That Web Man

One of my long-term clients was kind enough to send me a cheque this week for two small invoices, so that it arrived within the payment terms … which is nice.

I didn’t get a chance to pay it in yesterday, so I was planning to nip out to the bank today. Fortunately Mrs Web Man spotted that the cheque hadn’t been signed … doh!

The client has now agreed to pay by BACS this time and hopefully they’ll continue doing so in future to save time and effort. We’ll see.

You’ll perhaps have noticed that over there in the sidebar are some adverts provided by Google’s AdSense program: they are based upon the content in the page where they are shown and if a visitor clicks through one of them, I get paid a few cents depending upon what the advertiser is willing to pay Google through their corresponding AdWords program. I run AdSense ads. on all my personal blogs and personal sites and I also serve some on one page of one of my businesses’ sites.

I’ll never get rich from displaying Google Ads - I reckon to average less than a dollar a day but hey, $300 a year is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick - but I had noticed that revenues had been falling.

Now the positioning of the ads. over there in this particular sidebar isn’t that good from a layout perspective as most of them are “below the fold”, i.e. you have to scroll down to see them.

Google helpfully provide a useful guide on positioning their ads for maximum exposure/benefit in their AdSense Help Center. There’s a dedicated page for positioning for blogs too.

So as something of an experiment, I changed the positioning and added another set of ads to two of my sites: one a business listing site and the other a blog-based site for a community project I am involved with.

The results have been surprising with both sites performing significantly better since taking into account Google’s suggestions. My advice? Give it a go if you’re serving the ads.

Not signed up to earn money through AdSense? Click on the AdSense button in the sidebar.

This morning I received an e-mail from my hosting partners telling me the client’s domain names had been renewed and that they’d had a call directly from the non-paying client demanding to know when it would be back up.

By 10.00am, the .com had been renewed and the site was serving up the hosted pages again - the .co.uk had never stopped doing so.

I had also received an e-mail from the client which as a postscript asked if the cheque had arrived. Needless to say, it hasn’t…

I billed a client back in November for some site updates during October and for the renewal of his two domain names (a .com and a .co.uk) together with another year’s web hosting.

This was due for payment a week later…

Now this client has a history of being a slow payer. The company I use to host his domains and site - I am a reseller rather than paying for the necessary infrastructure myself - has to wait for me to pay them too, so they now don’t renew domain names until I have paid, billing me a month before they are due for renewal and these days looking for payment on invoice.

So by today, my invoice was already three weeks overdue for payment and I got an e-mail from the hosting company telling me they’d had an e-mail from him over the weekend as some e-mails to him had bounced. Hardly surprising, given that the .com had expired a week ago and the .co.uk four days ago.

I popped him an e-mail this morning to tell him what was going on and then at 6.00pm tonight got an irate phone call from him demanding I renew them! It was apparently my fault for not reminding him.

I politely pointed out that the invoice states what the payment terms are and gives both cheque and BACS payment details. I also pointed out that the covering e-mail gives a date when payment should be made by, just in case people can’t work out when “today plus seven days” is.

Clients, eh?