what would your goal ($) be with this site

[shirsc2]

I have a fairly decent content site that i just started to work adsense into. How well do you think i would be able to do just by looking at the content of the site. Site traffic, i get about 100-200 unique hits a day supposively, but doesn't seem like that much. Any ideas?

[Kokaroach]

If it's the site in your sig you're asking about, you should do pretty good in terms of adsense earnings once you bump up your traffic levels. Bluetooth gadgets and tech are hot and expensive, so advertisers pay premium for PPC to get the exposure. Your site looks good, I browsed a couple pages and your content is high quality, seo is good, etc...

One thing I will tell you though, is that among fanatical adsense testers, it's a (99%) known fact that the best paying ads are delivered to the first instance of an ad block on content pages (in the raw html code) and in decending order from there on down the file.

You have adsense in the lower left column on your page which is practically below the fold on normal monitors with 1024 resolution, especially if there are a couple of toolbars installed in the users browser. Your most prominent adis at the top of the content column which will give you the best CTR cause it's in the hotspot, but your best paying ad is below the fold and to the left.

If I were you, I would either take out the left column ad alltogether and just have the two content column ads - that means your hotspot ad is now also the first on the page (in the html code) and will deliver both the highest earnings per click AND CTR. OR, move that left column ad up to the top of the column, which is also a great CTR zone on page layouts like yours.

The last sentence above will also ensure there are not too many links other than adsense above the fold on your page, thus increasing CTR as well, without making your page look spammy - your site has good content and pro design which helps in that regard too.

k

[randymorin]

If you are only getting 100-200 visits per day, then you'll be hard pressed to make $1/d. You might want to consider some SEO techniques to get your visits up first, before you waste too much time with Adsense.

[shirsc2]

i have been doing some SEO, have gotten some link exchanges, etc. I think my problem is keyword research. I can't figure out which keywords are the best to go after even after using overture and wordtracker.

If someone is willing to help, it will be greatly appreciated

[Kokaroach]

Keywords are something you don't have to worry about much in your niche. There are bluetooth products being announced almost daily, and so many are out there already...

All you have to do is write about those in much the same style as your current content and the keywords will take care of themselves. Just use specific product names and models in your titles either preceeded by or followed by 'bluetooth,' do the same in your first paragraph of content, meta tags and other key areas of the page.

Also, check out http://engadget.com http://gizmodo.com http://dapreview.com http://gadgetizer.com http://akihabaranews.com and any of the other gadget blogs and magazines. You should find enough bluetooth stuff on those to keep you busy writing for a year!

Keep the content flowing, set yourself up as an expert in your niche, get inbound links and build a rapport with the influencers in your niche by commenting on blogs and forums, etc. and you'll soon see traffic trickle in.

k

[1-script.com]

i have been doing some SEO, have gotten some link exchanges, etc. I think my problem is keyword research. I can't figure out which keywords are the best to go after even after using overture and wordtracker.

If someone is willing to help, it will be greatly appreciated

It's a nice site you have there. I would not mind to exchange some links with you between similar themed sites. PM me if interested.

Back to the topic:

#1 Google update is just around the corner, so you have a valid hope to see traffic increases just the way it is.

#2 You can't earn much money on AdSense having no AdSense ads on most of the pages! The little link unit below the fold is going to get you couple cents every other day. There are many link units that you can nicely build into your template. Don't be shy. Any sensible person would understand that a site needs to be supported, so some amount of ads is usually easily tolerated.
#3 Your horizontal menu is still not mod_rewrite'ed. You don't need to worry about Contact or About us, but news and faq sections (because they have more pages behind) just cry for simpler links

#4 Mambo's HTML is pretty clattered. If you can't easily fix the template and get rid of some unneeded code, make sure you use

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

around your content.


Goal? Depends on your personal situation. How much do you want? That's your ideal goal! How much time you can allocate? Start from 18 hours a day and go down to your acceptable level. Subtract your actual time spent on the site from 18 hours a day, divide by 18. How much is that? 20%? 40%, 80%. Multiply that by "how much do you want" and you'll get your realistinc goal. You obviously need to give it time, but there is no reason you can't reach your goal after, say, 4 Google updates (gives you three chances to tweak your site). Updates are roughly once in a quarter, and your site is 15 months old, so it's out of the Sandbox already. With that said you'll be fine within a year from now :)

Good luck!

