $200-$250/month.

I receive from 4% to 7.5% of the Amazon price of anything purchased after someone arrives on Amazon via my Amazon box.

The more items that people buy in a month, the higher the percentage, which resets at 4% on the first of every month.

To get to 7.5% requires around 400 purchases in a month, something that's happened once in the two years or so I've had the Amazon box.

I figure that if that box does that well when it's pretty much invisible to most readers who happen on boj/take a look/then click away without scrolling down, it ought to do even better when it's always there up top, ready for a sudden impulse purchase or whatnot.

If everyone yells at me and tells me I have no business messing up the site with an ad at the top of the homepage, and if I myself find it unpalatable or visually too disturbing, I'll move the box back down where it is now.

I've always thought there must be a way to get paid a little for producing boj, and that it's a reasonable thing to do, yet the idea of a PayPal "Donate" button has always rubbed me the wrong way, in that it seems somehow sad and forlorn.

And a wordy explanation under a "Subscribe" button puts me off too.

If only someone could solve the micropayment puzzle, such that site visitors could instantly and without any effort deposit a penny in my account, I'd be home free.

Even at my current traffic level (below),

that would yield $40 a day/$1,200 per month.

And if I could get traffic back up to where it was in mid-2010 (10,000 visitors/day on average), why, that's around $100 per day/$3,000 per month, real money.

So that's the long and the short of it for now.

...............................

Note added at 11:03 a.m. Friday, February 24, just after these changes took effect: From my initial take, not too bad at all in terms of intrusiveness and overall feng shui. I'm gonna stick with it for a while and see how it plays out in terms of $.