Wendy, please consider submitting something for the next edition of the carnival as well!

Regards
Jesper

We’re always testing different changes throughout, always trying to “beat the control”. The winner stays, and gets to compete with next week’s challenger.

Be sure to keep aggregate numbers as well, since changes to one ad unit MAY impact performance of the other ad units. I.e. a more in-your-face ad unit may take clicks away from an already good ad unit elsewhere, thus leaving you with less gross income not more.

Just food for thought – track individual ad units as well as aggregate revenue vs. traffic.

And mix in different monetization options – AdSense, Text-Link-Ads, affiliate links, etc.

Have an awesome day!
Dan

Even now the Adsense engine sends some weird stuff. But most of my targetting seems to be dead-on.

I do make sure to not think about ad relevance (too much) when I write my posts, though. Adsense does a good enough job just based on my frequent use of zodiac signs in the titles and content.

I just went and checked out your site. I can see why AdSense would perform well over there!!

I had to kind of laugh at the Kontera ads – “Get great deals on ‘planet’!”.

HUH?

But to be honest, I think that for the most part, it served up good ads on your site.

The branding question is a good one. You have to strike a balance between the time it would take you to really go through your posts and add relevant ad links manually vs. what Kontera can serve up for you.

I would simply do a test and see how it goes in terms of revenue and relevance. If it continually serves up pretty good ads most of the time, and it’s a good earner for you, I would keep it.

But if the irrelevant ads make you cringe and they aren’t earning anything, chuck ‘em.

I think I’m about to chuck them myself on this site – I have green underline ads through AdBrite. I was holing out in the hopes it would get better, but I haven’t seen one relevant ad yet.

Alex, look deeply into my eyes… er, I mean, my typed words… you WILL give me all of your advertising revenue! You WILL send me money every week!

*snicker*

I have finally given in to your peer pressure. You can see the beginning phase of my monetization project now. Partially at http://www.alexshalman.com but more so at http://www.alexshalman.com/blog where I am able to use OpenAds.

** Wendy, sorry, would you edit my comment above to remove the HTML I inserted after the “here’s what the beginning of our single.php template looks like”?

Scott, if you want more info on the adsense suggestion thing msg me.

Thanks!
Dan

Some thoughts on this…

There are LOTS of monetization options, but take a serious look at AdSense – AdSense is also very clearly labeled as advertising, so that should work for you. It just takes a little patience and being VERY ANAL WITH TESTING and OPTIMIZATION!!!

For your audience (read: non bloggers, non-techie) your clickthroughs should be excellent.

We brought in just shy of $1k in AdSense last month, with 80k pageviews – up from just $20 or so a few months earlier.

It’s largely about position optimization. We’ve been optimizing it EVERY week for about 4 months, and more than doubling our revenue every month since.

Try something similar to our current layout – both in post detail pages and post listing pages.

Oh, and be sure you put the ad calls in your blog template, not in your posts – putting them in your posts makes it impossible to change your layout later on… and much of your traffic will be coming directly into your previous posts – that’s 95% of our traffic on any given day.

** ALSO – make sure you’re getting RELAVANT ADS – this is KEY for getting clicktrhoughs.

They’re pretty good at this to begin with, but you can suggest to AdSense where the meat of your page content is by putting in two simple HTML comment tags.

Just to clarify, this change isn’t made in a post, but rather in your blog’s Wodpress template – I think the ’single.php’ file for your theme, if you’re comfortable changing that.

Check out an example here on our site – and View Source:
http://www.askdanandjennifer.com/relationship-advice/first-serious-relationship-should-we-date-other-people/
< ! -- google_ad_section_start -- > is before the title of the post
< ! -- google_ad_section_end -- > is after the tags, but before the comments (that way you control the main content)

Here’s what the beginning of our single.php template looks like:
[From Wendy :: Dan, I was able to tweak the characters in the code you put above to get it to appear, but I couldn't get this part to appear.]

Have an awesome day!
Dan

My challenge is that any revenue tools I add to my blog need to be clearly identified as ads, and they also need to pass my standards. This has not been as easy as I thought it would be.

Now that my traffic growth is on target, I’m going to spend some time looking at revenue solutions. Thx for the great article Wendy.