[tbarr60]

I would do the ad layout and placement things suggested in previous posts. I might even go with the large rectangle ad where you have featured headlines. In addition, I recommend that you start purchasing traffic from Google Adwords, Overture, 7search, searchfeed, and others. I wouldn't be surprised if you upped your traffic significantly and had an increase in revenue well beyond what you spend. I wouldn't advise this for every site but Bluetooth should be a good niche. Start slow.

[lingeriediva]

You have a good opportunity to put a 60x486 banner into your body text with an image to the left. Basically you would put an ad in where you currently have text at, say, the second or third item,

[my44]

shirsc2

Your ads placement looks well blended, except that it's not on the prime area of most people's web browser. May I suggest you move the ads a little bit up.

I envy your traffic stats, 200+ unique visitors per day is commendable. I barely can get that with 3 websites. But my CTR is nearing 2-digit because of my ads placement.

There's certainly room for improvement for you buddy. Keep up the good work in term of your excellent articles (you wrote'em yourself eh?). But ads can be improved, for example at your page /content/section/11/38/ for example, the ads are far below. I went to your site looking for the ads, LOL.

Good luck!

[kahsoon]

I have a fairly decent content site that i just started to work adsense into. How well do you think i would be able to do just by looking at the content of the site. Site traffic, i get about 100-200 unique hits a day supposively, but doesn't seem like that much. Any ideas?
Hottest Blogger (http://www.hottestblogger.com) is getting 400 unique visitor per day after 3rd day of its launch and get few cent from AdSense...pathetic really.

[eduardomaio]

Hottest Blogger (http://www.hottestblogger.com) is getting 400 unique visitor per day after 3rd day of its launch and get few cent from AdSense...pathetic really.

Of course not, you have beautiful girls on the left side and the ads are blended on the right side...

Put the ads in the left side after the first post and at the end of the page... Otherwise the guys will only be looking at the girls ;)

[my44]

kahsoon, move the ads further up. what's more important? girls or money? HAHA!

[shirsc2]

i really appreciate all of the feedback you guys have given me. It just hard because i don't want my site to look too spammy but also want to make lots of money. I guess i'm a little bit of a perfectionist because if something looks a little bit funny, i have to take it down. This is why there aren't many ads in the content but that will change soon. The past couple of days, i have earned about 1.50 a day, which isn't bad for not really integrating adsense into the site yet. Thanks again

[greenway]

Nice site.

My only advice would be to remove the word "FREE" from your description as google have added the word to there filter list.

[shirsc2]

i removed free from the meta description...thanks for the tip

[ken123]

That is great reading. Could somebody give me some critics on how to improve my site as well? Thanks.

[izahan]

Hi shirsc2,

The content of your site is brilliant. I wish I had content like that. No doubt that you can pull in good ads from adsense.

Your main page is really nicely laid out. The little space between the left menubar and the content on the right helps guide the eyes. The little images are well arranged and presents a smooth transition from downward viewing to lateral viewing. You could make the title for each feature headline a bit more noticeable though - maybe you could use the same blue as your 'What Is Bluetooth Technology?' title. I think it will help give the eyes natural focus points when visitors scan through your site.

I am not sure about the adsense ads on the right of the page as it seems to break up the flow of the eyes when reading because it is not in lateral alignment with your features. May be it is a good idea to ditch this ad section and expand the features so that they fill the width.

I think you could get decent conversions by using the adsense link items at the top of your page, just below your underlined title. With your content, you should have no problems drawing in good topics for your links so a 5 item link will give you good variety.

I notice that you use quite a bit of Amazon links as well. You might want to consider reducing Amazon links as they only pay off when someone makes a purchase. I recommend adding Chitika eMiniMalls in place of most of your Amazon links that carry pictures. With your content, I suspect visitors will want to read and understand bluetooth and not really buy anything. With Chitika, you get paid when visitors click on the ads - and the rates are quite good too!

I must admit that I don't like the cellphones main page much. The table makes it look like a technical specification document and is a bit uninteresting. I think a touch of your 'Bluetooth Features Headlines' format could work wonders. After all, when first presented, this format carries visitors to useful info - chances are, if they see this format again, they will pay a bit more attention to it seeing as how it was useful the first time around. Familiarity could pay off here.

