Maybe you should start payig me a percent of earnings now instead to lessen the blow, before I sue you in court like facebook because you ’stole’ my idea ;-)

The FIFA 08 idea was/is great. Traffic is steadily increasing (it also helps to have a link on Wikipedia)

I use Google Analytics and the blog stats plugin from wordpress. It gives me a quick overlook over the most read posts, referrers, links and so forth.

Good point about Google Analytics and page loading times. Just realised I still have the code on my sites even though I never look at the stats -removing now

Google Analytics is free but it increases the loading times for the visitor and it could give problems if the service has a problem.

You could also check your webhost to see if he offers any statistics for your site, awstats for instance is a nice program.

@Martin: Even I am waiting for Google’s program to show up ( if they have any plans either on marketing or new style). Fan doesn’t work well unless you have 2000+ and kind of site.

Blogads seems to have died as well

A second reason why I never put them up was that I did not want to ad more ads on my site. I already had serious difficulties convincing myself to add Tribal Fusion to my blog ;)

I never thought it would make much sense to add another ad on my blog for just an increase of 1% or even less in revenue

Just spotted you don’t run feedburner ads on your site – interested to hear why not?

To be honest, I’m making less from feedburner every month and they are now down to less per month than I make from adsense in a day, so I’m considering whether or not to pull them, so interested to hear your views.

It’s not really about being de-sensitised to a site, it’s about what you are doing there in the first place

A search engine visitor is also looking for a particular service or piece of information. So, if they’ve chosen your link from a set of results on Google and your site is showing ads relevant to what they are looking for, they will probably click on them.

Whereas regular readers are visiting just to see what you’ve written about recently, and are not necessarily looking for things to buy etc

@Martin
I was thrown by Darren’s problogger layout initially, until I realised he had other sites that were making the serious money

I fell into that trap when I started using Adsense because I copied the ad layout from Problogger for a few weeks until I realized that this was not the perfect spot.

Everton you should probably mention that it could be counter productive to run more than one Adsense banner on your site.

I would not advise new bloggers to only look at optimizing their posts for search engines and revenue. It is my experience that it is most often better to simply write about subjects that you are enthusiastic about. Traffic will come in eventually.

thanks for the links