Digs’em WordPress Theme

I am an Adsense nut and affiliate marketer junkie. I really enjoy many pay per click (PPC) programs as well as commission by lead or sale programs. I received an email today from Aaron Kuroiwa who basically asks my opinion on designing a successful website to accommodate for the highest levels of click through and lead / sales conversions. Here is a copy of his email:

from letutor language services <xxxxxx @ letutor.com>
to Garry Conn <garryconn@gmail.com>,
date Jan 16, 2008 4:00 PM
subject Re: Garry Conn dot Com Contact Form
mailed-by gmail.com

Garry,

layout questions. I’m looking for advice in regards to creating a informational blog that gets the best conversion / click through rates for adsense and affiliates. I’ve done some basic observations of some other successful site owners and am looking for some additional advice. Here’s what I wrote in my first email to you.

I’ve been a reader for a couple of months now. I’ve visited your aircraftdeals.net site and have followed it’s progression. I have quite a few good domains that I want to develop into informational sites that serve adsense and affiliate offers. I am in the process of commissioning a customized wordpress theme to try and offer my readers the best experience and get the best click through / conversion rates. Would you mind sharing some of your sites addresses so that I could do a cases study of layouts or offer some specific advise on layout psychology?

One thing I am curious about is whether or not a left hand sidebar with adsense ads gets better click rates than a right hand sidebar. The reason I ask this is because we read left to right and I would naturally think that ads on the left hand side would get more attention. Specifically if you you adhear to the F pattern that most readers use to scan a page. Additionaly, I am thinking of using a central ad box like on truckerhub.com a site by www.noviceseo.com.

Not sure if you’ve done split testing in regards to how effective a leader board ad is directly below the header image I would appreciate your comments on this as well.

Aaron Kuroiwa
Le Tutor Language Services
Office Hours: 9 am - 6 pm
(office) 480.626.5180
www.letutor.com
www.letutor.com/blog - A Guide to Foreign Languages

Website design is VITAL towards the success of your blog, site or informational media network. The design has to be balanced in a way that is friendly for search engines yet cosmetically appealing to end users. Secondly, the design also has to look good in the many different web browsers, computers, and screen resolutions available. To complicate matters even worse, today we have people accessing the Internet with PDAs, cell phones, Nintendo Wii’s and more.

When I design a website I make it very simple. Typically I have the most success when I keep my designs very basic and limit the amount of options per page.

I like to use traditional link color schemes as they are widely accepted. (aka: blue = hyperlink, purple = visited, red = active/mouse over hover link)

I keep things at a very high contrast level.. the best contrast level is white background with black text.

As you mentioned, people read left to right.. So most of my sites will have a left sidebar with a 336×280 Adsense unit directly on the top of the sidebar.

Below the Adsense unit, I’ll most likely provide site navigation options, etc…

I love the Adsense leaderboards… they aren’t as widely used and found on the mass majority of sites and because of that, there isn’t as much “ad blindness” with these formats.

Typically, I use <h1> size fonts directly above the leader board followed with a <br/> tag below the <h1> title which gives a nice amount of space between the title and the leaderboard.

I rarely use right sidebars. My main personal blog is an exception as I am more focused on showcasing my content rather than try to score Adsense clicks.

Another effective method for me is using the 200×200 or the 250×250 rectangle Adsense unit in the post page.

Typically I like to float the unit to the left and wrap the text around it with a little bit of padding.

A simple way of doing this would be to add a few line of style code prior to the Adsense code. This is typically something I would do:

<div style=”float: left; padding-right: 5px;”>
ADSENSE CODE GOES HERE 250X250 OR 200X200
</div>

I am not a very complicated guy and I don’t really analyse things in depth. I focus on site wide reporting… If and when I have a poor performing site, I’ll dip in and figure out why it is performing poorly. I don’t invest time into tracking whether the leaderboard is more or less effective than the rectangle. I only care to make sure each site is making money and maintains around 10% CTR and has a decent eCPM level.

I hope this was helpful.

Best Regards,
Garry Conn

Tags: SEO Blog Tips, Website Design, WordPress Themes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Make Money Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.