Please review my ad placement

I've been writing for a long time, but I'm new to blogging and to Adsense. I've started a Blogger blog to get my feet wet before registering my own domain. Only a week old so far, but starting to generate some traffic. Can someone check out my site and give me some advice on ad placement, color scheme etc? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

http://cheapcanuck.blogspot.com

 

Well so far its not bad for a first blog. Your most recent entry seems rather long though. Id put a break in there so people can just read more if they want to finish the article. Otherwise it puts your other articles quite a ways down. Sometimes someone may begin reading your most recent article and not be too interested but may catch the heading of your next one and be really interested.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I know I can be a bit long-winded in my writing sometimes, so I had thought of truncating the posts. Checking around and looking at other blogs though, it seemed this was a rare practice even with long posts, so I decided to leave it as.

As far as the ads go I just chose to leave them blended into the template. Is this a good practice, or should the colors be in contrast to the rest of the page so they stand out more?

 

the color scheme is good. But I'm gonna talk about sidebar a little bit more.

1. Move "Fave This Blog (Technorati)" and "Subscribe to RSS Feed" under 120x600 Ads.
2. Give CENTER alignment for 120x600 Ads, Technorati Button, RSS Subscribe.
3. It seems that your sidebar can hold 160 pixel. Why don't you use 160x600 Ads instead of 120x600px ?
4. And maybe 200x200 Ads between My Favorites and Categories is also good.

Header :
Align it left.

 

Looks ok. But consider having ads within your content. Also add a link unit e.g. between favirotes and categories.

 

Good placement. You also can put it inside the article like mine.

 

Do you find you get significantly better CTR results with the adsense ads right in the article? I'd considered that, but I don't want to annoy repeat visitors by causing them to accidentally click on an ad. Fine line between maximizing returns, and losing readers...

 

interchange the title color and the text color in your ads..blue to black and black to blue...u get the idea...

 

Done. Is this what you had in mind? Does it stand out better now?

http://cheapcanuck.blogspot.com

 

yup it looks much better now...goodluck...