Just a link from Matt, and suddenly Cheap And Tiny is rubbing shoulders with the big guys on del.icio.us/popular. Traffic jumped from 600 hits a day (117 unique visits) to 15,021 hits (1,754 unique visits), and income from ad clicks went from “near nil” to “modestly pleasant.” I’m still tweaking the Google Adsense and Chitika ad positions to see what improves performance, and I’m open to recommendations for search terms to plug into the Chitika code to match the weblog audience’s expectations.

An anonymous commenter on 248am.com doesn’t like the design of Cheap And Tiny. I’ve tried to keep it light and clean, while smoothly integrating advertising elements into the layout — but without resorting to deceptive styling to make it look like the ads are part of the content. Does anyone else think the site is confusing? That WordPress theme (I call it “Yurt,” for no particular reason) will be the basis for other upcoming projects, so feedback on that will help improve future weblogs on the same network.