Argh! It's addictive.

[Smashing Young Man]

Per folks' suggestion, I decided to monetize my site. I've added Adsense, a couple of affiliates and started advertising with Adwords.

I was afraid that all the stat tracking involved would be tedious, but it has turned out to be insanely addicting. Observing how various tweaks done to the ads, keywords, meta descriptions and so on affects search engine rankings, CTR and all that is fascinating and very entertaining.

It's like a huge real-time strategy game where one doesn't exactly know all the rules. :p

[claus]

Welcome to the machine :)

[2oddSox]

It's like a huge real-time strategy game where one doesn't exactly know all the rules

That's one of the best summations I've come across. From now on when people ask what I do for a living, I'll tell 'em I play online strategy games :)

[Tropical Island]

One thing that adding AdSense last week showed me is that I have pages with too much info on various themes covered in the same page.

Project for the coming weeks is to split these topics out into their own properly set up pages so that AdSense can set the ads exactly to that topic.

It's not a search engine problem as these pages pop up in searches for the various subjects however from a user point of view and for AdSense they would be better smaller and more directly aimed.

[claus]

TropicalIsland you hit the nail on the head there. There's always a potential tradeoff between organizing your site for SE's, for income, and for users. It's not always that these three point in the same direction, and in these cases you have to make a neutral judgement and then choose which one you want to win.