I was reviewing the CTR across all my pages for this month when I looked at my Blog. 0 Clicks I then looked back over the course of the last 4 months and I've had a total of 12 clicks on my blog with only 2 in the last 2 months. I've been constantly tinkering with ad placement as well as clear ads or blended ads to as you can tell very little success. I think my best course of action might be to remove the adsense from my Blog page at this point. Is this a good idea? I am going to try adding links to other parts of my website at the bottom of each of my blog entries that may or may not relate to the subject I am discussing. Does anyone have any experience with such a technique and are there any tips you have to optimize this? Finally, on your own blogs do you find that you get a poor CTR? Should I simply accept that I won't be making a lot of money on my blog traffic unless I have lots of it?
It takes time to generate interest in blogs -- I highly recommend submitting them to blog directories and working on getting on other people's blogrolls. I get a great portion of return traffic, I've only been writing for 5 months, and I have a good number of clicks daily from both new visitors and return visitors. Just keep writing -- the content you write today will come in handy tomorrow.
I've had a satisfying amount of interest, but I'm just finding that the CTR is terrible. I'm okay with accepting that ads just won't work on my Blog page, but by the sounds of it you have had success which is encouraging since it means its at least possible to get a satisfying CTR on my blog.
Actually, my CTR is atrocious. The point of my various blogs is to get readers, not clicks. My average reader goes 5-6 pages deep per visit (with 3 articles per page) and stays at least 5 minutes on the blog. This is quite a bit higher than even some of the more popular blogs -- which means they're reading me. That's a good thing. The downside of deep page visits and average time visited is that your CTR tends to fall pretty bad. Rather than getting someone into my site, holding them for 10 seconds and getting a ad-click-out, they tend to see a lot more impressions before clicking-out. I also give readers a lot of links to exit my blog to other sites and blogs, so I have a much smaller CTR. That being said, all my blogs pay for their hosting and offer a profit on my time, but nowhere near the billable rate that I get in real life. That's not the point of blogging (to replace your income) in the first year. I truly believe that the future of blogging is huge, so I am setting myself up now so I have a history of consistent updates. I also believe there is a bigger income potential for privatizing blogs to a member's only section, but only time will bring that sort of "fortune." Good luck! Don't write for AdSense, write for your readers. You'll be much happier in the long run.
If you have other sites and if "smart pricing" is a real issue, you may want to consider taking AdSense off the blog until it gets more consistent traffic. This would also not distract you from the real issue -- developing blog content and traffic. Also, CTR is going to be very different from one site to the next. It is as much a product of the type of people coming around to your blog and the reason they are coming to visit. When I am going specifically to a blog about web design, which relates to my work, I might become interested in an ad there. But, when I am just pasing through to see what you are writing about or because I am interested in your observations about life, I may be less compelled to "see" the ads. From a marketing perspective, actionable content is more likely to generate a response than non-actionable content. But, all types of content is going to generate some level of response periodically. You may want to keep your eyes open for other advertising programs. I have a site with both Amazon ads and AdSense. So far, people click more frequently on the Amazon ads than AdSense, which I have tried to match to the content of the page. Sadly, they are not buying, which is the only way I can generate Amazon revenue. I am thinking that if I get the traffic up, I might see some Amazon affiliate results.