Hi All, I've been a passive reader here for only a month or so but I have learned a great deal from DP. I would be very interested in your opinions of my site, its layout an the placement/use of my ads, as I cannot think of a better place to get valuable feedback. My site is: http://nexus404.com/Blog/ (I know, not the best of addresses but I've learned a lot since starting this site and my other site is named somewhat better lol). The site is almost a year old and I am up to 50k visits per month now though I'm not the best of marketeers. The site is a bit of a passion for me to be honest (I hope that comes across in some way). As far as Adsense is concerned. Did run a 160x600 sidebar ad but have removed that as the pages looked a little swamped with ads with it there and it was not performing anywhere near as well as the other placements. I'd love to hear your positive/negative thoughts. Thank you in advance, Andrew
the filtered straw was so eye catching, that I skipped your ad completely lol. But once i did see it, it looked good.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, Ohmer. Glad you liked the iStraw lol. I admit the ads are easy to miss but there are, I know, two schools of thought concerning ad placement and formatting on a site - either in your face (ie, ads seem most important) or blended (content seems more important) and I would much rather my content got the priority, to be honest.
nice layout and nice concept, seems you have a good page rank and should be getting some good traffic. 1 suggestion, try to make the adsense link black so it's catchs the eye. I updated my site to have a white background and red link color and the CTR has gone up. Good luck
Thank you very much for your kind comments - much appreciated. I'll try your tip, thank you for taking the time out to reply - I'll try what you suggest though I'm having a good day today so dare not change anything at the moment lol. Traffic wise, I'm getting 50K a month at the moment (I'm rubbish at promotion) but its on the up and its a fiercely competitive subject area. Still, getting two links from Gizmodo and one from Boing Boing in the last couple of days does no harm. I love doing this either ways (its a passion and the thought that what I write is read by people the world over still makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside - sounds daft I know) and I'm making many contacts with some extremely nice people (I've also been offered paid roles on a number of very big sites which I would take if money was the sole mover). Thanks again to everyone who has replied - it really is most sincerely appreciated