One last thing (finally :D)... I read somewhere that it is useful to have logical stop points for the eyes when reading through an article. You have loads of articles on your site so maybe it is worthile to add sub-section headers so that it helps when a visitor scans your article. Their eyes get attracted to the headers which helps them find what they are lookng for that much easier and faster too.

Ok, I'm done. Now to browse through your site a bit more to get some pointers for my site! :D

Good luck!

[shirsc2]

originally i didn't have the ads on the right on the homepage...i just added that yesterday to test it out to see if i get better conversion rates. It may come down soon but i want to give it some time to test. I like your idea about the link text under the headers sections. I'm going to try that out

Thanks

[izahan]

originally i didn't have the ads on the right on the homepage...i just added that yesterday to test it out to see if i get better conversion rates.

I'm interested to know if this works.

[shirsc2]

now take a look...i changed the link colors of the ads to match the links of the pages...especially take a look at the product pages like the headsets...i incorporated some adsense into those pages

[izahan]

I like it. The matching colors work for me. When I scan through the page, my eyes can hop from title to title easily - and because the ads use the same colors as well, the are quite noticeable. Hopefully you get more clicks this way.

The product pages are nice as well. The link units at the end of each article looks to be a good choice. My only comment would be to have the ads that is incorporated in the article on the right hand side - my reasoning is that people are used to the margin being on the left when reading. The ads on the left could 'wake you up' out of your website scanning and it could throw 50-50 visitors off a bit. Keeping the 50-50 readers in a 'trance' could help generate clicks.

Great site!

[shirsc2]

i tried moving the ads to the right on the product pages but it doesn't look too good. The text looks forced their when it wraps around the adsense.

Thanks for all the tips

[my44]

Playing around with placement along with text can be tricky. If not careful, it could inadvertantly screw up the display without us noticing it.

Your 468px ads is well above the fold (ie the prime viewing zone) so that's a good start. Try to get a skyscraper to complement your "Bluetooth Feature Headlines". Skyscraper 120px should fit well in the there, not 160px because that'll be too big since you seem to have many things going on.

[shirsc2]

thanks for all the help. I'm going to see how it does for the week. Hopefully i start seeing clicks

[izahan]

Let us know how it goes. Good luck! :)

[shirsc2]

after the first week of testing, i've made about 25 bucks, much higher than what i was getting. I just took down the skyscraper banner that was on the right of the featured headlines. It seemed like all the ads were about the same thing all the time and it just looked funny i think. I'm gonna test it without that banner now. Is there a better way to incorporate adsense on the homepage? I had a suggestion to use a large rectangle, right under the What is Bluetooth Technology headline. Would that make it too spammy?

[jeeplaw]

Hottest Blogger (http://www.hottestblogger.com) is getting 400 unique visitor per day after 3rd day of its launch and get few cent from AdSense...pathetic really.

Very interesting how the hottest bloggers are all asian on the front page :D

[perdrix]

The original question being about the Blue Tomorrow site, I'd like to go back to it. I think a primary problem with the keywording inside the <title> </title> brackets is that it should match exactly the heading for the page. This page for example:

http://www.bluetomorrow.com/content/section/33/91/

Shows a heading between the title tags of:

Comprehensive Guide to Everything Bluetooth Related - Computer Adapters

the actual header for the page shows:

Introduction to Bluetooth Computer Adaptors.

I believe by this page you're trying to keyword for "Bluetooth Computer Adaptors" but that phrase doesn't appear once within the title brackets, and only once on the page. And that's 3/4 of the code down the page.

Just my opinion...

[izahan]

I agree that adding an ad under the headline would look too spammy.

I only have one suggestion: pad the featured headlines area so that the text does not reach the edge. I think the extra white space will help give balance to that section.

25 bucks in a week is excellent! I'm pretty sure you'll be gettng more soon! :)

[shirsc2]

the thing with the title tags is that with the Mambo CMS that i use, i can't change the title tags. I can only really do a global site name and what ever the link title is.

Its really annoying and its the one thing i hate about mambo

[shirsc2]

looks like the last couple days adsense earnings dropped....seems like i make more money on the weekends for some odd reason.

I think i'm going to worry more about adding content then optimizing for adsense for now......i'll continue to add ads but until i increase traffic, i'm probably wasting my time

[izahan]

Good call on the content adding. That should help you fish more regular traffic.