Effective Blogging: Stick to a Theme

I recently read a question from a blogger/AdSense publisher who was wondering why his blog had such a low CTR, and also wondered if was a result of low volume traffic. This question raises a couple of important points for effective monetization of blogs.

Traffic Doesn't Affect CTR

First, the volume of traffic doesn't affect the CTR. - for example, if you get one visitor, and therefore one page impression, and that visitor clicks on an ad, that's a 100% CTR!! However, if you are lucky enough to get 5,000,000 visitors and 1,000 click on ads, that's a CTR of only 0.02%!

Themes Mean $$$

Blogs are most effective when the bulk of the posts relate to a central theme. This ensures the ads are always relevant and pertinent to your readers. On the other hand, blogs that are comprised of mostly miscellaneous rambling posts on a wide variety of topics are going to have ads related to the topics most recently posted when last visited by the AdSense bot. This means, the topics of the ads will change frequently and may well be out-of-date by the time the visitors even come to your site.

For example, supposing one day you decide to write about the hassles you had when buying a new carpet for your living room. Shortly afterwards, you'll probably find carpet-related ads appearing. Then, a few days later you decide to write about your thoughts regarding some Hollywood starlets latest antics. In that case, you'll get yet another lot of ads appearing, yet your visitors may be there to read about buying carpets, not about Hollywood gossip . . . and so on.

However, if you regularly wrote about issues involving purchases from retail outlets, and you regularly wrote about Hollywood gossip, you should simply create a "retail hassles" blog just about those types of problems and another just about Hollywood gossip, then the ads will always be relevant.

Conclusion

Blogs that are just meandering ramblings across a wide variety of topics will not get ads that are highly targeted to the readers and, therefore, will almost certainly get low CTRs, no matter how well placed and "optimized" they may be. Furthermore, low traffic has no affect at all on your CTRs.

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