Adsense - what am I doing wrong?
 

I don't get it. I just read this article which talks about a website making just over $4 a day on adsense. The post also states there were 16 days last year where there were more than 100 page impressions.

I get over ten times that number on one of my sites daily, but make less than $0.50 a day. Of course I have a link site, but still... 10 times the number of visitors and 1/8th the income. This makes me sad... What am I doing wrong?

Er dude, is it the site you have in your sig? First thing, it isn't very user friendly. When I hit it, I have no idea what it's about or what I'm supposed to do.

I second Alvin's comment. I would click away from your page in a heartbeat. When I first enter a site, what I want is clarity. I want to know what the site it about immediately upon entering. I want to know what you offer, and expect a clear organization of that offer.

Good luck!

Yup, have to agree. It's all in the design. You have great content and a lot of it, but that wall of text is outright intimidating. Hire a designer to redo it, or at least sketch some suggestions for you. I think it will be worth it.

Remove two small AdSense units from the middle of page, and place two new 336x280 text only AdSense units between "WELCOME NEW USER:..." line and the rest of the content.

I agree with all the above. In the redesign you'll probably be hiding many of the links. Be sure to create a site index page (your current index page is fine for that) so google can have an easy index of all your content.

Sorry for asking maybe a stupid question. How does a index page help google SEO my content? Should all my links be on the same page or what?

I would also speculate that the type of users who visit your site are tech savvy and tend to avoid ads.

On top of the other issues mentioned, I would add that, the whole point of your site is for people to go to other sites. Meaning, when I'm done using your site, I'm not looking at your site anymore, and therefore I'm not clicking on your ads.

Compare that to a blog of new content, even if it has far less traffic than you have. When I'm done looking at that content, I might have no idea where I want to go next. Then, an ad catches my eye...

So, a site that encourages people to go elsewhere will inherently have more challenges getting a high CTR, in my opinion.

Not a stupid question ;) The index is especially important if you have a database driven site (geeklog, Joomla, etc) where the pages are generated on the fly and links to those pages may not be available to a spider crawling your site.

Here's Google's site guidelines:
Webmaster Help Center - Webmaster Guidelines

I think your market might consist of people that don't really like ads, i.e. web developers ;)

Both Moltar and Steve are correct. Techies tend to ignore adds, especially AdSense ads. You might try some other kind of advertisements geared towards electronics and such like Amazon, Chitika, etc.

I've read that most AdSense ads do best with sites that receive a lot of search traffic, but I'm not possitive on that.

Yes, that was what I thought, too. Also, it's a link site, so people use it to get information, they click on a link and they're gone. Not much clicking on the banners that way.

Still, putting an adsense banner on the top of my page dramatically increased my income these last 12 hours. Maybe it's just the traffic that comes from here that's clicking them though. I'll have to see when this thread dies down.

Of course it is, you doubted? ;)

Just a little. You rock. I love you. Ehr... figure of speech. I'm not available or anything. :)

All others, thank you for the advice, too. I'll work on the (lack of) design asap.

It does look better now :)

Btw there is a similar resource to yours, just in case you didn't know about it:

Web Developer's Handbook | CSS, Web Development, Color Tools, SEO, Usability etc.

Hey Bull, I think you're right! Maybe that's why I'm not getting much clicks because most of my traffic don't come from search engines!

But Steve's earning good income from his Adsense even though I suspect majority of his traffic comes from direct too, regular readers. I guess the only explanation is he's getting way too much visitors per day ha! LOL :D

Thanks. I do know about it, however, the resource you mention is for designers, mine is for developers / programmers.