Please bear with me, I am pretty new at all this. I inherited this site last year, and in the fall I implemented adsense. I have never operated a website before, so this has been an adventure! I make pennies per day, every once in a while a dollar or so, even when posting content several times per week. I had to pretty much go on a hiatus the last few months due to moving, but I am back and really want to make a go at this. I have had up to 300k hits per month at times, and the site is actually the only one of its kind. I tried affiliate marketing for 5 months, and didn't even make a buck! So I cleaned the site up last week, and will be posting original content at least 3X's per week. Can anybody offer any insight or tips? Everyone tells me I should be earning much more based on the traffic... The site is html://survivetheapocalypse.net I appreciate any suggestions
Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Especially on forums and social media; it's automatic traffic and easy to target your audience. Target keywords so you can rank on Google, that's free traffic on autopilot. Textbook SEO is what you need. Make sure all of your content is original and useful.
Try low competitive keywords which have high CPC. Then you can get decent amount of traffic. You can check such keywords via Google keywords tool.