Hmm .. not an expert, but I do manage one website that's got a little more twice your number of page views but brings in vastly more money. First thoughts: You

Hmm .. not an expert, but I do manage one website that's got a little more twice your number of page views but brings in vastly more money. First thoughts: Your ad placement is bad. Ditto on the colors. (I had to actually look for the things in order to spot them.) You want the big 728x90 leaderboards at the top or the big square rectangles (300x250 minimum) in the sidebars or in the page content. You also want to choose colors that pop off the rest of the page (black on gray is practically invisible). Consider mixing up flash/image/video ads along with text ads. Place them so they're highly visible but not obnoxious. Look to the bigger publishers (like Gawker, Wired, or Vanity Fair) to see where they place ads. You'll notice almost all of them place ads in a similar. There's a reason for that. Start checking out sites like http://www.problogger.net/ http://www.problogger.net/. You may not want to be that gung ho about monetizing a personal site, but it'll give you a lot of ideas to play off of. Other posters here have the right idea too: It's not so much about AdSense or Amazon (at least not at first), but attention economy. If you can manage to become viewed as a content-area expert, you'll get more book deals and people will start hiring you for speaking gigs at conferences and tradeshows. Good luck!