What you earn depends on so many factors. Layout, keywords, demographics of your visitors, type of site, phase of the moon... Well, maybe not that.

I only use one adblock per page on my site, and I average maybe 2 cents per visitor per day. If I were you I'd be building up good content and traffic. Use this time to experiment. Try one ad position/type/color for a week, evaluate, try something else...

Or you may find that local advertisers advertising directly will do better for you than AdSense. AdSense works on many sites but not on all.

That's what I been focusing on. I update regularly and continue to build a fan base. But what's to much advertising? Most of the ads I have are below the fold. I guess I should move them up.

I don't really know much about advertising, so I'm continuing to experiment. Will local advertisers contact me? or should I be out their making pitches and what not?

I moved to 2 million in Alexa compared to 29 million two months ago, so that's a good sign.

<off topic>Don't take any notice of Alexa unless you get into the top 20/30,000, it's totally inaccurate. I personally know sites in the Alex 2 million range that have thousands of visitors and page views per day, I also know some Alexa 150,000 sites that are lucky to even have 100 page views per day!</off topic>

Don't add more advertising to increase revenue. Best thing is to experiment with ad placement. Learn how to use the Google channels. Give each ad placement a channel, and then track how it does. Studies show that ads up higher do better. I've found that to be true also. But some people do well with ads on the side. Just experiment. I did that when I first started. Give a new ad placement about 2 weeks. if no one is clicking, try something different.
Also, some sites just don't lend themselves to having the ads being clicked. For example, if people are coming to your site to get scores, they may not be in a buying mood. So you may need to add some pages with content that is more likely to attract buyers, such as sports memorabilia, something like that.

Well I'll give you a little personal experience - in my first month I made something like $30 so no check the next month. The next month I was going through a slow nervous breakdown trying to get at least the other $70 that I needed to be able to get a payment the next month - I made it and then some! So it took me 2 months to get my 1st adsense payment.

I don't know if others would classify it as an "art" but I really believe that if you want to make money with your site you have to work with it. Mostly people will click on the ads when they want to find out more about a particular subject or an ad headline catches their eye.

Thanks for the insight. I'll continue to experiment and hopefully everything goes well. Thanks again.

Focus on traffic and forget about making money for now. You can not draw any conclusions from 100 visitors a day. As your traffic increases (say over 1000 uniques/day) you will start to see some steady earnings.

Let's focus on why people visit your local sports site. Is it to get news about the local team and the players? Or is it to buy merchandise? How focused on buying tickets to games are your visitors? This is determined by the keywords used to access your site.

If it's for news about the team then I'd have to guess you'll never make significant money no matter how much traffic you have. This is because it's not necessarily a matter of how much traffic you have, or how long you've been displaying ads. It's about the reasons visitors are coming to your site.

If the keywords are not focused on buying or reviewing merchandise then you may have an upward battle to monetize the site. That's not to say you won't have the impulse buy here and there (which also relates to clicks), with enough traffic you will. But the topic is so tightly constrained(to a single team), that the traffic levels needed may not materialize. And that's not taking into account the off-season.

Good luck.

So I added a few adsense, adbrite, and yardbarker ads...

Is AdBrite or Yardbarker contextually based advertising? Do these ads look similar or mimic the AdSense ads? Do they appear on the same pages as your AdSense ads?

...not much just two skyscraper ads, leaderboard and two text ads.

So are the skyscraper and leaderboard non-text ads?

FarmBoy

If the keywords are not focused on buying or reviewing merchandise then you may have an upward battle to monetize the site. That's not to say you won't have the impulse buy here and there

This is an understatement of the value of branding, take consumer food and beverage ads for example, they are niche independent (we all eat and drink), and most of those items are bought in a store or supermarket not online.

I know this is drifting from the sports related niche discussion, but I always feel like the above needs to be stressed when someone mentions writing sales oriented copy and successful advertising, what also matters is your traffic demographics and how many advertisers need to target exactly those, not underplaying the value of content that converts, just balancing the scale a little more.