to many ads on the sidebars. check out the sites in my sig. something like the first one makes me $50 a week with 1500+ uniques a day.
I do not know, but your blog is hurting my eyes. You have too many color out there. IF I am not wrong, marketing and psychology say human eye can withstand atmost 3 color at a time less is better but higher is going to hurt. May be you can use this insight. Just a suggestion.. Never mind if you have somethingelse in your mind.
Learn from the best. Look at these two sites, and count their ads. http://www.yahoo.com/ http://www.msn.com/
Yes, but they can use custom ads (and make most of their money per million, not click) and they have advanced designs that work well with square ads.
Square ads don't work well on old designs? I'm not sure what kind of ads you are used to, but on the internet most banner ads are either square or rectangle. The rest are usually text. Look at yahoo, really. Small text link on top of header. Anybody could squeeze that into their web design. Then look at the rest of the page. 3 simple columns underneat the header. Hardly a complex design. Column 1, menus for yahoo services. No ads. Column 2, the page content with a fancy text link (has a form in it, easy). Column 3 more content with a square ad. 3 ads total Looking at the juiced site...my eyes hurt now...but 3 columns just like yahoo, and even a header. If they wanted to they could place ads exactly like Yahoo. I think the sites biggest problem is the lack of keeping it simple. Too much stuff with no direction. As a visitor, where should my next click be on that site? Who knows...People will leave unless there is a clear course.
I used to use Adlinks, and I got a ton of clicks on the link but very few on the ads. As for the rest of the layout, I'm still confused about why it sucks. I guess the background color might be too bright? But, that's the color that goes best with my color scheme and is an Adsense color. The red right sidebar? Should I change it to the same color as the rest of the background? The black header? That wasn't my design plan, but when I added the nav links, they brought a black rectange behind them, and I thought it looked better to have the entire header black than to have a black rectangle coming over a blue background. (If anyone can tell me how to make nav links right...) As for the other ads. I was trying to blend them with my layout. There are ads under the recent comments sidebar designed to look like recent comments then more in the contact us part designed to look like the contact us links. Then, I just put some extra widgets on that I can take off if they detract from the blog. But, I would think that "Most Popular Articles," "Links," "Recent Posts," and "Labels" are neccesary. "Recent Comments" seemed like a good idea to increase comments (not sure it has), but it does help me keep track of comments. Again, thanks for the help.
If you have an alright designed site with good content then visitors will use your site. A good majority of them will use it with or without ads no matter how many ads you had. But if the ads slowed down the site significantly then that will turn people away. I would suggest that you look at the Google ad further down the page as it's overlapping some of your content a little and I also noticed that you are using no padding on your text meaning that it's touching all of the borders and doesn't look as professional that way. Anyway, good luck with this site.
I fixed the background so that the entire bground is the same color. Maybe that improves it? Some people were saying I had to many colors. Tell me what you think about it now.