I’m on a quest to earn my first $100 from AdSense. I’m very close.

Today I decided to switch things up ad-wise on Haunt Jaunts, which is my current leading AdSense revenue generating blog. (Although, even though I haven’t been as active with the SAHW Experiment, it’s already trickling in cents here and there. I can see how that one might be the main breadwinner if I started investing more time in it.)

But as far as AdSense overall, it’s been a little stagnant lately. Which I sort of expected. When I switched things around last time I was curious to see what kind of an impact it would have.

I’ve read all sorts of tips about how to get the most out of AdSense. Everything from the size of the ad, to how many you have (you can only have 3 at a time, which you should always do), to colors, and most importantly placement.

Placement, above all, has definitely been the one thing I’ve noticed matters most. The second I moved AdSense ads from HJ’s sidebar alone to the little box within HJ’s header, I noticed more pennies piling up in my account.

Also, ads within posts, which I took out last time as part of my experiment, seem to matter. Sidebars do okay, if there’s nothing else to compete with. But ads within posts are golden.

However, I’ve got other affiliate accounts too. I’ve now come to realize you don’t want too many of those, though. It’s too many ads which makes things look cluttered and cheap.

Instead, I’ve tried to hone in on key affiliates. For Haunt Jaunts that’s mostly iTunes, Halloween Express and Spirit Halloween. Although I also have Amazon, but I can link to specific products within my posts and I’ve found that works rather well actually. 

Except I’ve now removed the AdSense ad from HJ’s header and replaced it with an Amazon one. I had to, because I have a Google Search box which also counts as one of the three allowed AdSense ads.

I also removed the AdSense sidebar ad and replaced it with not just one ad, but two, within posts. One at the beginning and one at the end. Two different sizes and not both in the same location. (One is centered, one is aligned to the right.)

AdSense is the one it’s taken me the longest to accumulate money for a payout in. I’m bound and determined to have it earning at maximum capacity and getting me paid out no later than the end of next month. (If I had thought about implementing these changes sooner, I might’ve even been able to manage it this month. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.)

Still, it’s going to be very exciting reaching that goal!

Ever since I got better and decided to go after Haunt Jaunts hot and heavy, I had it in mind I was going to make money with it. I’ve read of others bloggers doing it. A lot of the ones I’ve seen interviewed are making anywhere from $30,000 to $75,000!

I sure wasn’t making that at Families.com, but I was making something. And I knew they had to be making something because they were paying 20+ of us bloggers monthly, plus our quarterly bonuses.

I learned a lot at Families.com about the importance of including pictures with posts, SEO,  linking, and writing entertaining, informative posts frequently. I went from 1,200 hits my first month to between 40,000 and 50,000 hits/month when I left two years later.

Which was impressive to me, but the Superstars (as I liked to think of them) snagged 100,000+ hits a month. And since our bonuses were based on hits, well…it behooved us to get as many hits as possible!

Some people knew how to work it. Plus, they wrote about timely topics that naturally generated tons of hits. (Think Britney Spears, weight loss, etc.)

Then during my brief stint with Examiner.com I learned about embedding videos and polls, the importance of links/lists to Google rankings, and a little more about Digg.

When I started to really put all that together with Haunt Jaunts, I noticed I did okay with hits on the blog.

But let me back up a sec. I had BIG ideas about having a Haunt Jaunts website that listed haunted places. I planned on having affiliate links, like Travelocity, Amazon, plus Google AdSense that would help me earn money.

However, that was a LOT of work to compile the lists. I also quickly realized my blog was (a) more fun and (b)  getting more hits. Also, there were other sites similar to mine, most with better graphics and set ups. But none of them really had a blog.

Hmmm…here was my niche. But could I earn money with just a blog?

Naively I thought you just throw up an AdSense link and that’s that. The bucks will come rolling in.

Not so. There’s a lot of tricks to it. The ones I’ve found to make the most difference so far include:

1. Having “above the page/above the fold” ads. (Ads near the top of your page/post.)
2. Ad size. The bigger the better.
3. As many ads as possible. (Google currently allows 3 per page.)
4. Color. Ads that blend in with a site’s color scheme do better.
5. HITS! This is the most important. More hits translate into more page impressions which translates into increased page per hit percentages. Oh, and if people click on those ads, BINGO! You can score big!

Amazon hasn’t worked for me at all. Problogger and my friend Chris V. say they’ve had luck with that. That hasn’t generated any funds for me –yet. I did recently redesign my Amazon ads so we’ll see what happens with those.

The biggest revenue-generator last year was from a company who wanted me to write about a link and include it in a post. That’s all I had to do! It was a fun assignment and easy money. I’d like to snag more of those gigs!

I also signed up with a new company, ReadySite, that I put on HJ today. As well as I revamped some of my Google AdSense ads and shuffled around some of my widgets to give HJ what I hope is a more pleasing visual feel. (In my efforts at the very end of last year to retool some things I felt I was getting too commercially-feeling. I wasn’t liking it.)

Because yes, I want to make money and entice clicks, but I also want to have a nice site with good info. If it’s all cluttered and visually distracting, who’s going to (a) notice the links to click, or (b) and most important, visit in the first place?!

So, we’ll see how I do going forward. The great thing is, nothing’s written in stone. Things can be changed any time.

It’ll be fun to see what happens from here on out. If I learn some new tricks or anything that works spectacularly (or fails spectacularly) I’ll post here to try and help others avoid my mistakes!