Hey OP I read through your post and your doing great. Have you considered the Ebay partner network for monetizing? I just stumbled upon them the other day..looking for alternatives to adsense for autoblogs.
i use the amazon affiliates currently. ebay is for sure something worth looking into though.
ive found the niche for my second batch of sites is much more conducive to amazon. smaller $xx.xx 'impulse buys' then the huge $xxx.xx 'investments' that are related to my first site.
speaking of which, im finally starting to see some income from amazon. not a huge amount, but enough to at least keep it around and look into it more as a diversified income source.
also threw in a CPA offer, see how that goes.
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my new layout is really kicking ass (for my noob ass anyway, 1.5%). about 3 times the CTR of when i started out

flirting with $1 per day from adsense, couple bucks from amazon, bunch of hops from clickbak and CPA but still no conversions.
starting to get the hang of scrapebox and market samurai. but as i learn more, seems new questions keep popping up
lets say my blog is about 'widgets' and i want to target the phrase 'widget a versus widget b'. do you make backlinks to your sitepage that is already being returned, low in the serps, for this search? do you use this search as anchortext linking to your homepage? do you try to get any link you can from a site already ranking for this term?
i get the concept of link building in general, and am already starting to see the results it makes, but im very lost on the concept of "targeting a keyword" once you find one to go after.