ronburk - 5:44 pm on Apr 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

but THIS page gets around 500-1000 uniques per day.

Then why won't Google give you more money? Where does Google get that money anyway? Oh, looks like they get it from advertisers. Why did the advertisers give Google that money? Good grief -- they're actually selling products! They must be hoping that those ads are actually going to get people to buy their products!

Well, there's nothing you can do about that, is there? I mean, you're a PUBLISHER, and we all know that publishers don't pay any attention to their advertisers. I mean, newspapers don't run auto reviews on Friday/Saturday to go with all the weekend car shopping ads, and women's magazines don't write articles about cosmetics just because of all those billions of dollars of cosmetics advertising dollars, so surely you shouldn't be expected to analyze the advertising market and use that knowledge to better monetize your readers, right?

• Know, measure, or guesstimate the demographics of the people visiting that page (knowing what info they're trying to get is usually a big clue).
  
• Try to find products/services that are not trivially cheap that are marketed to that audience and that exhibit appreciable AdSense inventory.
  
• Build one or more pages whose editorial content is useful and attracts the ads identified in the previous step.
  
• Replace some or all of the AdSense ads on the high-traffic page with "house ads" that entice qualified visitors over the other page(s) you've just created.
  
• Note the word "qualified". SmartPricing means it's just as important for the house ad copy to discourage visitors who aren't likely to buy those products/services as it is encourage those who are.
  
• Sometimes the better money is in branding instead of products/services; be prepared to make the appropriate copy and accept CPM ads.
  
• Many advertisers avoid AdSense like the plague. If you happen to represent a really good match for one of those advertisers, be prepared to find a polite way to bring that fact to their attention. One way to do that is to just give them a free hotlink yourself temporarily; if you can really deliver an appreciable stream of qualified traffic that converts for them, and if they are savvy spending their ad dollars and analyzing ROI, that can be enough for them to notice you in their weblogs and say "hey, how come that guy pulled that useful hot link? Maybe we should advertise on his site."
  
• Since you control the quantity and content of the "house ads", you can repeat these steps for multiple advertising targets. Obviously, the traffic arriving at those "next step" pages will be less than what arrived at the initial high-volume page, but just as obviously, they will be better qualified to purchase those products/services.