Advertisement as recommendations in blogs

I just wondered how much money I gained from the clicks on the one google-ad that I put up in the sidebar for over half a year now. Its not even 10$. Well I deacivated AdBlock PLUS for one moment and took a look at the ad, and wondered why anyone ever would click on such an ad – its not nice and the content is not even close to what I’m writing about. Well its main purpose was counting the visitors, but meanwhile I discovered other methods that I use for counting visitors now.

So I took it out. And thought about what could take its place. When I thought about that, I remembered seeing recommendations for books and music in other blogs and thought – why not make advertisements for books and stuff I really would recommend to my readers? So I googled to the amazon-website to take part in the affiliate program. This is the english website and this is the german one. First I saw that the english one give much more benefit to the user than the german one – but as most of my readers are from germany, I took the german program after all.

I entered german and english books that I can truely recommend, some of which are also available in the other language (like some of the HeadFirst books). I wrote a short comment about each item, chose an ad outfit and color – and copy-pasted the code to a wordpress-text-widget. I plan on writing reviews of the ad-items later on (I reviewed Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii on german here), but you can watch them now in the sidebar, if your adblocker is off and if you have flash installed.

This way I can recommend interesting things to you, have a nice flash-application and gain more rewards if someone buys on of those books on amazon. Hope you like it! I’d like to see your recommendations too, if its liked to amazon doesn’t matter much to me. Any comments?