Pidgin’s Progress. Raffy, who does the tech-scouting and writing for Cheap and Tiny, has now also been tapped by Weblogs Inc to write for PSPFanboy. Coincidentally, Performancing did a “Monetization Makeover” study on PSPFanBoy just as I was mulling an ad placement redo on Cheap and Tiny, and some of the tips provided were quite useful in my assessment of what to move. See, somehow the synchronicity of it all centers on Raffy, like he was some sort of cybernodal hub. Like Neo.

Anyway, I reviewed the Adsense Heat Map, and re-reversed the sidebar and skyscraper positions on the Yurt template. (Sorry, left-sidebar fans, but that’s where the clicks are.) The top leaderboard, which was vacillating between above-header and below-header positions, has settled for the latter. Finally, given some of the Chitika audit hubbub, I decided to relegate the eMiniMalls units to below-the-fold positions in favor of the more reputable (and more likely to pay) Google Adsense.

It’s worked too. I implemented the changes about a week ago, and click-through and daily average revenue are up. Still pretty meager, since we’re still just in the baby-steps stages, but the improvement is noticeable.

By the way, at the risk of sounding like an overeager self-promotional marketer, do check out Cheap and Tiny; Raffy finds some pretty cool stuff. I had no idea Bluetooth headsets were getting so cheap, for example, and the Totebag Square Micro looks tiny enough to swallow. (In that Totebag entry, by the way, Raffy didn’t know about ZomboCom.)