Last week, I said anybody could make good money blogging and I challenged my readers to setup blogs and make some money. And if you had any questions, then simply send me an email. Sterling Camden of Chip's Quip took my challenge and forwarded me the following question.

An offer I couldn't refuse. I'll admit that my Adsense campaign has yielded a grand total of $4.57 since March 1. I started out with the ads in the right sidebar (yellow on the heat map). I recently moved them to just above my content (orange), but haven't gotten any boost from that. Do you have any suggestions about placement on my site (http://www.chipsquips.com). Should I use multiple ad units? Any other suggestions?

Let me start with the easiest answer and move onto some suggestions.

1. Yes, use multiple ad units. Three ad units and one link unit. Put one leaderboard at the very bottom of the blog. Try the other two ad unit and the link unit in different positions with at least one ad unit in a hot area.  Make certain the ad unit in the hot area is the first ad encountered when reading the raw HTML. This one will pay the best.
2. Next, remove the borders around the ad units and try to match the ad unit fonts, sizes, colors with your blog text.
3. Try a horizontal ad link unit directly above or below your tag space links or a vertical ad link unit in the right sidebar.
4. Whitespace is for starving artist. Replace white space with an ad unit or move content up.
5. Content is gold. Never place an ad unit that drops your content down more than one EM-space.

Let me add that $4.57 since March 1st is not bad for a blog that started less than 6 months ago and doesn't yet receive significant traffic. At this point, Sterling should be worrying more about traffic than money.

1. I know Sterling uses sitemaps, which is a great tool for getting indexed by Google.
2. One thing that Sterling isn't doing is making it easy for his users to subscribe to his blog. Try finding Sterling's RSS feed? It's not easy. Move your RSS chicklet to the top of your right sidebar.
3. Consider using the chicklet generator to make it easy for mundane users to subscribe. This should also be near the top of the right sidebar.
4. Also, he's gotta get an email subscription widget like Rmail. This should also be near the top of the right sidebar.

I could go one forever, but I'll stop here. Chip can implement whatever he wants above and when he's finished, I encourage him and others to drop me some more questions or just simply ask for random advice. Email is randy@kbcafe.com or leave a post in the comments.

http://www.chipsquips.com/