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Comment by BryanBigs | Hacker News Reader

By end of august I'll be split-testing moderenizing it (it's not mobile/tablet friendly, backend makes it a pain to add content (especially text),etc) - I'm hoping making it nicer doesn't hit the income.

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Nicely done! $1K on revenue for that? Are you driving traffic toward that? I do photography and feel like stock images could be a nice way of getting traffic, but don't know how to optimize AdSense.

I haven't driven any traffic yet. I have a SEO tool that I've been developing and finally finished, and was going to use this site as my test case. With no text it has no search engine traffic, the picture names are horrible from an seo perspective...there's a lot I can do if I ever have time.

How did you decide on the placement of adds and layout of site? Glad it's doing well for you.

Testing about a year ago. Had a 8x increase in CTR without much drop in CPC, so that was a big win for the site. I think there's more to squeeze out but it was written a long time ago in hobbled-together .asp, and that's not my forte. Someday I'll move it to a different back-end so I can experiment with things with more ease. For instance, I have content (with real words!) ready to go, but sadly the amount of work I'd need to do to hack the code to display it isn't worth it if I plan on changing the code out anytime soon.

Where do you get the photos from?

I take some myself, and have a whole bunch in backlog from when I bought it. I've bought one from an artist I knew and liked.

Now that my kids are old enough to travel easily, I plan on taking picture-taking vacations to some cool places once a year - and let them take a shot at learning photography on the job.

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