0.20% CTR, Placement needs changing?

Hi and thanks in advance,

The site in question is:

http://www.tech-rant.com/

There's also a link block in the middle of full articles. The site is getting a decent amount of hits, which is something I know I need to work on; however, I think I need to look at placement at the same time. To promote good advise I'll provide a nice PR3 site wide link for the best responses.

Since my CTR is poor on my main site, I wondered if the placement on my new site is poor too. That would be http://406NotAcceptable.com/

 

Error 403
We're sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server.

An invalid request was received from your browser. This may be caused by a malfunctioning proxy server or browser privacy software.

Your technical support key is: 18b9-88fc-45b3-5e30

You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact admin at tech-rant.com and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.

 

Mmm... that's the BadBehaviour anti-spam plugin, I'll turn it off for a few days

 

The site should be accessible now, turning of BadBehaviour has resulted in me getting an extra 50/100 uniques a day over the past couple of days. Although the number of spam comments has drastically increased (from none two a dozen...)

The adsense placement still needs sorting out, I was thinking of changing the link block to a text add and trying to add a link block at the top of each page. Sort of like the ads-minded Wordpress theme I use on 406NotAcceptable.

 

Best place would be text links between posts, keep the links blue as this is most effective.

Otherwise you may want to consider tidying up your design. For me my eye is not drawn to anything, I'm left looking all over for a place to start reading.

 

Reviewing your placement, this kind of placement is not effective. color is not also appealing. try other combinations.

 

Put a link bar at the top; below the header...

 

the ads blend well. but i just dont like the look try a leaderboard or link units in header =] and withing your content works great 2

 

Thanks for the advise, I'll get round to changing it sometime this week (really busy right now.)

For your help, I've added links to the blogs in each of your 'Recent Blog' feeds.

 

I agree, looks like the link units below header will help.

I think you should try using a link unit between "Unregistered? Register for a user account." and "Home :: Downloads :: Submit News :: Reviews :: FAQ ".

 

I was going from a CTR 0.17 % to 5.0 %
I know this dosnt look pretty but do you wanna make money or have a pretty website?
This is my idea how you should do it.


I would say that this could increase your click to 2% maybe more, but i would but an ad 336x280 on every page the same place.