One of my 2006 goals is to grow some of my websites into viable, stand-alone revenue makers. When I say "
revenue
", I’m not talking quit-your-day-job money. I just want to experiment more with Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, Ebay Affiliates, RSS tools, and other progams to see how they can be applied for clients as well as to generate enough money to justify their existence.
Toward that end, today I relaunched my website, www.wesleywillisart.com. I started it in November 2003 and have never really done much with it. I started it because I thought it was a shame that lots of people knew of his music but few knew of his art.
It has consistently ranked #2 in Google for "Wesley Willis" and has gotten enough attention out there that I really think it’s made a difference.
In looking at the myriad comments on the site, I notice that the thing people are most interested in is where to buy Welsey Willis Art and how much it might go for.
So I provide direct links to places where they might find Wesley Willis Art through by Ebay and Amazon affiliate accounts. I also placed some more contextual Google Ads on the site near each post. I had them there before, but nothing has ever come from it. I only had a tall banner ad in the sidebar and most of the ads are Chicago-oriented instead of art or folk-art oriented. I am going to pay more attention and try to influence the ads that are displayed. I’ll report back the results here.
One original goal of my site was to become a compendium of images of Wesley Willis Art. Some people have uploaded their images, and I give directions on how to post to the site, but it has never caught on. Flickr has changed everything on that front– allowing people all over the world to simply tag their images and share with us. I use Feeburner’s Buzz Boost feature to display all images tagged with "wesleywillis" in the right-hand column on the site.
Go there, and for God’s sake, if you or someone you know has images of Wesley Willis Art, tag away!