Hi all, I've just started to "monetize" my forum site (for want of a better verb!) - and it's not going as well as I thought it would. My traffic is good... I probably get about 300 unique visitors per day; my alexa ranking is circa 450 000; but the cash coming in via adsense is not very good... Any ideas how I can make the adsense on my forum work better? Any tips gratefully received. Forum is at www.fitbaw365.com/smf
I have a few tips. If you're serious, use vBulletin. It is worth the investment. Allow guest viewing. How are you planning to acquire members if they don't know what your forum is about? Better positioning of the link-ads, perhaps next to the navigation or replacing "Fitbaw's came hame..."? If you're staying with SMF, remove unnecessary attention grabbing buttons in the footer. Center your bottom unit. All in all, forums get very low clickthrough rates, but I hope at least that my tips are going to help you.
Thanks for your feedback. I'm not "serious" serious about starting a business - for this forum, I am happy with SMF and comfortable in using the templates etc. I'll keep vBulletin in mind though... My logic to not having guest viewing is this: I found that people were surfing in, seeing a VERY quiet forum (only 4 weeks old) and then leaving. There is a BIG chance they won't return. If you make people sign in before they can see ANYTHING, then you have their email address so you can at least mail them from time to time and maybe get a repeat visit(s). Good tips r.e. buttons and centering etc. I'll do all that! Cheers!
Well, forums always have empty beginnings. People might never come back to empty forums, but people like me immediately close locked forums and never come back either. What makes them want to register, if not for content? If you want some placement inspiration, you can see Meizu my site. I've made it so after 4 topics read, a large ad comes up for guests.
It can be done on smf. My forum (in the sig) pulls in $25-30 per month from adsense (not my top earning site by a long way ATM), with a similar traffic level to you, but CTR is typically low on forums, around 0.25% for mine, but it's not too tightly targetted, so maybe you can do better. As has already been said, you need to open your site up to the world.
I think its a must that you allow people to view the forum before they register because a lot of people surf the forum before they might take any interest.
I own my own forum and after a lot of time I finally figured out how important is VB. It was because I was serious with it and now slowly it is becoming little bit active, however it is just a begining. As you say 300 uniques a day? it is actually very good, but I am shocked how? You have disallowed guests to view inside, so SE bots cant index inside pages. The biggest suggestion that I can give is allow guests to browse inside or you will lose a lot of guests that can become members. I've dont this before and it doesnt work out well. Not at all with SMF because SEs need to index your website and that gets you more traffic. Also change it to /forums rather /smf because "Forums" keyword in the url helps more than keyword "smf" And yeah, the link to home is http:// only and not www. So, you are causing damage there. Rest can be done if you get VB... however if you are serious only then because $80 or $160 is a lot if not serious. I cant give any other suggestion as I cant browse inside. Good Luck with it!
Hi I am now not ready to be the person who instruct anybody I am nowbie here, and still have to learn a lot more by viewing and reading all your comment and instructions. ^_^ anyway, be support with my willpower, be improve yourself. good luck