(This one is not a part of the “Blogging Tips” series, for now, though it may be added to it after some editing.)
The question of this post is “what kind of visitors do you want”. It may depend on the type of blog/site you have, but there is probably some common ground for all blogs. Especially if one of your goals is to make money from advertising.
Basically, you want visitors who see the ads and click on them. So far, so good, right?
Unfortunately, your site’s content may be exactly in opposition to what those people usually visit.
Think about it: how often do you click on ads? When you see something that draws your attention? Almost never? Never? Do you even block them?
In fact, many more technologically inclined people never see ads at all. There are some great extensions for Mozilla Firefox that block almost all kinds of ads. And there’s nothing wrong with that - I used to use AdBlock myself, until I added ads to my blogs - I want to see them so I can see whether they’re appropriate to my sites or not, from time to time. But those people, unfortunately, never make you any money, no matter how often they visit your blog. The best they can ever do for you is to direct other people to it.
For that same reason, while being linked on the front page of some large sites such as Digg or Slashdot can get you thousands of extra hits on a single day, you’ll find that ad revenue almost doesn’t go up at all. Those people, in the short run, aren’t really the kind of visitors you want (they can still help in the long run, though, as they may put links to your blog on their own smaller sites, and both the original link and theirs get you new visitors, and improve your PageRank). But in the short term, they make you spend a lot of bandwith, without extra ad revenue.
I haven’t looked into this myself, but I’ve seen an article which goes into which traffic source gets you more ad clicks per number of hits. Their results were quite interesting, though not surprising: people who come from Google click less on ads than people who come from Yahoo! Search. And those click less than people who come from MSN Search or AOL.
I don’t want to talk here about people being more or less “intelligent” or “smart”; however, I’ve also seen mentioned that less “tech-savvy” people sometimes click on ads because they don’t distinguish them from normal links on the site. Those are much more likely to use the “start page” they had on the browser (probably IE, with no plugins or extras to block ads - they don’t even know what a “browser” is, in fact), which goes to AOL (if they’re AOL users) or MSN, most likely.
What about people from blog exchangers? Not good, again. Unfortunately, most of them are simply surfing for credits, and don’t even look at the blogs they visit. The rest of they can make a difference, but, from what I see there, most blogs are either political or personal, which means that the users there will also probably be interested in political or personal blogs. If yours isn’t one, tough luck; if it is, those don’t tend to be successful in terms of making money. I’m not saying not to use exchangers (I do), but don’t expect miracles from them, even if you do get a lot of visits.
The best kind of visitors seem to be the following:
- not tech-savvy…
- … but not entirely afraid of “teh intarweb” - otherwise, they’d never think about buying something online, or even searching for information about some product
- with money (that is, not kids or college students)
- using bad browsers such as IE (yuck!), with no ad blockers
- looking for some product to buy or at least know more about, which your site is about, or at least talks about in some post(s)
This, in a way, makes me feel a bit sad, as I despise Internet Explorer and have done a lot to persuade friends, family, co-workers and visitors to my sites to change to a decent browser such as Firefox. Yet, it’s the technology-challenged IE users that have the potential to bring me the most money. 
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That’s completely true. My blog is aimed not at the very technological, but rather the not so smart, rich, people who want the cool gadgets that I feature.
I agree with you for the most part, though I’m partial to checking out what books and music bloggers are reading and/or listening to. iTunes really needs an affiliate program to help me sell their music. I’ve already bought one album that I found while listening to my Pandora station.
Making money from smart people isn’t impossible - they’re just not going to fall for the same old tricks.