These are just some notes I've been making as I've watched all of you make use of the new article/blog posting system.
AdSense
You guys know you can be earning ad revenue from your posts, right? The system is in place. All you have to do is enter your Google AdSense ID number in your user profile and you'll make 100% of the AdSense revenue (those are the banners to the right of your articles and just above the comments field) from your blog posts, articles, and reviews. It's not a lot -- though we're working to improve it -- but there's no reason not to.
Article Explanations
Tadeusz, I'm thinking of you here. You're writing some great stuff stuff but if someone finds it through a search engine or by browsing the site, they're not going to know what it is. When you're writing, it'd be helpful for readers if you prefaced the articles with a paragraph explaining what it was, that it's a setting for gaming, etc. Also -- and everyone can make use of this -- if you scroll down on the article posting page to near the bottom, you'll see a blue bar that says "Optional Excerpt." Expanding that by clicking the plus sign will give you a field where you can type a description of your article. This is what'll show up on the home page instead of the truncated first paragraph you're seeing now.
Spreading the Word
Lastly, I wanted to point out some quick promotional tools everyone can use to get people finding your articles. One of my design tasks is to integrate these into the article pages themselves, but for now, here are some direct links. Submitting your article to Digg is a great way to get readers, and so is doing the same with Reddit. Both are lists of internet content the community votes on.
A particularly good way to find readers for your articles is to submit them to blog carnivals. These are pretty much blog posts on other sites listing cool articles by topic. There are hundreds of carnivals on a ton of subjects, and you can get at all of them as well as submit your stuff at the official Blog Carnival site. I've used carnivals in the past for some of my other online writing and have had terrific success.
And, clearly, if you're taking advantage of GO's AdSense program, driving more traffic to your articles via the above methods is also a great way to boost your earnings.
