Whenever you read about tips to increase your Adsense earnings, you always get the same five or six tips about placement, color, and defeating ad blindness. Here are three that I remember:

• Make sure that your ads blend into your site
• Place ads in a prominent place
• Make sure they are visible to all visitors (regardless of screen size)

These have helped me quite a bit to bring my ad revenue up. However I just discovered one that has helped more than anything else.

• Make sure your website is fast

Making my website faster has doubled and almost tripled my ad revenue. It is insane. So here is some history:

A couple months ago I wrote a rewrote one of my sites to take more advantage of the Internet community. Yea know - that web 2.0 crap. It basically allows people to integrate my content with the likes of facebook and myspace and all that. Nothing big. My ad revenue took a hit - then it got back up to where it was - however it didn’t grow. I was kinda bummed. I was getting more and more traffic but not more and more ad revenue. So I start to evaluate why this was happening. While thinking about it, I noticed that my site was slow as shit. It was killing me. But it had been slow from the beginning - it had never been fast. So I was blind to it from the beginning. Then a couple days ago I installed eaccelerator as a test of its power. It sped up my site. Noticeably. It really made things better.

Then I logged into adsense. I hadn’t expected a side effect of performance be that my users hung out more and that my clicks would go up. In fact - I never really thought about performance and adsense going hand in hand - but I was blind to it.

Website performance has effected my ad revenue more than anything else I have done.

Now keep in mind that my site was still usable. It was not so slow people were not going to it - but it was slow enough for people to eventually leave. And it stopped people from clicking around. So now - my visits are steady and my pageviews are up. people are sticking around more. They are happier - and my ad revenue is up.

w00t.

So make sure that your web applications are snappy - and you will surely get a better response in your ad revenue.