Advertising / affiliate programs - your opinion is wanted

[Mervi]

Some thoughts after looking at the most recent figures.
- my amazon sales have been dropping over the past few years anyway, probably due to competition from tBD etc. But most of the articles sold this year are not Hobb related at all, so they are either generated by my other smaller sites or are "random" sales - the initial click might have been from theplentynet but then the customer has started to browse other categories and decided to buy something else.

- it's been almost a year since I started the ticker, and we've almost reached the goal (currently at £24.73) - I'm pretty sure that commissions from thebookdepository.co.uk sales will cover our hosting costs for 2012 for which I want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who've been clicking the banners & buying books!
- tBD.com is still sitting at 1.11 dollars - but I'm willing to give it more time since a lot of people probably don't even know yet there's two (sort of) different sites to order from

- there's still no revenue at all from either abebooks program or audible.co.uk and actually so few recorded clicks I'm starting to wonder if there's a problem with the banners. I'm actually waiting for Commission Junction (which is the 3rd party for abebooks.co.uk and audible.co.uk links) to kick me out of their program for being unactive. I didn't expect huge sales from either since I guess our "target audience" would use them for searching used books mostly (and audio obviously) but the fact that there aren't even clicks is a bit weird...

Anyway, what it all comes down to is that I've been thinking about removing the current "store" tab entirely (perhaps replacing it later with something better if possible) as well as the amazon "essential reading" boxes from the front page. None of the other book sellers have such a handy way to link to a particular product and keep the info up-to-date, but since those seem to no longer generate sales (and are contributing to the slowness and general mess of the front page) I think it's time for them to go. However, I don't know when I'll have the time to redesign the front page so it might be awhile. So - if you're a big fan of the amazon boxes and/the store - now's the time to let me know!

I need to look again into the possible wiki extensions for affiliate programs. The couple of "test links" I insterted earlier seem to generate clicks for theBD links at least...