Hi I am a medical doctor and got involved in the online business about 10 years ago. I first started to use adsense when I started my hiphop music website (which will be closed down at the end of this month). I was able to earn the running costs with Adsense but the hiphop market is not a good paying niche to monetize with adsense. 2006 I started my first german medical forum www.patientenfragen.net (translates to "patient questions"). I was a student and I started the forum as a hobby and to keep me learning. Since then I am working on developing a forum network of medical forums discussing all different kinds of themes of medicine. E.g. I have a parents forum, a diet forum, a diabetes forum, an asthma blog and some more ideas for future use. I often hear that you can't earn much with forums because of the low CTR and I have to DISAGREE! Currently my earnings pay my rent and party life. That is not enough to support my life but it's a very nice earning on the site I have a fulltime job as a doctor in a childrens hospital and my salary takes care of the rest so no worries at this point. Ok but what are your secrets you might ask? First let me show you my adsense earnings improvements I am currently earning less then 1000$ a month and more then 500$ and about 84% of my income is generated by one forum. Not bad for a hobby eh? My secrets are: 1) Always work for your site not for Adsense 2) Always try to improve your Ad placements 3) Use channels to track every single Ad you place on your site to track changes you make 4) Educate your self constantly about new ideas, new strategies and ad placements of other webmasters 5) Blending is the key 6) Be patient Over 2 years now I have adsense on my forum and every 1-2 month I experiment with changes to my adsense placements. Most changes are so insignificant that users never notice them but they sometimes make a difference between a 0.88% CTR to 1.1% CTR wich is solid money for you. I have nearly 200 channels which track my ads all over my forums and I use OpenX as Adserver to deliver Ads to my site. This gives me the capability to introduce changes to banners and let them run in a 50:50 ratio with the old banner. After a few weeks I then can decide which banner works best and kick out the under performer. This helps me to constantly increase my CTR to the best CTR possible on my forums. Today (because I am sick and at home) I worked like 7 hours cleaning up my channels, introducing some small and some bigger changes to my ad placements and I am already seeing improvements in my CTR. Never give up and always be patient. It is your site that counts! StarBuG
No offense but what is the secrete? these are pretty much known facts - blending, be patient, ad placements. The only thing this thread does is prove that forums do make money. Oh yea you forgot another known fact, traffic, without traffic no matter how good your ad placements are, who's gonna click them?
With the limit to the number of channels this is not always possible, though Analytics will help. Unfortunately, I'm still seeing discrepancies in Adsense vs Analytics stats when it comes to earnings. Anyone else seeing that? What is the Standard Deviation of your daily CTR values? For me, 0.22% is in the noise and I wouldn't base any decisions on it (ie, statistically insignificant) but all sites are different. From this I would gather that your actual CTR hasn't really improved but rather the accuracy of the reported CTRs has?
I have around 2100 Unique Visitors per day and 126.000 Page Impressions per month, so my forum is not a high traffic site
You are right, depending on your network this can be a problem but grouping ads that you don't change and track ads you change is always possible About Adsense Analytics tracking: There is a small link on your main Adsense Content page in analytics: Why do these numbers differ from my AdSense account? There you can see the difference between your real Adsense earnings and your analytics tracking My daily CTR varies around 0.10-0.15% but the changes I introduced over the years increased my CTR over 80% so no, it is not statistically insignificant With cleaning up my channels I meant that I introduced a uniform naming for all channels on my site which results in a much cleaner report. This has nothing to do with my CTR improvement. Some changes I made today were: 1) I introduced a leaderboard banner on my forum index when no notice (welcome message) is shown 2) I added 2 large rectangles below my blog list instead of a standard 468x60px banner 3) I changed my 2nd larg rectangle banner that is shown as second post for guests to "Image and text" (only image does not work because there are not that much image campaigns for my niche) 4) I changed the look of the link unit displayed under the forum threads and on forum display under the thread list 5) I started to compare a rounded corner leaderboard with a blended in leaderboard on my leaderboard below navigation location to see which performs better
When it comes to adsense I am the biggest loser, more than a year and still waiting for $100 limit. Now clicks started accelerating but per click gone really down.
Then get feedback on your placement here on DP and other webmaster websites. Start experimenting with your ad locations, your ad blending and such. Never stop working on your site
By the way... who would have guest that my fourth best earning location on my forum is a 200x90 link unit placed next to the posting rules at the bottom of each thread? Would you? @jezzz I don't focus on any keywords I focus my forum on my topic and that is as broad as it gets in medicine. Patients can ask any medical question they might have and medical professionals as well as users try to answer them
yup simple secret is "Never Give Up" i also have a medical student site and working on it for almost 2 yrs ..not much success on adsense but getting decent amount of doctors and mediccal students.. and the best thing is that i get around 5-6 click per months which are worth $10 per clicks..
Thanks for sharing, doc. I especially love your way of working for your site and visitors rather than for Adsense! However my opinion might be different in that blending is not my way of improving ad performance - it constantly brings down my eCPM. I'd rather make the ads prominent and stand out.
I guess the main secret is TIME, give any good website 2 years with good enough content and it should start to repay the hard work but it's having the patience to work those first few years.
Good to know your forum is working great for you and yes you need to be changing the ads layout after some time as forum people (the ones who tend to stick around) become blind to the ads after a while @AdPubster: On adsense reports, the time is usually US time but in Analytics you can change it to be local. If you have changed the time to your own country (which is not US), then this could explain the discrepancies you are seeing.
i really appreciate it.. it's fantastic story.. everyone has different luck.. one thing taught me all apart from what you said.. you use VbSEO which will convert all your dynamic files into static files, so your site is more exposed to google and other search engine bots friendly.. i think that is also the key. besides, some not too much IT people are not easy to spot on the ads and menu.. I have seen one elderly person clicks ads instead of category.. because if your niche and target audience is not computer literate, it's very big chance your ads might get clicked and they even surf that ads for next 5-10 minutes.. I didn't mean to look down, but it's true. especially, when u have a website that teaches how to sites, which tend to get more clicks than tech-geek sites... i saw one lady who shares like who to use basic internet stuff or how to install use in simple english, she's got like 10k UV a day and massive over 100 comments on how to set up a wordpress.. it's not even how to set up manually download/install thing, how to set up with fantasico or anything, it's just how you use wordpress LOL. it depends on luck and of course simplicity.. I have MMO site, but it's not where I would like to make money.. because after I tested for a while, MMO site will not make money because of its cheap payment and too much info.. even though i tried to make it unique.. and never ask someone to join my affiliate programs.. so, well done and thanks for sharing
Thanks DaStartBug for the info. But this is known to everyone and this is not a tricks just general rule of thumb. Keep Going Best of Luck!!!!!
Well only with passion on the topic that you intend to write and manage, that's the only way that you could come up with quality content.