Hi all I'm running a PR3 forum with 600-700 users online daily ( Motorsports Forum ). That forum running SMF . Indexed well in Google SE (19,500 records ) but suck bigtime in Yahoo SE ( 1800 )...well my friend forum using IPB Trial is much better in SE indexing. I'm using only Adsense as income and the technique used are : - 1 leaderboard below the nav - blended 2 leaderboards after the 1st topic After tracking for 6 months, the outcome was not satisfying. Low clicks and too much impressions..hence low CTR. Frustated with the result, I came up with an idea. To run WordPress blog. Using HTACCESS I've changed the domain start page and point to my blog system. Since I'm running motorsports & car modifications forum, I have access to a lot of pictures and contents. What I did was, start filling my blog with images and some description about the images. I'm using image next to medium rectangle ad, and running 1 wide skycrapper, and 1 728x15 text link ( put underneath the main navigation ) After 2 days running, my adsense CTR dramatically increase and 80% my revenue was from the Blog....... And WordPress SEO feature does help a lot if indexing. Here's my sample ad Blue Theme Black and yellow theme I'm using color theme for the adsense. If the featured car theme is green, I'll use green.On the sample above, I use simple HTML table to align them ( not too close on each other otherwise violating Adsense TOS ) Just to share my experience.
Good for you! Forums are not very profitable yet blog-type sites are much more! Good for you to switch. I am thinking to do something similar with a community I have, the damn forum only costs me money!
A FORUM..... ~ eat bandwidth ~ killing the apache ~ eat resource ( top -d1 on 4am and suddenly load average increased to 10 ) ~ lots more headache... But it is fun to run a forum with loyal subscribers ..nothing can't beat that.
Hey - great to hear of your success! I'm sorta anti-local cars, but it's nice to know there's a thriving community around Proton autos - good work! One other thing - not to dampen your spirits or anything - I had pretty good initial success with some of my blogs, but after a while, the click-through-rates went down, and the earnings-per-click also went down. Could be a combination of factors, maybe due to SmartPricing and ad-blindness. It's always nice to have new visitors to your sites, coz I think the loyal ones stop clicking after a while. Hope yours continue the upward trend.
I'm driving Bimmer...but running Proton forum..... Well there's another way to increase revenue 1. run a classified site ( photopost USD199 is nice example ) 2. run a web service site, like free guestbook, counter, online user...easily done using PHP but the running cost will be high..but this will improve PR and expensive ad will be displayed 3. run a dating site like PlentyOfFish.com 4. run a directory engine to improve PR / Alexa 5. run a forum....you source of traffic to other sites 6. write a blog....
Latest addition My permalink goes to default wordpress content layout..with no sidebar...and since my theme is listing resized pictures in vertical order, I use a table layout with 3 columns...column 1 for filling up pictures, column 2 for separator and the final column with valign=middle, I put 2 wide skycraper So In a content page I'll display 1 medium rectangle,2 skycraper..and one text link ..sample
I tried the same thing on my site, CTR quadruple almost instantly, but to be safe, I emailed google and asked them to review my site to make sure its not violating their terms, unfortunately they came back saying its not within their guidelines, the images are misleading and are drawing undue attention to the ads. They said I can continue doing that, BUT i have to have a visible border around the ad so its not easily confused. Well.. I added a faint border (its visible), google approved, but CTR went down by 1/3 so heres a summary: Original CTR: 1.x % With images: 4.x % with images and border: 3.x% just to be safe, i think you should contact google and ask if what youre doing is legal.
tdotn ----- thanks, I'm using table with a seperator column ( 10px )......is that now enough ? I'll mail the google guys anyway
I dont think a column is a good enough separator, you need a visible line... anyway, let us know what they say
>> chachacallis Thanks... >> tdotn Adsense still not replying my query after 6 hours. Well I follow your advise, to put a visible line between the ad.