Can you help? I get 13 USD/day with over 10k uv and 20k prints per day. Top Alexa 50k

Hello my friends,

I founded a forum community that I cherish and love. Besides putting my heart onto managing this community since several years in a row, it became an authority site with daily contributions of quality content by users. Nothing in the site is forged or fake, just natural traffic and quality.

More than half of our visitors arrive from search engines and the other half referred by other sites that like what we do and often refer back to us for more details.

So, everyday we welcome thousands of visitors and making money is not a priority but my experience with Adsense is frankly disappointing. On a good day we get 13 USD while I see so many others talking about 20 USD/day.


I tried my best to use Adsense according to the regulation. Placed two adsense units on header and footer of each page to prevent saturation, created two separate channels to track the performance of each ad unit.

The colors blend nicely with the theme, a mix of text/images are set as default. I've removed bad quality publicity on the past through the ad filter and still get an impressing low number of clicks, less than 50 per day that are very badly paid.


Look in my signature and you find my website. If you have any good tips, I'd be grateful and even be available to help in the future with whatever means at my reach (hosting, promotion, etc).

Thanks!

 

Hello. Your website is very nice. However, sometimes nice websites do poorly with adsense because they are not optimized for ads, instead they are optimized for beauty.

Here are my suggestions.
1.) Try changing your ads from images to text and see if that makes a difference for you.
2.) My experience has been that the more links you give someone on a webpage to click, the lower your chances of one of them being an ad. Think about it.
3.) Inside the actual post, get rid of the banner at the bottom of the post. Change that to a text block (300 or 336) and put it right at the beginning of the post, not the end.
4.) You have a 728 banner at the very bottom of the page, nobody is ever going to see it. All your ads should be "above the fold" as much as possible.

I think you might see some difference if you make these changes.

On a sidenote, forums are one of the hardest types of websites to make adsense money on. You have the added complication of having a website for techies as well. In my experience, tech people do not click ads much.

I don't want to discourage you though, you have a great website, maybe it's time to think about selling a product on it for extra revenue, or selling ad space directly to other webmasters.

Tom

 

I agree with tom and particularly his side note.

I've pretty much given up on any kind of ads or anything that only earns a few cents or less and started creating my own utilities/apps that I sell for $2-$10.

It's far more profitable and better for your own motivation when you see dollars per action instead of a few cents.

I normally look around the download sites (download.com, brothersoft etc) and see what's popular and just create something similar or go with a anything common.

Good sellers are Youtube to MP3 type apps and even better adult video downloaders but you wouldn't want that on the site in question.

I would definitely come up with an idea and make a simple but useful utility and sell it for 4.95 or so.

If you had an idea to collect donations, DON'T. Regarding giving to others on the net, people just don't no matter how much of a help your content is.

 

I wanted to add another perspective, if you wanted to see more money from you site, you could monetize it differently. #

Ofcourse it is a good community so you dont want to mess it up. The best way to monetize would be Memberships. If you are capturing their emails offer them memberships for a very low price but make sure their is a monthly payment - nothing beats Residual Income.

 

Thank you for the good comments and hind sight. Indeed making money was never a priority albeit the funds would be really nice to help improve our site and (hopefully) one day become capable of replacing a full time job. I guess we all dream about that kind of living every now and then.

Take care!

 

Let us know what changes you make and the results of your efforts.

Tom

 

Ok, here is an update.

Yesterday I experimented with 3 ad units per page, all with image/text ads enabled.

On the adsense panel I unblocked all the available network and campaigns that had been blocked in the past

I create a separate advertising channel and code for each ad unit present on the page.

As result it provided 24 USD on a Saturday which was an excellent outcome albeit I can't yet say if this is a constant or just an exception.


Today I continued experimenting, added a google search bar to the top of the pages and tried my best to make it integrated with the site.

I've read around this forum that the search bar has helped to raise the CTR and so I will be trying it out for a while. Last time I used this option was a long and was disappointed. However this time the search bar is directly integrated into the page and looks much nicer.

 

Yes, I do the same thing by creating a channel for each ad, its the only way to know what is working. Sounds like you are on the right path.

 

New update:
- Added google plus vote next to the logo
- Using the newsletter, I asked members to press the +1
- Blocked all advertising coming from http://google.com to avoid "Get Chrome" type of publicities


So, I got 24 USD yesterday with close to 100 clicks across the whole day.

