Disclosures

First off, the changes to the FTC disclosures which have had bloggers doing a bit of housekeeping for the past few weeks. Since April 2012 I've had a link at the top of each product-review post that either says "bought", "gift", or "PR." Click any of those links, and you'll get a popup window with full text telling you that I either bought the item(s) in question, received it as a gift from family/friends, or that received it from a company for PR purposes. I may change these links to make them more visible, or placed differently, but they're working fine thus far.

I'm also styling my affiliate links differently. For a while they had a dollar-sign after them, then I got rid of that and had them double-underlined. Now I'm making them pretty prominent: there's a border around them, they've got a gradient background, and there's padding to either side to make the styled block larger. I'm also increasing my affiliate links for brands like Maybelline, Revlon, Tarte, et cetera. Previously I either didn't link those names at all, or I linked to their 'native' site (bareescentuals.com, tarte.com, et cetera.) Now I'm just linking to their brand pages over on either Beauty.com or drugstore.com. It makes things easier for me to maintain, on the back end; and I'm in one affiliate program rather than ten or eleven so I actually stand a chance of getting a payout on a semiregular basis. (If you're interested, it's the Linkshare affiliate portal. Lets you sign up with lots of advertisers and sites, get and maintain all kinds of links, and you manage everything in one place. They don't work with every single advertiser, but they work with enough to make me happy.)

Giveaways

For a while, I experimented with weekly flash giveaways. It didn't work out: I was doing work to plan and publicize and schedule the giveaways, I was spending the money to buy the prizes, but I wasn't getting too many return visitors nor visitors who would sign up before the giveaways. I thought about making it explicit that if people signed they'd be the only ones eligible for giveaways, but that would have pretty much turned me into little more than a giveaway machine - not fun for me, not really that much fun for the site visitors. So, for now, I'm halting the giveaways. They may resume at some point in the future, they may not. I don't know.

(For the curious: I'd buy a giveaway prize when I saw things on a really great sale, or when I had enough extra Rite-Aid or Walgreen's points to get an item or two for the "giveaway" bucket, or when I had enough Rite-Aid/Walgreen's points to get shampoo/conditioner/what-have-you and then use that money to buy the indie prizes. When I do giveaways, I want it to be for things that I actually use and enjoy as opposed to)

Weekly Roundups

I've gotten more solidly into a posting schedule, even with the new job (which I still love, and which I've been at for three months now) and so I'm posting weekly recaps. Just a tweet or a Facebook post to recap what I posted each day the week before, nothing super special. It does a few things: lets me review what I did the past week and think about how to change and improve in the future; republicizes my posts for folks who don't have time to catch up during the week; and gets another link to my site into the social-media/search-engine churn. I don't know that I want to start doing a "weekly recap" post on my actual site, because that's another RSS feed hit and folks who subscribe may not want to see those links. (Or maybe they do? Eh, never say never.)

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