Things are starting to get very interesting at Mission Control.

March saw my website empire pull in £1,995 give or take a few pounds - another five pounds and I would have broken the £2,000 barrier. That’s three times what the same websites earned in January.

I think I had a very fortunate month to be honest and don’t expect this growth rate to continue. In fact April’s figure may well be below that of March’s, but as long as the trend is in the right direction I won’t be complaining.

March received a big boost from advertising sales. I sold almost £1,200 worth of advertising  on my websites, something that I would love to repeat in April, but don’t see happening.

I try to make my advertising rates attractive across all of my sites. Businesses will spend money with you on advertising if they think they will get a return on their money - it is as simple as that. So I price low enough to encourage advertisers to test the water and if they like the temperature they come back for more.

One strategy that I am trying at present is to sell advertising space on a monthly basis, with the first month at a reduced rate and subsequent months at my normal rate. And advertisers can bail out at any time - no 12 month contracts or anything that might get in the way of them signing up.

Another strategy that I employ to great effect is the use of testimonials. If I receive a complimentary email, saying how pleased an advertiser is with the response, I ask if I can use a quote from it on the website to encourage others to advertise. It is a small world, with most businesses knowing their markets well. And this type of peer recommendation really does work.

Equally pleasing is the fact that Google Adsense revenue across my sites continues to grow - it’s now around the US$1,300 mark for the month.

I’ve spoken before about testing ads and where they appear on a page for maximum return. This point cannot be better illustrated than with the story of a science website that was earning US$10 a day from Adsense. By changing the size of ads and where they appeared on the page, earnings rocketed to US$1,700 a day. No kidding! Read more about it for yourself over at the Adsense Blog.