I note that the google search bar is being used (close to 200 times yesterday) but has yield no clicks on publicity. Still, I will leave it as an option.


What about you guys? Any tips/experience you want to share?

Thanks!

 

How was average since last Sat = $24 and Yesterday = $24?
Despite the traffic its a bit weird to see so less new contents added to the site.
Also if for me I would remove the banner at the footer and add a large rectangle after the first post.
I would also center the top banner and add an adsense link ads after the navigation and search bar

 

Consult a google expert and they would advise you in generating more cash, many can be found on DP!

 

The average has been 18 USD a day, not bad when compared to past use.

The front page gives relevance to recent activity from members, this is what really motivates content to surface in the first place. Unlike other forum sites, I don't like when you need to specifically visit a forum section or click a button to find new posts. I hope this answers your comment.

Could be a good experiment, there are days when the footer is showing more revenue than the header so I will leave it for now. Might indeed try out the rectangle after the first post to see if it can bring different types of ads to that position.

I've done it once but doesn't look good when it is centered. And adsense links after navigation will look dodgy. On this case they can either opt by our site or go elsewhere, therefore usability matters to increase user retention.

Good tip with the links after the search bar, will try it out and see how it goes.

 

Actually, I doubt this would work out. I prefer to share my thoughts/experiences in public and invite more people to do the same.

Hiring a google "expert" doesn't really inspire me much trust.

 

Well, as was mentionned you accumulate two bad points: forum and for technical people.
So that means you earn way less than if you had a website for non technical people.
But still it's ok you can get some money.

First what you could do is try to display ads ONLY for unregistered members. On one hand you'll have less page impressions with ads, but your ctr will increase because it is sure that active members don't click as much as loggued out visitors. So in the end I think the difference in earnings will be minimal, but the added benefit is that you can provide an additional benefit for your members, to browse the site without ads.

Then if you can get accepted by buysellads.com you could try sell direct ad space on your site, because it has many impressions, so that will attract advertizers browsing the buysellads marketplace. If you can't get accepted in buysellads, then you could also sell the ad space yourself, but it is more work and you don't have the benefit of their marketplace.

As for ad placement, I won't suggest you anything because you're experimenting anyway and that's what you should do, analyse the datas and improve, test for a week, then change again if needed, etc. Make sure to write down your changes so you can analyse usefully the datas and don't get lost with time passing by.

Good luck with it, first try to display adsense only for visitors and try for a few days then analyse your results, maybe you'll find it is ok. more happy members could mean also even more active members, so more pages for more visitors which in turn with good ad placement will make more money so that you can improve your site even more.

 

Well, for me these are two good points as any other forum would normally be dead and gone by now instead of flourishing every year. Given my (modest) conditions to keep up a site, one cannot expect to compete against companies with funds or well established sites. Just my evaluation..

Already done before, thanks for the tip in either case.

I already got accepted and tried them out some years ago. The result was frankly disappointing and their commissions quite high. I did sold directly advertising space, however it simply does not give back profit and last only one or two months.

Good one!

Yes, I fully agree with your words. In the end, what really matters is a happy and motivated community.

Take care.

 

PM me...heck I will PM you and I will contact you on your site. You want to make
a killing with GA? I could probably help you increase to about $50 $100 a day
possibly even more. We can run some tests and see how it goes.

 

4651 users are online (in the past 15 minutes)

Together we would KILL ADSENSE!!! Froget 50 to 100 a day...you are talking possilby 500 to 1500
a day on adsense....

 

He doesn't need you. You bring nothing to the table except for a dream...

 

Community web sites are funny... They carry a lot of repeat traffic which is great but these people eventually (sooner rather than later) become blind to your ads. So one thing you notice is every time you change the ad placement your revenue will increase then taper off until you are depressed again. You need to constantly change your ad placement over a period of time to keep things fresh.

Like James pointed out... the tech niche sucks. In fact, I'm well aware of what an ad looks like but I'm so stubborn I will type the URL of a web site in to the browser before clicking on an ad. I do the same with affiliate sites. Why? I don't know...but I do and I'm sure others do as well if they are familiar with what they are.

 

Everyone NetStar is what we call a HATER I'm ballin right now so we'll get to that later...

Never said that he needed me. Hmm and imagine where the world would be without
dreams? Take the 2012 Olympics...US 104 Medals...104 dreams!

I offer a dream that can become reality!