Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have a big forum with about 12.000 members, more than 500.000 postings and a good income with AdSense for many years now.
Traffic is about 90% coming from Google, and CTR is between 3-5%.
AdSense-Ads are not shown when members are logged in, I think this is very important.
Lately I thought of sending out a newsletter to all members with the most important discussions going on in the forums (never done that before), because many members haven't been active for years. With declining earnings in the last months I thought it would be good a idea to send out such newsletters once a month or so.
1st question is: should I do it? :)
2n question: should I send it via the private-message function of the forum? In this case members wouldn't see the ads, because they would have to login to read the newsletter. Or should I send it out as an email message? Then users wouldn't have to login, they would see the ads and maybe click on them.
What do you think? Any experiences with newsletters for making more earnings with Adsense?
The only thing I'm afraid of is: to much "low quality traffic" and Smartpricing! Because I think the highest form of traffic quality is when users come from Google Search - but newsletters?
Email is the usual method, and you would send actual news about how the forum or site is getting on rather than sending discussions (apologies if I've misread).
Once a month would be too much for me - I tend to block forums that send me info that frequently. Twice a year would work for me.
I'd see it more as community building rather than adsense generating, and would orientate my aim to achieve that. Hope for knock on benefits maybe.
With forum sites, I think some members post for a short time and never return. Some members simply forget about the site, but may be pleasantly reminded once they receive an email update.
Either way, I wouldn't consider direct traffic (i.e. email link pointing to your forums) as low-quality.
If your forum members have asked to subscribe and then actively confirmed the subscription (some call that double opt-in, others don't), that takes care of a lot of the poor quality traffic concern.
You also want to be regular. If you haven't sent something to subscribers in a number of months, a lot of people won't remember asking for a subscription and will consider it SPAM.
But you also need to make sure you have something useful to offer in the newsletter. If it smells like you're just sending something out to try and get a response, you'll lose some members/subscribers each time.
I've noticed that if my EPC is X for a few days and then I send out a newsletter, the EPC jumps up to 1.5X or more. Don't know why - but it happens.
FarmBoy
If you receive traffic from a newsletter, make sure not to put ads on the landing page. Some people get in hot water for that as Google may interpret it as traffic generated from spam.
I send nearly each week to 3700 German and 3000 English my newsletter.
There are aound 20 Links in a newsletter to new pages or pages mentioned special in the head of the newsletter.
Why should this pages have no ads?
I am not sure how this affects my AS earnings though
My sites have in average 5000 visits a day.
When I sent out on Sunday 6700 newsletter, the result could be about 10% more on this Sunday.
I write "could" because the effect is to small to can tell an exact number.
