I am in the website/forum business for 5 Years now and an adsense publisher since 2005 as well. Currently I run 5 Forums with one generating 95% of my income. Currently my earnings are in the low 4 digits generated by around 200k unique visitors/month. The secret is to be patient, build content and traffic and NEVER stop optimizing your ADs and TRACK YOUR RESULTS! My future plan is that I earn a second income (I am a pediatrician which is my main job in German) with Adsense by the end of the year. One step in this direction was getting an exclusive contract with the biggest direct advertising marketer in Germany for health channels starting this week. This should greatly increase the value of my AD Inventory Good luck to all of you who still struggle with low income. I once was one of you and was impressed by the big numbers. Keep in mind that it IS possible. Be patient and don't do anything stupid that could jeopardize your Adsense Account! For those of you who are interested to follow my traffic and earning stats, I am running a "vBSEO" case study for my main forum. You can follow my stats here: http://www.vbseo.com/f30/patientenfragen-net-vbseo-case-study-15198 The stats date back to 2007, are updated monthly and are visually displayed in nice graphs so maybe it's worth a look May the money be with you! Always StarBuG
It is hard to start a forum, once you reached critical mass it's just sit back and watch the content and traffic grow.
Took my main forum about 3 years to reach critical mass. That was pure organic growth though. You can speed that up a lot if you take money into your hands and advertise your forum over 6 Month or so aggressively with Adwords However at first it was only a hobby for me and only recently became more and more of a business. One other thing I noticed is that your field of operations and the focus of your work changes the more your website/business growth. I started with learning the technical things that came with running a forum as well as spend time to create content, answer questions and work on traffic. Now I spend my time on optimizing ads, work on the forum performance and I also spend time marketing my forum and my ad inventory. StarBuG
top respect to you my friend. I also run a forum and for those thinking a forum is easy money. Forget it! It takes blood, sweat and tears, you fight an endless battle against spam (if anyone wants any free advice on free anti spam forum tools please PM me). And it also takes around 3,000 post before your forum really kicks off. The CTR is not good but on the good days when you get a £1.46 click then it's worth it. As the man indirectly says don't ever give up, don't ever give in, not ever, in the dark days of the night DO NOT EVER GIVE UP ON ADSENSE. 4th July - I'm not American but that's when I launch. Tag me? And keep posted - Dickie Boy has Spoken.
So far I turned down lots of direct marketers that wanted an exclusive contract with me. This one however is the only one I now with a health channel that has that kind of reach. I am a small fish in their net however just phoned with them and even though they have a lot of forums in their network generating over 40.000.000 impressions none of the forums even by far reaches my CTR nor my earnings in respect to the number of Impressions. That makes me somewhat proud
I have to say your posts are quality reads and some of the best advice that i have read for along time.Thanks and + rep added
I did that in my first post. Simply click the 2nd link it shows a detailed growth statistic Thank you. I learned so much from DP Members and I am always for giving something back in return.
A very nice discussion...thanks for the breakdown. Probably outta lose 4 outta 5 of the forums, free up 80% of your time while only hurting income a small amount!
Wow an inspirational post..forums are good because other people keep creating new content so you dont have to.. Just curious do you have/allow advertising on your site? You could also generate some money for yourself my selling links from your site to other sites..
I allow users advertising as long as it is usefull for the thread and my users. Blunt advertising is strictly forbidden and will be removed quickly. Did that, got punished by google with a toolbar PR of 0 However the internal google PR is way above that cause 93% of my weekly increasing traffic comes from google 150USD for link advertising is not worth the risk of getting kicked from the google se index
addsence takes your 80% juice, but i heard many ppl those who are only running on addsence only, but if you've that much resource you can utilize it some where also. it will generate you 100% juice of it.