Am I leaving money on the table?

Hi guys,

I run an online forum where people talk about anything from politics to Entertainment. It was something that I started just for fun but now It kind of became a giant. I get around 200k uniques and about 1.5-2 million impressions DAILY.(60% of that traffic comes from USA, UK and Canada, so it is not some cheap third world country traffic)

Until now I have been monetizing it with adsense only. It pays well and I do make more than a full time income and it pays off cost of my 4 servers and staff of 8 people.

Am I missing something monetizing it with just adsense? how do you think I should start looking for other avenues to increase my income? Do you think I should test affiliate programs like cj and clickbank? It isn't really a targeted traffic to any of the stuff those guys offer.

your input will be appreciated

 

I think the first thing you should do is make sure you are maximizing your adsense income. I just read a book by Joel Comm called Adsense Secrets, 6th edition. You can pick it up on amazon for about 5 bucks. My eyes were opened to whole new ways of converting adsense ads. I would look at this book, especially with a forum and the traffic you have

al

 

If you are getting an RPM of over $10, I wouldn't worry too much about leaving money on the table. If your RPM is much lower than $10, you could consider optimizing ad placements, colors, fonts, number of ad units per page, etc. and you could perhaps create a media kit and try to attract direct advertisers.

 

You could open up other advertisements on the site or something. I co-own a forum and we recently put a side bar up where companies or websites would upload small square banners for a fee and it's doing well.

 

Forums can be hard to monetize. When I managed a popular forum, I made the most from selling direct advertising, but it would be more difficult attracting advertisers with a multi-topic forum.