I changed my ads placement as advised by you all and got a good many clicks on Thursday but yesterday out of 300 odd views I got zero clicks. Now I am thinking perhaps the last blogs I did threw up hopeless ads that people were not interested in so is the Content more important than the ads placement, I despair, I really do lol !!
The nature of content is very important and your page visitors should have a reason to click on it. For example you had an article titled "teach yourself SEO" and you displayed adsense ads about SEO companies that optimize your websites for search engines. Your visitors are not really interested in these ads, because they want to do SEO themselves and not pay companies to do the work. You see, even if you have topic related ads on your webpage it doesn't mean, users will be interested in it. You need to write topics for visitors who are interested in content as well as "make an action" for the advertisement you are displaying.
Well the topic of your website is humor. Visitors of your website are only interested in text humor, humorous pictures, games or videos. Usually these kind of visitors are not nearly interested in filling out forms (lead action) or buying things (purchase action). This is usually what an adwords advertiser has on his websites. What your visitors want is to be entertained. They want it NOW and they want it FREE. Your ctr in this niche would normally be pretty low, so you would need lots of traffic to compensate your low ctr. There are basically two steps you can take. Add LOTS and LOTS of content or change your niche. But be sure to enjoy what you do, don't just base your topics on high paying keywords that so many here do. They have no interest in their topics nor what their visitors get. If you base your website on high paying keywords, you will probably end up dumping your website after a while.
Hmm its pretty unlikely the average untrained internet user will know that the ads are going to lead them to form filling web sites. They have to click to find that out which is what we are trying to do. What happens after the click is not of concern. You need to blend your ads into your content as much as possible. With some luck but not allways you will get your clicks because many an average joe does not know they are clicking on ads and just regard them the same as any other link. Sometimes making them stick out like a sore thumb doesn't work either as people will quickly realize you have no content and move on. Always lace your ads with plenty of content. PS: Just checked your site the first thing that hits me is 3 quarters adsense at the top. This is a very unatractive prospect i would spread it out more evenly on the page. Go for top middle and bottom.
The ads have descriptions and the descriptions may say something like "sign up now" and "buy now", "join now to view". So unless the viewer doesn't know how to read, he will at least have a clue what the ad is about. Whatever one does, click through rate on websites such as online games and humor can't be as high as it is on most other websites. That doesn't mean its not profitable though. You just need lots of traffic and the traffic may be easier to get than it is for other niches (example, you would add a watermark at the end of a video and upload it to youtube. If viewers like it you will surely get hits. From that point its just leverage).
Ok what do you mean by spreading the ads out, I am using 336 x 280 which I thought was popular with most users. Which ad size would you suggest that I replace the 336 x 280 with ?
I'm not saying theres anything wrong with your ad size. Different segments of your site may suit different ad sizes. Its upto you to be creative and blend your ads in. Consider not having all of them in one place at the top. As i said before try to make them top middle and bottom.
What he says is you don't have any content above the fold. Move one of the sidebar units lower (probably the left one). Most appropriate position for the large rectangle unit on your current design would be below the title of your first post and wrap the text around it. However, you're using blogger and thats not possible there, because you would have that unit below every post then and you would end up with too many ad units (against tos). So a good alternative would be to remove the rectangle altogether and place a horizontal link unit below the header, center it and use the same orange background as you have on your sidebars (or white, experiment how it looks like, make it pretty, don't just place it). It's important to find a harmony between content and ads.
The content is certainly the more important factor to get more clicks, keep in mind that fresh content will rank you well in Google, and will send natural traffic (usually clicks will come from). So your focus should be content, ad placement, and ads should blend with with content to increase CTR or clickthrough rate.
Content is naturally important in getting more clicks but the source of traffic decides the CTR. (Ad placement and blending the ads with the contents is another good thing to be considered). If the traffic is from organic route like search engines, the chances of your ads clicked are more rather than from social bookmarking sites like digg, stumble etc which are considered as crap as for monetizing the traffic is concerned.
the content is important to build stable traffic ( returning visitors ) and the placement to improve the CTR , 300 views is not so much, maybe the ads are not related to the content