Your website template, or landing page will have a lot to do with your earnings. This applies not just for people looking to make Google adsense revenue but for people generating money through affiliate programs or actual goods & services.
There is an art to making the right template that usually only people who have been doing this for years would appreciate. I have tried many different types, experimented with free many free ones, and paid hundreds for professional ones.
Personally, I have found that less is more. The best website templates out there (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc) perform the best when they are simple. Clean, attractive to the eye, but minimalistic. Getting to the point is priceless and something more people should consider instead of inundating the user with “bells and whistles.” Adding pictures is fine, even encouraged, but cluttering your website up with them is a mistake. They may look nice but they divert your visitor’s attention away from where you want it.
While I am specifically talking about using a template that will convert better and have the highest possible CTR this same principal goes for sites using other types of monetization. Your goal, hopefully, is to have your visitors take action. That should be the end result of all your online activities, period. If you have adsense on your site you want as many valid clicks as possible, if you have an affiliate site then you want to give your advertisers as much targeted traffic as possible in hopes that a good percentage of that traffic will purchase something, and if you have an actual physical business than you want people to see your phone number and call you. Anything less and you have wasted your time.
My analytics reports have conveyed this too me time after time. All my flashy magazine themes and graphic rich sites convert the least.
Again, keep things simple. I do not care what everyone else is doing. Many of those ‘other people” are broke and not converting. They have a fancy site but its not making them money.
Your website template, regardless of the CMS, should contain a) great content with your keywords in them b) a neat background that is attractive but not too flashy and c) 1-3 main pictures on a page that clearly explain what you do.
That is all you need besides, of course, clean coding that meets W3C standards. Here is a great post about successfully optimizing your template for maximum SEO effectiveness. If you have those three ingredients and have enough organic traffic from Google then you will make money.
As far as adsense revenue goes your main template, or landing page where the majority of your traffic first comes, should be content heavy. Lots of words. You want to quickly engage them and get them reading what you have written. Pictures and other gadgets only distract them. Hopefully, they will read what you have written, be educated in some way by it, and then click on the adsense ads that fulfills their needs.
For instance lets say you have a website about search engine optimization. When a visitor comes to your website they should immediately see a post or content pertaining to SEO. He is most likely trying to grow his own website online for his business. What should he see? It will most likely be tips, news, or tools that explain some ways he can accomplish that. You want him to read at least a little what you have written. Your goal is to educate him about that topic in someway. Maybe its common SEO mistakes or something along that nature.
But, once he has learned a little bit about that topic that does not mean he can do everything himself! He has a better understanding of what the process involves but he is far from prepared to work on his own site. There is little chance he knows basic HTML. So he sees your adsense ads to the side or in the middle of what he has just read. Because you have a basic template his eyes do not wander elsewhere. The ad states “promote your website” or “professional SEO services.” Do those ads lead to actual companies who can help him? Absolutely and voila! he calls the SEO company, that company gets a new client, you get paid a couple bucks because the customer was referred from your website, and Google makes enough money to buy a whole country if they wanted. But again, the template must be informative yet to the point.
Flash, animation, tons of pictures, and gadgets everywhere do not convert. I have a friend that makes a living buiding those sites for clients and charging them a couple thousand to do it. Unfortunately, those websites look great but they do not convert visitors to money.
You will just be able to brag to your friends that you have a fancy website! Less is more and this rule applies to all publishers whether you are trying to make a living from your adsense income, trying to retire off affiliate advertising, or trying to grow your business that actually sells products and/or services
