Why is my AdSense CTR so incredibly low?

bump -- anybody got tips for a n00b?

Hi,

Sorry but your ads don't blend well at all in my opinion. To me that dark navy ad block just looks like a black hole. My eyes skip right over it and it's hard to read. Try using an ad block with a plain white background and blue link and headline text.

Have you tried other ad blocks? I swear by the 336x280. Not sure how well it'll fit into your site layout though. At least change the color scheme as I suggested and see what effect that has.

I have an adsense blog. Without being too specific, my clickthrough varies between 8 and 15 percent.

If you want people to click on your adsense ads, you need to create a site that gives away good, targeted, information. You have a site that is honestly kind of depressing and is expressing the fact that you're unemployed and don't know what to do next. This isn't going to give people a reason to click on your ads.

First of all, I would recommend reading Tim Gorman's report - it's free - Article Marketing Strategies - he is the king of using article marketing to make money on adsense sites.

Secondly, here are the steps that I took to make sure that I had a successful adsense site:

I picked a subject that has high paying adsense clicks. Go to adwords, and look up how much it costs advertisors to bid on a click. If it costs $10-$20 a click, then you will probably be paid $1-$2 a click, at least.

Debt consolidation, student loans...those are some good areas to look at because there's a hungry audience out there AND the clicks pay a lot. Do a google search on "best paying adwords" or something similar to get more ideas.

I used a free adsense-optimized wordpress template and paid someone to put in a customized header for me.

Write 10 or 20 posts of good, informative, useful content; if you have a site about debt consolidation, write about how to get out of debt, how to tell if a debt consolidation company is legitimate, etc.

Drive traffic to your site. I did it by writing dozens of articles for ezinearticles over the course of a couple of months.

Experiment, and go with what works. Some of your sites will do well and some won't. Ditch the adsense sites that aren't paying well and concentrate on promoting the ones that are doing well. I created an adsense site on plastic surgery that did HORRIBLY. Entirely my fault; I didn't check to make sure that there were a lot of people searching for the keyword phrases that I put on my site. The adsense clicks would have paid well but not that many people were searching for information on my subject.

Just wanted to update you all:

Implemented the suggestions I found here on all my sites, and the results were almost instantaneous. Now I just need to focus on traffic, even though it's off to a good start.

I think there comes a point where traffic is high and click thru is low, and that space is worth more when you run your own program. I did this on my site (dance-forums.com) and so far have more than doubled earnings.