My website icanspeel.com has been up since April, and I finally started to get good steady traffic, and my forum is up to 1,500 members. I'm making about 3 dollars a day, maybe a little more lately, but I can't help but feel that there is a lot of potential being wasted here. The majority of our traffic goes to our board, so I'd like the focus to be on what I could change around to hopefully get more ad clicks, but feel free to give me advice on any facet of the site. Thanks in advance.
I think you are in the right place for this question. I went to your site, which showed AdSense ads for a couple of seconds, and then redirected to another page, which has NO AdSense ads. Right while I was reading the ads! This is definitely a problem. I think you may want to lose the "splash" page, and just put your AdSense ads on your main page. That way, people will HAVE TIME to consider clicking on them. Not to mention the fact that your splash page could be considered a "doorway page", which is highly frowned upon by Google.
Happened to me, too...popped over to a "Sponsor" page and then had an option to "Skip this ad" When you skip the ad it goes back to the original site. Seems almost like a pop-up to me. I'd stay away from that because I always bleep on out of sites that put up obtrusive advertising like that.
The full page ads were a way of getting consistent revenue when our traffic wasn't clicking, but they really serve me no use now, since they pay less per day than most of my clicks, so I'll axe those. That aside, can you give me critique/advice on the layout? Particularly on the forum.
On the main page I'd consider a smaller logobanner across the top. I have very high resolution and large monitor so I was able to see the content below, but smaller resolution/monitors may just see the logo and an ad. If I were to see that, I would probably back out of the site because it conveys the impression that the site is mainly for showing ads, ie little to no content above the fold.