Ad Terras Per Aspera

For anyone that pays attention to the referral/affiliates community, you guys already know that Amazon’s affiliates programs is now one of the not-so-well-paying programs out there. Seeing as all my links are Amazonian in nature, I’m now going to be supplementing or even removing links and switching them to other programs.

One of those programs is the Linkshare network. Several big companies do referral/affiliate work through Linkshare, including Apple (.Mac, iTunes, Apple Store), Office Depot, and Walmart, and a bunch of others. Most of these companies also have 5-10% referral payments, which is a lot better than Amazon’s 4% with $15 cap for electronics.

Update: I’m also doing stuff via Adorama’s referral program. They pay a decent rate, have the lowest prices I know of, and I tend to order all my stuff from them due to great customer service. I’ve converted most of the applicable links to Adorama.

I noticed a neat little article over at ProBlogger, about optimizing tags in your <title>for search engines, which also helps for tabs in Firefox due to lack of room to display long titles. In this article, Aaron Brazell says to use:

<MainPage>
  <title><$BlogDescription$></title>
</MainPage>
<ItemPage>
  <title><$BlogPageTitle$> &raquo; <$BlogDescription$></title>
</ItemPage>

But, he complains that it still puts the blog name first. Instead, I suggest:

<MainPage>
  <title><$BlogTitle$> - <$BlogDescription$></title>
</MainPage>
<ArchivePage>
  <title><$BlogPageTitle$> - <$BlogDescription$></title>
</ArchivePage>
<ItemPage>
  <Blogger><BlogItemTitle>
  <title><$BlogItemTitle$> &raquo; <$BlogTitle$> - <$BlogDescription$></title>
  </BlogItemTitle></Blogger>
</ItemPage>

My example adds two things, 1) The blog entry’s name first on item pages, 2) archive page titles, which his version lacked. I’m now using my version on my blog, and it seems to be working fine.

Update: I’m now using Wordpress, so I’m obviously no longer using this technique.