Cleaning House

Following in the footsteps of a few other bloggers I respect, I am making some small changes around here. Nothing serious, just a few layout changes. For one thing, I am slowly getting rid of the Adsense ads. They aren't doing anything and add nothing to the site. Passive Family Income wrote awhile back about only having ads on his site for products he actually uses. I like that. It makes sense. (He also writes in this article about Restaurant.com, which I signed up for but haven't used yet.)

In that vein I added the Prosper.com link. I currently am investing $100 with them - $75 of my own money and $25 that I got as a bonus for signing up. So far, I have really liked Prosper, and wrote about my experiences here.

Today I added a new advertisement for eBates. I used to do a ton of online shopping - now that I am being frugal it has gone way, way down! I still like online shopping for gifts though. I keeps me out of the stores (and away from impulse purchases) and I feel like I have a better time finding the perfect thing. My sister's birthday was June 5th. One of the items on her list was "fun wine glasses." Those are kind of tricky to find - if you eliminate the plain ones, the stemless ones, the ones that look like they belong to Henry the Eighth, and the stupid ones... there isn't much left! I went to my favorite "inexpensive, fun, hip" store - Target. I had just read about eBates so I decided to try it out and see if it worked. It did!

The wine glasses I found were $15.99. From eBates I got a $5 sign up bonus and then a 4% cash back on my purchase for $.64. This puts the cost of those glasses closer to $10! I noticed they have tons of stores, so that is where I will be doing a lot of my online shopping come Christmas time. Oh! If I had only known about this site earlier - the have a 6% cash rebate on Zappos.com, do you have any idea how much I could have gotten back on shoes alone???

The other thing I am doing is an idea I got from Enginero. He is listing the blogs on his blog roll by how many people they refer to his site. I've been looking for some way to change my list of blogs, to somehow sort them in order of who I get the most from. I didn't want it to be a popularity contest though, I wanted some hard metric. What I am finding is the ones I get the most from are the ones that I comment on the most, which are the ones referring people back to me. So, I thought I would give his system a try. I hope it won't be too difficult to keep up with, but I figure if I check it weekly or so, it shouldn't be too bad.

If that doesn't work, I'll list them by the number of letters in their name or something equally clever!