My advice would be to blend your adsense with the theme colours of your site. Also I personally wouldn't use a large advert at the top I would integrate this into the page text and opt for a headline banner instead or text links. Otherwise it just looks like you are set up to sell advertising rather than to provide a service to readers
I increased my adsense earnings by putting the adsense block within the content itself. You also need to increase the traffic to your website first.
The reality is you will never make much from adsense on a Free directory or article site until the content of your site is crawled and indexed and people find you looking for the content in the articles not people looking to submit articles. User intentions are everything. Changing your placement or colors on your existing set up will make little difference. You already have a huge block at the center of your page. It makes your site look cheap and unprofessional. Compare what you are doing to what ezine articles is doing. Night and day. sorry but that is the truth. Adsense is about traffic and user intentions that match ads displayed. You have to pick your niche to be effective.
Keep on working on your two sites, by building more and more backlinks for them instep to drive more traffic.. Then based on your articles niche, people might be interested in the ads provided and hopefully will give you some clicks