marketing ads on your blog?

[blokus]

Thus far, I've solely used adsense on my blog, which is a local restaurant review website. I post a review whenever we eat out, plus any useful restaurant related coupons we get. (about once or twice a week) I also scan or photograph the restaurant menu and post that. The blog is never going to be huge, because the audience is pretty much limited to our city - metro area of about 1 million. (there will never be a statewide audience for it) Had about 10,000 views in the first year, and now up to about 1,500 views per month after 13 months. I'm up to about $80 on Adsense. Obviously, I've mostly been doing it because I like to write, and I enjoy reviewing restaurants.

I made one recent change to the website - now there is a request for gift certificates from restaurants on the blog. I explain that I can't guarantee anything more than a fair review, but it would move them up close to the top of the "visit soon" list of restaurants I'm thinking of reviewing. Cutting down on our "dining out" spending is probably one of the easiest ways for us to make some $$ on the blog.

I've also been considering adding a couple of "paid coupons" or ads along the edge. I'd like to find a couple of restaurants in the area willing to pay $40 a year to have a printable coupon featured along the side of the blog. (small, and then if they click it it expands to a larger, printable jpg?) Eventually, I'd like to have a paid coupon/ad for each major genre of restaurant. (1 Italian, 1 seafood, etc.) Trouble is, I'm not sure how a person would go about putting something like that on Blogger -or if it is even possible to host a small jpeg on there, and have it come up in the same location on the blog all the time.

Anyone have suggestions for enabling something like this? Essentially, I'm interested in creating some very targeted advertising, and selling it cheaply to several restaurants that I like. I could guarantee any restaurant that takes me up on it that they will be the only restaurant in their genre that is featured for the year. I'd prefer it to be as low maintenance as possible as well.

If anyone has thoughts for how I could easily implement something like this, I'm all ears! Thanks!

[dog8mybag]

You have an html-javascript widget option in blogger. Put a small image of the coupon in the widget in the sidebar or wherever, make the small image clickable to open to the larger image.

In blogger I always save a lot of images to an unpublished post and name it images-nodelete or something of the sort. Basically so i dont forget and delete them. Then when i need to use them i go to edit / html of that file and have the images easily accessible to cut n paste the html for them to use where needed.