It's one of the basic facts about adsense. You have to have your ads displayed above the fold of the page.
As you said, it significantly increases your click through rate
I have had adense for a few months now, but only put it in the footer and other crap places. I was earning less than 50c a day in clicks.
The other day I decided to put a big square in the first post and in the last post of every thread. My daily earnings have quadruple in two days because of this. I have also got vbseo and I optimised the site for that ( http://www.vbseo.com/f45/critique-paintballer-ie-32300/ ) although I still have to make it look a bit better.
I have also blended in the code a little to make it look some what similar to content. Check out a thread to see what I mean ( PaintBaller.ie - The Home of Paintball in Ireland )
I only show ad's to guest also. Members are not going to click on them anyway so once they register, they will only see the footer adds, which still make very little.
It's one of the basic facts about adsense. You have to have your ads displayed above the fold of the page.
As you said, it significantly increases your click through rate
After a few more tweeks, the average earnings are 6x that they were with out adsense in the first post.
All I need to do is to work on traffic now and hopefully that will increase even more.
Some useful sources are social bookmarking and networking. Also try article marketing. Works for some
The biggy os SEO, but that takes time
Oh and I use answer sites as well like yahoo answers and help.com. Both excellent sources of traffic
Thanks for sharing that, I might try that . . .
http://www.mylocaltown.ie/ - Your local town virtual community hub and noticeboard . . .
you can place the ads anywhere in the post like after the first line of text and you can have the ads in different areas in every post.