Vasanth Dharmaraj’s Blog

I have been reading ProBlogger for a few weeks. Well I am not planning on becoming a ProBlogger. But I did add AdSense ads on this blog a year ago and wanted to see if I can improve the earnings from it.

The first thing I did was blend the AdSense links I had in the side bar to match the theme of the site. I could see a slight increase in click through rates but not much. Now I am not trying to cheat the visitor into thinking these are navigational links. I have tried to make it clear that these links are “Advertisement” and the links look a bit different than the regular links. See screenshot above.

The second tweak I did was to move the side bar from right to left. Now this increased the click through significantly.

Finally I added some ads below the post on individual blog entry pages as shown above. Most of the visitors who arrive from search engines land on these pages. They are the ones looking for something and are most likely to click on ads. These are by far the best performing ads on this blog.

Note: It is not possible to have ads shown only on pages with single blog entry in dasBlog. I created a custom macro to do this. Take a look at it here if you use dasBlog and what to do something similar.

Now are these tweaks going to make me rich? No, not with the current level of traffic. But this year I will probably get enough to cover the web hosting charges.