I heard forums dont make as much from adsense and blogs can make you tons of extra cash, can someone explain this in detials?
Forums generally have lower CTR than blogs. At the end of the day though it all comes down to traffic.
Yes you can make good money out of forums. Not just through adsense. If you want to position yourself as expert in some kind of field forums are great.
The real answer to the question is it depends. When something big is happening, blogs get hot. When the US was bombing the crap out of Iraq, blogs by young Iraqis were big. The blogger becomes our eyes on the ground -- just like a journalist might. By contrast, scuba divers tend to congregate around forums instead of blogs -- especially when bad things happen. It may be that diving is an intense, individual experience and the best way to work out what has happened to you is with a community of divers. Since all people respond differently, a diversity of opinion is needed.
I tend to lean more towards Blogs for a number of reasons. The online world has marketed Blogging as the best new thing for surfing more than forums which have brought traffic from millions of reader’s everyday. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that Forums are the best information tool available for free online and they too attract lots of traffic but only if you do things right. A forurm can be a total failure when you simply can’t get people to post – ok you can go out and pay someone to create posts like http://www.communityboost.com/. With Blogs you put exactly the information and links you want on your pages but with a Forum you need to rely on the users which gives opportunity for your competition to add their links in their posts which can be sometimes a nightmare to track – you can turn off URL’s but for me I hate these type of Forums. Although you can edit posts and links created by others you need to be extremely careful not to piss off the users or you may see a drop in posts and traffic. I know of one Forum that lost over 90% of its users because the owner gave Moderation duties to a number of teenage friends and didn’t have the time to keep an eye on things. Over a 3 month period things got really ugly with insults being passed from the Mods who then proceeded to edit random posts for no apparent reason. It ended up that one of the long time users of this forum started his own which won all the original users and 2 years later are still going strong. Another important factor is users of forums will not click out of the Forum as much as someone who is reading a Blog because they are in the Forum to gather help or to have conversation with other users. I know when I am browsing forums like DP I stay there until I have read as much as I can, which takes more than 2 hours. The only time I really use a link is when someone posts it and if I do visit the posted url I open it in another browser window. For example, the majority of people reading this post are probably going to click elsewhere within DP to read more rather than click out of the site altogether, unless they are totally pissed off with this information and close their browser in disgust. For Blogs, if I haven’t seen the Blog before I’ll read some of the posts and if I like it I’ll pop it into my favorites and navigate out. If I visit a Blog in a daily basis such as the Google Adsense Blog I’ll only read the current post and then leave the site, either by using a link on a post or using an advert. My approximate time for reading one Blog is 5 minutes before I move on. I am glad I have caught your post as I am too trying to decide if I should build a forum, I already did but decided to remove it after a week – I’m thinking its going take up lots of my valuable time to setup and maintain. Hopefully someone can prove my information to be wrong and possible persuade me to build one.
No, because repeat visitors get used to your Adsense ads and stop noticing them after a while. I've done both, as most people have, and I'm sure they'll agree that blogs just generally do better.
my vote goes for blogs as well. Get to know http://www.technorati.com/ and if you're using Wordpress, google 'technorati plugin' ... extremely helpful
Its a hard call but i would go for forums are better because of the easyness that a large number of people can participate, also when a thread is replied to it usually jumps to the top of the New Posts list, whether a blog usually is a hard job to find which story has been responded to last. But as someone stated why not both, exactly Use as much as you can.
I think it's mainly because of where the ads are located. On forums they are usually not anywhere where it would keep the visitors from reading thru posts. If we found new ways to integrate ads and be more visible, maybe this would change. haha there are many ... some ... a few
http://www.communityboost.com/ ROFL!!!!! That's hilarious! Not only is it hilarious that they have a service. It's even more hilarious that all the popular forums i visit INCLUDING THIS FORUM! Have all used communityBoost's services. HAHahahahA! Anyway, Blogs are good but remember they are sometimes useless information. I've seen many blogs, where topics are unrelated and uninformative. Usually people make blogs, without real knowledge or ideas about anything, they just exagerate and lengthen a 1 sentence idea to 5 paragraphs for no reason. While posts are just there for ideas and information and not useless. (atleast not always). However, getting started is hard part. Usually it should be started by a group of people who are friends and made the site together. Trying to start a forum on your own is hard, unless you get lots of traffic. Blogs are unprofessional, there is NO such thing as a professional blog, a professional blog is called an article. I believe articles are 10x better. Blogs are usually for things people experience, or questions or problems they have. Almost like a really long forum post, while articles are for information, teaching, and educational, and are usually knowledgable authors.
This forums is ad revenue because there are less posibilities of getting banned from google adsense for many equal ip clicks ... :-o
In our experience, blogs definitely yield a higher CTR. Forums are fine for CPM advertising but even then it's an uphill battle. A forum can be a good feeder to other areas of your site (articles, blogs etc) where CPC or affiliate programs are more effective.
If you are posting about some common thing in your blog for example your daily life or something in your mind , even you have many visitors you gain little money because you ads price is low , probably you will get some ads related to blog . This is because your key word density is not high enough to make Google show high price ads . But if your talking about some of your profession experience as the topic in your blog , you will cache more people just because they want to read more from a expert therefore your blog will receive more high value ads and of course the visitor will have more chance to click your ads because they want to know more. for example my web site , I use both blog and web site for the same topic .But my blog brings me higher PPC than web site . for forum is the same , if your forum is focus on certain topic for example MAC , people who visit this forum will be interesting about the ads shown on the forum . but if this forum is talking about wide rage about computer related , the ads will get pretty low PPC.