February 10th, 2009 | 
Author: Right so adsense has been running for just over a week now on my blog and I have spent that week testing various placements, colour schemes and ad formats. Max banner ads has helped with this immensley in conjunction with using adsense channels on each new adsense block I use. By rotating through the blocks in max banner ads I can give each ad block a fair crack of the whip.
After a week, I can finally reveal the results of which adsense blocks I will be using.
- A Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600) in the left hand sidebar.
- A Large Rectangle (336 x 280) above the first post.
- A search box in the right hand sidebar.
- A (160x90_4) Link Unit below the search box in the right hand sidebar.
- A Banner (468 x 60) at the bottom of the page.
The colour scheme I have chosen is a mixture of blending and contrast where the background blends with the background of my blog (same colour) and the text is the same colour as text on my page with no border. However, the headline text is red which is contrast to any other text on my blog.
The best peforming blocks are the large rectangle followed by the skyscraper which had almost double the CTR of any other block. I also noticed a big increase in CTR when I changed the headline text from dark blue to the red you see now. The least peforming ad is the banner ad at the bottom of the post. I am debating whether to keep it in or not. I have now reached the CTR I was hoping for but the CPC is a lot lower than I was initially hoping for, maybe advertizers in the cruise market are making cutbacks in the present economic climate.
Even though I was hoping for more income at this stage of the challenge, I am around 10% of the way to reaching my income goals for this blog but with the click costs a lot lower I am hoping they will either pick up or I can attract more traffic.
As for traffic, it is doing okay but I need to start seeing some huge increases over the coming weeks to get on target, in fact I would like to see 1000 visitors by the end of February. I saw a big upsurge in the middle of last week up to the weekend and then it fell back a bit again but the trend is still up.
To reach my targets, I need to step up the article posting and promotion. I am getting a whole load of articles written and I am starting to write more myself as well. I am also looking into adding RSS feeds for more fresh content and also introducing a reviews section for visitors to post their reviews on cruises they have taken. All this takes time to drum up a buzz for though and I fear I may not see the benfits of this before the end of the challenge.
Overall, I am happy that the blog is making an income at last, but the magnitude of the challenge is starting to hit me now. I really have to step this up now in both content and promotion. I have plenty of ideas for new articles, so I am not worried about running out of content ideas. Stay tuned, I will update soon.
Just curious Steve, when you say you have reached 10% of your income goals do you mean you are making on average $10.00 a day?
Hi Steve,
When you talk about needing more articles to boost traffic, are you talking about
a) articles to be added as content to you site – as fresh content attracts Google
b) articles to be added to directories and/or Squidoo?
It seems to me that you are doing really well. In my experience, “headline” rates for clicks are always far higher than what you end up getting. Keep up the good work.
Pearson
Hi Pearson,
I am talking about both..
Hi Eric,
I have to be a bit vague about earnings and other things like CTR to stay within the rules but you are on the right lines.
Steve,
Can you give us some kind of idea how many articles you have posted to date and maybe a snapshot of the kind of backlink building and social networking that you are doing to create traffic. It would be nice to see what kind of effort has been done so far. Also, I think that hitting about 10% is a great acheivement in such a short amount of time. Way to go!
Understandable Steve. How many article do you currently have up?
Wow, all I can say is that this is a phenomenal amount of work. I hope that you will tell us how many articles you intend to put up. Also, I would like to know how much all this article writing cost you? Last, but not least, how many articles can you personally write in a day? I am just curious. I have around 200 adsense sites myself. I found a few niches that yield $3 clicks. I got some the other day. With high paying clicks, I don’t need the crazy traffic numbers you need for this cruise blog. Might I recommend to your readers that they do some keyword research on high paying niches and then use free blogs to test the water (say 20 niches at a clip). Then, they can pick the winners and do something like you’ve done here.
Thomas C. Gajdjis
Steve,
Great work and good reporting- 2 questions:
1. Can you share the design you are using? for ease of implementation
2. Does the larger rectangle wrap in the text or is it right above it?
Thanks
Paul
Well here is something very interesting. I had a small block above my posts on my adsense blog, making around 2.00 a day. By mistake I changed it to a large rectangle block and my CTR increased over 600% and my earnings also increased to almost 10.00 per day for the last week. Jeez, had I know something so small could make such a difference… oh well, no time like the present.
Steve, I’m now off to further experiment and add the red text to the ad headline. Will let you know if it causes a further increase for me. Cheers and keep up the good work
Hi Steve,
I have been doing IM for a few months. I have followed your thread on the warrior forum from the start. I was wondering how often you change your adsense layouts? Are you constantly changing or do you stick with what you initially started with?