I appreciate advice on this forum, but would like something personalized

I recently migrated from a Wordpress hosted domain to my own domain. I have collection of blog entries that do garner a decent number of hits after reddit/digg/facebook/twitter posting.

My simple question is the placement of adsense. I do like to keep things minimal, but have noticed that the first two days registered 250 hits and an estimated $3.20. The second two days registered 200 hits at $0.00.

I understand the click mechanism, but wanted everyone's feedback on what I could be doing to better suit my niche and the visual appeal of the website (fightingforcake.com).

I'd like people to comment... I invite them to, but none do. I'd like people to subscribe, but hate to ask.

Am I hoping for too much, too soon? Are there any visual changes I should be considering?

 

went to your site. I'm not exactly sure what you're asking but in short, the placement of your adsense should be in the middle of your blog posts. You might want to cut some of the posts on the first page to say 3-5 since they're quite large. I would also organize your posts in better categories so if you have gamers coming to your site they wouldn't see the Obama getting locked out or a rude Finger! great pic by the way...

Although I would rather see you promote affiliate products within your categories rather than adsense. Think about it...you'll make a quarter to have google slap over all your posts and probably cause a little yeuk on your readers. But heck if its a gamer and it also says hey I bought this cool game trick book and highly recommend it...and hopefully you do actually buy it and then you can be a fan and make better profits this way.

It also makes you look like an expert without being one...fake it till you make it! Make more money and have fun!

Andy Nakamura

 

I agree with andynak. I started out using adsense on some of my sites and found that depending on the type of blog discussion it can be better to have affiliate links instead. The majority of the time you make more of a commission with an affiliate than you would an adsense click. Plus if you tie the product into your blog post you become and authority on the subject which people start to trust and will push more sales. Ill check your site out and try to give you a better idea of what might help shortly but it sounds like andynak is leading you in the right direction.

 

Thanks andynak and jpmag.

I'll work on the layout of the ads I currently have on the front page and within the posts. I had assumed that, for now, minimalist placement would be best on both the front page and the posts themselves, since I'm still securing a reader base.

Since I posted the first thread, I went from what I assumed was 5 organic hits a day (I assume spam hits) to 50 organic hits a day. At one point, based on controversy, I hit 700 hits a day, mostly driving traffic from a combination of facebook/digg/reddit/twitter with the proper hashtags. I have two subscribers, both of whom I have responded to and thanked.

I'm currently working on getting some guest bloggers from other sites to come in, but need to consolidate and figure out what topics I really want to pursue without driving people away.

As for backlinks, I had 5 backlinks when I initially setup the domain and posted this. Now I have around 30 credible backlinks as reported by Google Webmaster. My next step is to definitely work on backlinks from credible sources and to create sustained relationships with other bloggers, smaller first and then larger as time goes on.

This isn't a new initiative, either. It's a migration from amiworking.wordpress.com. Decided to shut that down and host through lunarpages, with my own domain.

Adsense should be fine now. I'm going to tune it to work on getting categories disabled that don't fit the theme of my blog. My intention with adsense, right now, was to break even. I'm exactly 2 weeks into adsense and have an estimated $25. Even at half that rate, I'll break even when it comes to the cost of owning the domain (after taxes).

I assume the following:

If I continue to write relevant content, build relationships and backlinks, and push out to social media, blog shares, and feed shares, I will, a few months to a year from now, have a pretty solid community built where I may no longer have to continue pushing posts out to social media mechanisms to drive traffic.