I think you need to approach advertises directly, or as I suggested up there buy elvis stuff from eBay and open your own store on the site. Evil fans want to buy elvis stuff, and eBay sells below 3x what items are generally worth. Buy from eBay, hike up the price and sell on your site. You could test it just by buying 4 relatively cheap items, worth maybe $20 each. Try selling them on your site, above the fold in a 'special offers' section offering them for $60, with the original price being... well that'd be $130, wouldn't it? Worth a shot........ it'd be a shame to waste all those visitors. I think contacting advertisers direct would be a better solution though - like the places that offer Elvis Cruises and such.
You are always very black or very white Fryman, no greys with you. But if I was an Elvis fan and followed through on the site to a page about exotic locations Elvis filmed at, I might just click there. If I landed on a page talking about Elvis's favourite brand of underwear and there was a link to big-jocks or whatever, I might click there too. If I was a fan, I´d want to go to the Elvis suite of the Heartbreak Hotel in Upmagumphrey or book that place for my 25th anniversary with my sweetie that I met dancing to Blue Suede Shoes back in the day. There are a lot of reasons why an Elvis fan might click on anything from cars, to hotels, to dental care as a sincere buyer, but it is up to Elvisfan to tweak with his content a bit more to get the right ads.
I'm no dude!!! I am a refined woman that lives and works in Australia... thank you very much... e10 - you got it.... yes, yes, yes.... that's the sort of ads I would like to see on my site... remembering that my visitors are mostly baby boomers with deep pockets... An ad for Elvis wigs gets me .001 income.... DIY Wills .005 income.... However, travel or cheap flights ads and the ball park figure goes up....
I'm not sure this story is as sad as 9/11... but it does suck for you. Elvis's death is like your birthday for cash, so sorry about that low, low, low, payday.
LOL Well I'm a refined woman that lives and works in the US and people call me dude all the time...course I grew up in California and I don't mind that. I think you just need to go beyond Adsense, start researching other ad programs, affiliate programs, etc. YOu already have a good grasp of what your readers are probably spending money on so start looking for online companies that might be interested in sponsoring or advertising on your site. You'll find a wealth of information reading through related folders on this board. Two ad brokers that I don't see mentioned on this board much are www.adbrite.com and www.blogads.com. They work with content rich sites and often payout more than ppc programs...but the good thing is you can still run Adsense if you want. They have really strong reps among the blogger community. You might consider adding a blog to your sites as a way to work in more retail related content.
Ok, Elvis Fan.. here's a suggestion. I think, once your visitors land on your pages, you need to drive your traffic OFF the Elvis site, and onto some other sites you yourself own and maintain. Take them away from the articles pages to other domains (which you will need to purchase and develop of course), talking about insurance, cruises and what not. Copy Google's textual ad look.. and keep these home made ads (pointing to other domains you yourself own) above the fold and in the most prominant sections of your pages. Keep the visitors in the loop until they leave your network having clicked an ad. This suggestion is coming from someone avaraging $400/day with adsense. Take it for what you think it is worth.
` I'm facing a similar problem like elvis fan, and mine is even worst, 500 clicks = $20. Thx for the suggestion spdude, I'll try to implement it in little by little.
I would seriously recomend starting a store selling collectables. The click on an ad may only get you .01 but it might get the advertiser a sale. Not to mention you can drive a lot more traffic from your site onto an ecommerce part of the site. I think you could probably turn your $30 profit into $300 or $x,xxx pretty easily if you took that route.