davidof - 10:24 pm on Nov 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

> What kind of traffic does not click
> In my experience, forums and how-to sites don't do that well.

Logically this makes sense. Forums have a lot of traffic but often generated by a small band of contributors who monitor the site constantly.

Or so I always thought. I did some SEO on a friend's hiking forum. Making sure that a lot of links were not visible to bots, making thread URL's use the title keywords etc. I also helped him a bit with AdSense positioning.

Last month he contacted me saying he had $1000s waiting from Google that had not been paid. I thought he was confused and said he probbly hadn't reached the $100 threshold but I took a look at his Google account. Well he was getting around a million ad views per month with just under a 1% CTR and was earning around $800-1000/month. This is on a forum he barely touches and doesn't really know how it works. The threads are pretty well referenced in the search engines and I suspect that people come there and a good percentage click out via the Ads which seem well targetted for gear and such like.

Anyway he pays his hosting charges and turns a handsome profit.