The first thing to do is to divide your revenue numbers against your page views: you get an eCPM of 22 cents per 1000 page views from adsense and 24 cents from

The first thing to do is to divide your revenue numbers against your page views: you get an eCPM of 22 cents per 1000 page views from adsense and 24 cents from amazon, for a total of 46 cents. That's pretty good for a programming blog, in fact, the best I've seen. Programming blogs don't monetize well, for quite a few reasons: * Many programmers refuse to buy software and other programming tools * Outside of a few special enclaves, programming is a relatively low status and low paid occupation. (Yes, you'll find people in the valley who get paid $120k a year, but every one-horse town has a job shop that wishes it could pay programmers $30k a year and may or may not offer health insurance... Sure they get turnover, but they think they'll make it up in volumes) * Programming blogs attract a lot of people from India and other developing countries who are very poorly paid, cheap and don't have credit cards anyway * There's just too many programming blogs... The cost ofadvertising is set by supply and demand if there's a lot of inventory and not enough advertising, the price is going to be low What to do? You may (or may not) be able to double your revenue by making your ads more intrusive; if you make your blog look like hell, you'll lose the social traffic, however. The best things to do are: * Not blog. Permanent content that attracts search traffic pays better than blogs that are driven by social traffic. Blogs aren't all bad, because (1) you write a lot of content and (2) the social traffic results in a lot of links which helps you in search, but a search-first strategy is better still. * Pick another topic. One reason so many people make so little money on ads is that 80% of content creators create content about 20% of the topics. If you put on a blindfold and threw darts at a thesaurus, you'd find something that monetizes better than the average fool who "follows his passion" Oh yeah, if you need to "make money fast" don't forget the value of your domain name. You could get $5000-$15000 in one lump sum for a three-letter name. That's 8 years to two decades worth of your ad revenue...