More musings about Green links and discovery modules

I am seriously considering turning them off. As I said before, if I want green advert links in my text I could create my own easily enough and not share revenue (Half the affiliates on commission junction offer that option). Looking at the pros and cons:

Leaving them on gives on big advantage - money. Apparently it should almost double what we receive.

However, on the downside, this comes at the cost of losing visitors and therefore potential sales. It places links I can't control in my content, which are rarely relevant. Also the links will remain able to place all three in the intro module, which looks dreadful.

It may even be lowering lensrank. You see, my visitors books are set up so any visitor can post (and fully moderated because of it!) Most of my comments were from non-squidoo members. Since the links came in, that has almost stopped. Since comments count towards lens-ranking, some of my higher rated lenses have dropped quite badly.

Of course, if I did turn them of the option would be following Squidoocool's lead to replace the cash loss. Might try it on a few of mine and see how it works...

Discovery Modules
Squidoo used to have a "discovery module" which displayed related links (three of yours, three of someone else's). These were a great traffic source, but they were turned off on the new templates.

de Havilland Mosquito is the site of a test - whether I turn this into a full module or not will depend on the results.