Don't overlook simple things in Forum

[creativepart]

I've got a forum that does OK with Adsense. I'm not setting the world on fire, but $500 to $600 a month is better than nothing.

I'm trying, without going to extremes, to get to $1000 a month this year. Making subtle changes here and there.

Like everyone says BLEND IN. If I so much as put a border around the ads--- even though the rest of the forum has borders everywhere -- clicks drop dramatically.

I decided for July, to put a Link Unit at the top of my page, above the logo. Just as a test. Well, it's quickly become my second biggest click producer. I've tried Link Units elsewhere before and they did so so. But this one is consistantly adding $4 a day. When you're at $20 a day and trying to get to $30 a day something that adds 4 bucks is a good thing.

Seems so simple, yet it really worked. As they say keep experimenting. It's easy to say when you do something that works, harder to go along with when your experimenting drops your income.

[caran1]

Recently, when my forum was really busy, my eCPM tanked. Do you show ads to all members or only to visitors who have not logged in?

[gamiziuk]

I've noticed that adding the links unit at the very top also seems to help with ad targeting though the page.

[m0thman]

Personally, I've found link units to be good as well. Almost doubled my income with them. I guess there's a feel good factor in that they user has to actually then click on the ad afterwords, so its not a tricked click due to a disguised ad.

Well done on your success BTW!

[creativepart]

Do you show ads to all members or only to visitors who have not logged in?

I show ads to all, members and guests. Last month as a test, I set up my forum to show ads only to guests and revenue dropped by 60%. I was going to "test" it for a whole month but after 8 days of horrible earnings I went back to showing ads to all.

I know they say members don't click, but I think they do. They may not click much, but they're clicking some.

[Jafo]

I will give it a shot, why not..

[Heartlander]

You should look into using the inline post ad modification.
Your board is obviously busy, and if the members are clicking now- wait till you see what you can earn with that simple tweak.

[Troutnut]

I'm not sure exactly what the inline post ad modification looks like, but I was going to try implementing something similar in my forum--random auto-replies by an "ad-bot" user which contain the ads where the post text would be. I wrote to Google to check about the ToS and they said not to do it.

[jema]

I tried guest only ads for about 12 hours! Income slumped instantly.

[Bates]

Are you using pphpbb? Where would you put the link unit so that it appears at the very top but does not violate the TOS?

[rj87uk]

Hey creativepart,

What type of traffic are we looking at?

500,1000,2000 uniques / day?

RJ

[creativepart]

Hey creativepart,
What type of traffic are we looking at?
500,1000,2000 uniques / day?

I have 6,000 unique visits and 60,000 pageviews a day. The forum has 10,000+ members and about 1400 of those are active enough to visit once a month -- 450 visit once a day. 80% of all visits are returning visits.

I'm running vB -- I just switched from PHPBB after 3 years with it.