Well, after promoting the Basement Flooded site, I stopped and realized that it made three times what I spent on it in just three days. Granted, someone from North Carolina got very excited and clicked the hell out of the ad links, but still.

So I was thinking of some more sleazy ways to make people click on those ad links.

1. Promote your start-up sites from your more popular sites. Always works. Everyone is curious, and rightfully so.
2. Achieve a healthy balanace between ads and content. Too much of either is bad.
3. Create a few extras. Something unique that cannot be found elsewhere.
4. Trap visitors by cutting off navigation in strategic spots. So-o-o-o-o sleazy. Like “what do I have to do to put you in this 1987 Buick Skylark“-sleazy.

I’m going to talk about #3 and #4. You’re curious already, I can tell.

Well, for #3, I jacked Jeffrey‘s idea about writing nifty little calculators. You give users some interactivity, and if everything is nifty enough, they will stay on the site longer and click them ads.

Want to see mine? Since I’m talking about flood damage (from rain, storm, hurricane), I thought it would be neat to calculate the impact all that water makes on a property (house + land). Not only it was a good exercise in php, it actually made me play with it for a while, plugging in different numbers and seeing what happens to the result.

For #4, I completely cut off the navigation from the calculator page and, inspired by Plenty of Fish, added more ads (3 blocks on that one page). You can go back, plug in new values, and recalculate, but you can’t find your way back to the articles. Possibly, you click an ad link to get out. Oops, I better not.  Apparently, this sleazy approach violated terms of use:

Don’t forget about the sidebar of this site – revenue figures are updating automatically.