I Worked My Ass Off For THIS?!

Your ads are the size they are because that is probably the size you chose when you created the ad in Adsense

And, yes, you do want to add pictures. My bounce rate improved when I added the photo of the penguins

http://www.travelsnippetsandmore.com/

 

the title of your site should also show as the title of the page to SE.
I would get someone to optimise the site.
here is a decent adsense set up
http://webhealtharticles.com
some up top, but not overpowering, some put in the content, then some at the end of the article for people to click to move on to the advertiser.

as far as a template, i would use something that makes me feel like im on a travel site, not sure the flowers do it for me.

however, as you can see from the advice here, you need visitors to get ad clicks. conversions suck, you gonna get like 2-5% ad conversion, you can add up how many visitors you need from that

 

This image does make your site look really bad. The truth is it only looks that way on a smaller resolution. On a wide screen maximized it looks okay.

Still I would go for one bank of 160 x 600 ads OR get the ads below your copy. Many people will view your site at 1024 or less resolution and that first impression is important.

You get your highest paying clicks on the first ads served. Why waste the look of your site with more than one set?

Just my opinion.

Best wishes

 

I'm on the latest firefox and once I scroll down a little, your site looks terrible. Sorry - but would rather not beat around the bush. If I were a true user who landed on this via search engines, I would click right out. Your content is not readable.

You refer to some guy who makes 200 bucks a day with this style -- two questions: 1. Are you positive about that? 2. Are you positive his traffic and revenue is legit?

 

Why does everyone think that adsense should make them rich just because they put up ads on a site? Who pays for the Ads? And what are they getting from your placement?

 

Websites can be automatic moneymakers with low maintenance, but first you must work a lot on it. Things i suggest doing

1. Rethink about your design as a whole, is it a good template or is bad navigation the cause, changing ad formats, keeping quality content for the reader with keywords in mind, etc

2. Site promotion, go and manually submit your site to 300+ most popular websites example : top 50 social, top 20 blogs, top 50 search engines, top 50 directories, etc. Linking on two thousand low quality websites like some indian offer with their so-called manual submissions for 10$ won't show any results, do them yourself on the top alexa-pagerank websites.

3. After you did all this you will gain some experience and probably money, you should be able to leave that site on autopilot and with new personal experience start another bigger-better site. Good luck!

 

Your site doesn't need to look great to make money with Adsense. Having pretty headers etc, while nice, is actually not necessary. How much traffic are you getting for $1 a day. It could just be that you need to promote your site more.

Dean

 

You are absolutely right. I only get about ten visitors a day, and about 95% of the traffic comes from the article directories... no love from the search engines.

Thanks for all your advice, it's much appreciated.

 

I would also change the template. It does look like it's been created by some kind of a site generator. The more personal it gets, the more people will get comfortable staying at your site.

My two cents...

Regards,
Joseph