I’m glad I was able to exceed your expectations with my response.

Thank you for the kind words. Please let me know how your testing works out and if you discover any helpful techniques or software along the way.

Good luck!

Wow. That is absolutely by far, the most informative, detailed, and useful reply to a request for advice I have ever received online.

Yes, I will definitely be following your advice with the “testing” of various ad placement strategies. It is often interesting of note that I have 2 sites of the same domain name, exact same template, and similar traffic stats, yet 1 receives 4 times more CTR than the other - and I am in the process of finding out why.

I am also following your advice about posting in bulletin boards - though this is more of a SEO strategy.

Thanks for the ebooks links! I will be bookmarking your site and recommending your information to my friends as well.

Cheers!

I’m glad you liked the article. I haven’t had a lot of time to devote to this project recently, so there isn’t much to update right now. But I always have advice!

One important thing for improving your click-through rates is to experiment with both your ad placement on the page, and the colors and formats you use.

Google’s Adsense Heat Map will give you some ideas about placement, and many people suggest choosing colors that make the ad units blend in with the rest of your site. Also good to know is that most people scan a web page starting at the upper-left side. They linger on titles and subtitles. Images grab a lot of attention and seem to work well in the upper-right portion of the content area.

The only way to know what works for your site is to start testing. Make one change (it’s important to test one change at a time) and let it run for a little while. Check your results and see whether the change helped. Keep doing that until you optimize the ads for each of your sites. It’s tedious, but that’s how it is done.

Make sure you are getting good traffic statistics. I use a service called http://www.statcounter.com and another called http://www.mybloglog.com. These let you see where your visitors are from, how they move through your site, what they look at, and lots of other useful stuff - if I’m reading my logs right, you are from Australia, read my ‘Niche Marketing’ article first, went to my homepage, read my article called ‘A Seed Planted’, then ‘Placing a Rock in the Stream’, and finally this article. You have a pc running Windows XP (like 89% of my visitors) with a screen resolution of 1024×768 (like 39% of my visitors), have Javascript enabled (like 100% of my visitors), and your browser is Firefox 1.0 (like 6% of my visitors - 57% have upgraded to version 1.5). That is a lot of useful stuff to know.

If you know where visitors come from, how long they stay, what they look at, what they click on, and how they move through your site, you will get a better idea of where to spend your energy.

For increasing traffic, writing short articles and posting them on free article databases is a very good strategy. I get regular traffic from a few of the articles that I posted. Each one you submit will also have a small place for an author’s note and link at the end of the article. You will benefit from the traffic building efforts of everyone who uses them.

These articles are used by ezine and website publishers, so it is a good strategy to write articles that are indirectly related to your website. That way they won’t appear on sites that are direct competition for you. You may even want to find a few related sites of high quality and offer to write an exclusive article for them - with a link to your site included. I’ve written an article about this, so check my archives.

Another excellent way to get noticed is to participate in online discussions that deal with topics related to your website. Put your site’s address in your signature. Commenting on blog posts (like this one) will also help generate traffic. Don’t abuse this strategy by posting when you have nothing to add to the conversation. You will get more responses when people are impressed with the content of what you say. I wrote an article about this too.

In the future I’m planning to experiment with creating ’sticky content.’ These are features like mortgage calculators, games, videos, and other content that will keep people coming back to your site over and over. A great one I came across recently was for a press release generator. You answer a few questions by typing in your responses, click a button and a properly formatted press release pops up ready to cut, paste, and send to all the media. I’ll write more about this when I’ve finally had a chance to test the idea.

This all takes some work to get going, so hopefully your sites are on topics you find interesting.

This link is for the page where I have links to all of the free e-books for downloading: http://www.andrewseltz.com/my-bookshelf/free-e-books/. ‘Ads of Gold’ isn’t there because I don’t have the rights to re-distribute it. Sign up at TrafficSwarm.com and you can get a free copy from them.

This is turning out to be more of an article than a reply, but I hope I’ve made good on my claim to be your ‘online information consultant!’

Regards,

Andrew Seltz, The Go-To Guy

Over the last few months I have been doing a similar project, creating about four (very small) niche content websites, using a unique marketing strategy. I am working on improving my Click Through Ratio of the websites, and a method/formula to gain a steady amount of traffic to the sites.

Is there any advice you can give based on your experience (what works and what doesnt)? Also, could you please send me any e-books you have? (especially “ads of gold” that you mentioned)? Thanks!