It helps if you’re already relatively well known and people are listening, otherwise you’re insulting someone or something in an empty vacuum. But ultimately what you want to do is elicit an emotional response that compels someone to take action, in this case it is to respond to your post or comment and link to you.

The downside to this is that you may hurt your credibility in the process. Tons of people think Jason is a prick, I have no idea as I’ve never met the guy, so you have to be prepared to irk some people. But irk them enough to post and link.

Why is this? It’s because Google (and the other search engines) updates its index on an irregular basis, updating things like PageRank (though that doesn’t happen nearly as regular as it used to) and the search engine results pages; so the decisions you make now won’t take effect in the search engines until much later. All the links you’re trying to earn, all the content you’re putting up, all that is great for your current readership but it won’t come into play for a little while longer for the search engines.

So, if you’re dabbling in some SEO, just be aware that the effects are like the Fed, they happen a little while after you make them.

The moral of the story is to not focus on the money at first, focus on generating good content, participating in the conversation, getting that link equity, and building your site’s brand. After all that, once you’ve gotten a foothold into the niche, that’s when the money will start coming in. At first it’ll be a trickle… but you never know.

Effective Cost per Thousand impressions (eCPM) is directly related to the content of the advertisements being displayed by your contextual block - if you write about blue widgets, you’ll see blue widgets. If you write about structured settlements, you’ll see advertisements about structured settlements. When you write about mesothelioma, your eCPM (if people click on the ads) will be higher than if you wrote about structured settlements, which will be higher than if you wrote about blue widgets. The content of your site, and this is why niche selection is crucial if you’re in it for the money, is what will dictate your eCPM - not your layout.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) depends on a whole host of factors, one of which is layout. If you remove visual impediments between your content and the ad (blending), then you’ll see your CTR increase. When it was permitted, people put images next to the ads because it drew the attention of the reader who would then be enticed by the ads. By making layout changes, you affect CTR.

Increasing your eCPM may have a negative effect on your CTR (people visiting your site for blue widgets will start to see advertisements for mesothelioma, which they don’t care about, so they don’t click) so don’t devote your time to increasing your eCPM. Likewise, layout decisions could increase CTR but lower your ultimate revenue number. If you have three blocks per page and drop it down to one block, you will likely see a CTR increase but an overall revenue decrease because the number of clicks will fall. This may have different benefits down the road but in the short term (which is a bad way of thinking about things) it may not be the right move.

I would argue that if you have fewer than 500 unique visitors per day, you really shouldn’t focus on earning advertising money and instead focus on ways to get traffic to come to your site. Outside of a couple adsense blocks, focusing on content will yield the biggest gains down the road because as you gain exposure and backlinks, your value as an advertisement platform increases. In fact, if you sell advertising too cheap and experience typical blogging growth curves (especially if you sell an ad before reaching some sort of critical mass) you may start kicking yourself in the ass because you sold something off for too cheap.

For example, I sold my first private sale text link ad on Blueprint for Financial Prosperity on January 6th, 2006. I don’t have traffic records or anything but I know that I had relatively low Pagerank (probably a 3 or a 4), with fewer than 500 unique visitors, and not that impressive a list of backlinks. I was growing, not growing tremendously, but I wasn’t making a tremendous amount of money. I sold a text link ad for $12 a month for six months - a grand total of $72.

By comparison, my total take that month was $1,114.75 after expenses which included the once a quarter payment of $326.99 (For 4th Quarter of 2005 in which a post I wrote about Amazon’s Price Drop Policy was Dugg, so it was atypical). So, that $72 represented almost 10% of the otherwise $787.76 I would’ve probably pocketed sans the Amazon excitement - so you can see why I signed it.

By the time that arrangement was up for renewal in July of 2006, I was asking for and getting $50 per text link sold.

The lesson is: Don’t focus on advertising, focus on content. Content will make you more popular and more money than devoting energy to monetizing. Not only that, you might sign yourself to a long term deal that ends up being bad for you.

I had previously used ad links in the sidebar, having it mimic (albeit poorly) my sidebar navigation, with little success. However, after adding it to my header and placed all the way at the top of the page, I was seeing a noticeable increase. I noticed a 10% increase in revenue and the clicks on that block now account for approximately 14.4% of all my clicks across the site, a pretty serious percentage considering its placement is so minimally intrusive.

As always, experiment experiment experiment.

I removed the lines as a little bit of a test and my CTR improved by 50% as did my earnings. I didn’t think such a small change would have such a significant impact but it did.

Incidentally, SERPalert looks like a useful service regardless, so it’s gotten at least one additional eyeball out of it.

I was curious how he reached that figure so I emailed him and I he told me that he pulled the figures from Google’s 10-Q. Of $675M in revenues from the Google Network, they paid out 78.5%, or about $530M. Then he mentioned that the company emphasized that 78.5% is an average payback… so each publisher gets more or less than that. This is for advertisements across their network, which I assume doesn’t just include Adsense, and for some that revenue share can exceed 100% depending on their agreement. Also, some sites get a minimum payout so that can elevate that percentage number.

Also picked up by BlogHerald.