The Butt Ugly Weblog

My bank, a small company from certain Swedish-speaking isles in Baltic sea, did not charge me anything to cash a U.S. check for USD 20.

Some banks, notably those that like to levy all sorts of outrageous fees to anyone not either depositing in excess of €1M or owing them €2M, probably do things differently.

Of course, it would be much better customer service from Google to just do a wire transfer from one of their EU-based tentacles.

--AnonymousCoward, 27-Jun-2006

Like I said to Tuomas on his blog, cashing checks in Osuuspankki is significantly cheaper. But you need to be customer, that's true.

About not earning even $100 on your blog - (I'll say this knowing that I risk sounding like SEO zealot) - you might want to reconsider the placement of your ads. It can make a world of difference. Also, keep in mind, that with blogs it's the long tail that earns you money. And forget Google's product referral buttons.

--samik, 27-Jun-2006

I've cashed loads of foreign (US) cheques in Nordea, and iirc the fee they took was something like 12 euros per cheque.

--Outi, 27-Jun-2006

samik: I've tried differing positioning, and in fact, they're now in the places optimizers suggest they should be.

However, I have two things which break it: my URL paths contain the word "wiki", and therefore I get loads and loads of wiki ads. My readers in general don't care about those at all, and even if they do click, it's a very low-paying word. The other problem is that half of my readership is Finnish, and many of the advertisements I get are just simply not that interesting to that bunch.

My guess also is that a lot of my users are savvy enough to run adblockers... I certainly do :-)

--JanneJalkanen, 27-Jun-2006