I've been spending the last week trying out a new advertising unit for the blogs we publish here at Clear Digital Media, the leaderboard.

This is the big long banner, measuring 728x90, that you usually see running at the very top of many websites. Except that I'm not running it at the very top, but below the website logo, still at the top of fold.

So far so good. I started this with DoggieNews, running a leaderboard ad from a new advertising network called, "Top Dog Network". They specialize in advertising for dog stuff, and place ads on dog sites, like our DoggieNews.

Top Dog Network actually called me with this idea. At first, I was kinda skeptical. I knew that a leaderboard banner would do well, but my belief was that it would take away from the skyscraper unit we have running with AdSense. The AdSense skyscraper we're running on DoggieNews does pretty well, getting a CPM between $6.00 to $7.00. The only thing is that DoggieNew's traffic is still too small to translate into big dollars, even though DoggieNews itself is one of the higher volume blogs on dogs.

In any case, I didn't want to mess with the performance of the AdSense skyscraper on DoggieNews, after I put so much effort into finding the best creative size and placement.

But the guys at Top Dog Network offered to pay me a bonus for three months to cover any potential losses we might experience with AdSense. So, I went with the deal. Well, so far so good! The leaderboard banner from Top Dog Network only seems to run one ad, and it's resulting in earnings exceeding the AdSense skyscraper, but better yet, it hasn't subtracted much from AdSense at all. Hence, it has more than doubled my overall earnings.

So far, anyways.

As time goes on, and all the regular visitors to DoggieNews have become used to seeing the same ad from Top Dog Network, the earnings should go down. But I can't see it going down far enough to where I'm losing money. So I think it's a keeper.

This has actually breathed some new life into my blogging effort. I'm sure you have noticed that my blogging has died down significantly, mostly due to frustration that I can't squeeze much more earnings out of the blogs. I've been working on new blog models, taking what I've learned about blogs over the past couple years, and finding the optimum compliment with affiliate marketing programs. I've got a couple blogs going on this already.

However, I don't want to walk away from the audiences I've built up on the blogs I've been writing in the past. The idea of using leaderboard banners to double the earnings on each blog has inspired me to keep them going.

I have thus far placed leaderboard banners on Junk Food Blog and Biker News Online, both from AdSense, to see if I can duplicate the same results. I'll follow up on this blog as I gather more data.