Advice on ad placement for my new site

I'd love to get some opinions on the best places to be placing my adsense ads on my new blog. I have been experimenting with different placements for the ads (see different individual posts for examples), but traffic is still quite low and I am only very rarely getting clicks.

There is some need for compromise here, in that I want the layout to be clean and the ads to not be too intrusive. Keep in mind that the general theme of the site is on ethics, so the ads have to be appropriately placed to not go against that!

Any thoughts would be great. I'm still playing around with the site design, so now would be a good time to think about such things. One obvious thing is that I do not have any ads 'above the fold' (at least not on the homepage, I do on some of the individual post pages) - I'm thinking of ways to do this and still maintain a clean look on the site...

 

Put ads in between the posts..

 

With your requirements you cannot expect high click rate like websites which are made only for adsense. I would concentrate on the higher traffic in your case.

 

Thanks for the replies, I am thinking at the moment that the best way to monetise is to build up traffic and then sell advertising space to particular clients. But it would be nice to get something going with Adsense as well.

I'm testing out different options to see what works, at the moment none of it really is! But I do think that the placements I have now at least look nice compared to many sites, so I'm happy with seeing how they go for a bit longer before radically changing anything. Will look into putting ads directly between posts as well - easiest option might just be to put a horizontal banner at the bottom of a post...at the moment I am mostly using a link banner for that purpose.

 

i would say the ad placement is pretty good. maybe something along the very bottom.. a simple link text ad?