Understanding the average Internet user and there reading patterns is very important if you want to monetize your website or just want to make the user experience as pleasant as possible in your website. In very broad terms reading patterns can be categorized into two , immersive reading and scanning. The goal of immersive reading is to go through almost all of the text and thoroughly understand what is written in there. This could be something like reading a novel where you absorb everything written there. By contrast the goal of scanning is to locate things , this could be something like a user visiting your website to find your contact details or find an order form etc. When it comes to blogging in most cases it is a combination of two of these techniques , they scan for the desired information and do some immersive reading to comprehend that section. Which is why it is important to make your blog , websites and even blog posts easy to scan and locate important things. In one of my previous posts I showed how to make a user friendly website , below are few things you can do to make them easy to scan.

• Have important information in vertical navigator or at the top of the sidebar - it could be your contact information , link to the download of something your giving away free , if its an event it could be link to the time table , anything that you will think that visitors to your blog or website want to find out quickly
• Break your blog posts into small points - it could be by having sub headers , presenting items in bullet points , making some text bold etc , anything to highlight the important aspects of your blog post , keep in mind that users tend to skip large paragraphs that are not properly formatted. There are some cases where this is a good thing and which can lead to increase in advertisement clicks but if you trying to provide information and grab the attention of the user then its best to avoid such text blocks.

How could this be used when placing ads

Scanning Pattern

Making the text easier to scan can highlight your main points in the blog but to highlight your ads and to increase your income you need to understand the general eye movement pattern when scanning. Typically a user would scan a web page or a document in the order shown in the images. Top left corner is the starting point which is why ads just under blog title tend to perform well. Then the focus moves to top right and as you can see the least looked upon place is the bottom left corner. So having your contact information and newsletter subscription form at the bottom left is not a good idea. This web page about home business ideas is a good example of utilizing reading patterns. See how they have utilized the least looked at part with an attractive colorful looking poll.
Although these patterns could be considered as starting point you should remember that it is very important to measure the performance of your advertisement units because user behavior is differs from blog to blog. Most advertisement programs allow you to track your clicks etc and in case of Google Adsense you can use channels to monitor the performance of your ad block.
I hope this point will help you to increase your earnings and to grasp more readers , feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.