especially chrislingle and setec
Hahaha. I'm pretty sure I'm making < 5% of what he's making on arbi... still, it's more than enough to pay the rent. There are
lots of people here making way way more than me. Those people seem to have two things in common: a
very high degree of automation, and multiple source of PPC traffic. I've just taken a couple steps in that direction so far. Anyway, here are my $0.02:
On your layout: It's too easy to tell your ads apart from your content at first glance. They're spaced about 50 pixels apart and in completely different visual blocks, and the content block is more eye-catching because it's obviously the meat of the page. You want the ads to either look like they
are your primary content, or blend in with your content more seamlessly. Try having your text wrapped around an ad to the left of it, with no padding around the ad unit, so when the eye reaches the end of a line of text it naturally continue onto the ad. You should try to match the font and line-spacing of the ads with your text, too. Also, I like to throw some bold words into my text, so that they have the exact same font as the ad titles. I haven't done testing to see if that really helps but it does feel a little better.
Some niche selection tips,
all very general and open to lots of exceptions:
- Look for topics people mostly only search for if they're planning to spend some money. Lots of people searching for digital cameras are just browsing to see what's new or to compare, and the odds are even if they're shopping they're just looking for information on which model to buy and already know where they're going to buy it. On the other hand, if somebody's searching for toaster ovens, they're probably looking for a toaster oven to buy. Nobody's into browsing the latest and greatest toaster ovens for fun. (By the way, toaster ovens pays like shit -- it's an example from my list of scrapped niches, but it's the sort of inconspicuous product that often does well for me.)
- Try lots of niches at first, not just 2 or 3. My first instinct when I started was to build just a few and tweak them until I had optimal CTR and everything, then build more. That was wrong. Even well-researched niches are so hit-or-miss that you should really have at least 10 or 20 before you start spending much time tweaking other aspects.
- Stay away from niches with too much of a local component, because the CTR is horrible. One niche like this that I gave up on was flowers. At least on YPN, nobody was advertising national flower delivery services. All the ads are "Flower Delivery Houston" or something like that. Unless the visitor happens to be in Houston, why would they click? (Disclaimer: AdSense sometimes does a good job geotargeting by IP, so local stuff might be fine. My bad experiences with this are from YPN which shows untargeted local ads to everyone, and I've heard AdSense does that sometimes too.)
- Stay away from broad niches when the visitor is looking for something specific. Example I gave up on: Diabetes Supply. The ads paid well but the CTR was horrible because all the ads were for individual types of supply and the visitors were looking for some individual supply -- usually not the one advertised.
Hope this helps a bit.
