I've recently started posting here a DP but I've lurked for the better part of a year. I run two successful fan forums for American Idol contestants so I've spent a good deal of time reading through the forum related threads here. Most of which I've found have a common theme to them, CTR or the lack there of. A little background on the sites I run. My main site is for a past winner and has 28.5k members and almost 1.4M posts and is currently in the top 850 on Big Boards. We get a modest 5k uniques a day but that has been as high as 40k a day after the finale. I also run a forum for one of this years top 10 contestants and it currently has just shy of 10K members and a little over 237k posts and receives between 800-1000 uniques a day. I've experimented with all kinds of ways to position ads and Google’s Adsense Team has even offered their advice and suggestion on layouts and positioning. I think I've learned a couple of things over the past year and a half so I thought that I could provide some benefit to others that run forums and are frustrated with what they believe may not be good Adsense results. To be honest, I will admit that some degree of the successfulness of these sites is due in part to their subject matter and the fact we leverage the marketing provided by the Idol machine. However, that's only good if you can capture and maintain search engine positioning which constitutes 90% of our new traffic. For the sake of time and sanity I'll only highlight things I've learned, a lot of this is probably rehash for answers in other posts but a few might be new to people. - The most important of which is mentality. If you expect to get results similar to a traditional static content site, you'll be very disappointed and forever frustrated. Once you can accept the fact that something less than 1% is excellent then your on your way to figuring this out. - Blend your ads and experiment with that blending. I have a firm belief on what works for me and when I mess with it, the results are always worse than before. You have to be attentive to the changes your making and don't make too many at any one time. Also give any changes you make at least a week to accumulate results. - Don't be afraid of your members. Members hate ads, good for them, but they aren't footing the bill so unless your just feeling mighty generous, they don't have a say in matters. If you don't want to annoy them, then offer them a way to turn the ads off. Either via donation or post counts or some other method of activity. The bottom line here is, there needs to be some incentive for you to turn the ads off for them, whether that be monetary or otherwise. - Don't be fooled into thinking members are complacent and don't click ads. Of all the things I see on here that's the one I feel is most abused. While it's true members may become ad blind or may simply ignore them, there are still ads that may display they find interesting and worthwhile to them. You can't know the minds of your members. If they complain, put them in a special group because they are the only ones you know for certain, advertising won't work for. Everyone else is fair game. If this bothers you, then remove your ads. As harsh as that sounds, your just wasting your time. - What works best for me may not work the best for someone else, but I find that a well blended leaderboard displayed above or below my navbar, just underneath the header, is the best performer. That's followed by a tower on the frontpage (I run vbAdvanced). The third hot spot is after the first post. I've recently expanded that spot to include a forced image ad as well as a text ad. I find that the forced image ad makes effective use of the CPM ad pool. I know some people say it pisses their members off, as I said earlier, if that bothers you, remove your ads. If you firmly believe your members don't find any ads appealing to them then turn off the text ads for them, but I'd leave the image ads there. That just money your leaving behind. - Use the CPM ads. Identify your high impression areas and make sure to target those with a CPM ad, I force image ads in these spots. - Changing things around. I see a lot of advice given that says to change things around. I think that's only good when your working out where to place things. Once you find something that works, stick with it, don't be lulled by the low periods into thinking it's no longer working. I've made that mistake a time or twelve. So we've got some things we can do to improve our forums production but what if it's still not working out? Well the first thing is you have to have some semblance of traffic. I don't subscribe to the build it first and add ads to it later mentality. If anything set the expectation with members up front there's going to be ads and make that a non-issue from the beginning. Most importantly you need to really understand your market. Simply putting up a forum about the latest console gaming system might draw a large number of members but that's not what sustains ad revenue. You need a steady stream of new traffic and to get that you need to know your audience and what drives them. You've got to invest time into your promotions. Simply adding a gazillion backlinks from unrelated sites is, in my opinion, a complete waste of time. Targeted links from related sites regardless of PR, is in my opinion worth 10 times 10 links from any high PR site. The point is, just building it doesn't mean they will come. I don't work as hard now getting traffic as I did in the beginning because we've established ourselves, but I'm still on the lookout for what's happening and what may be happening and how I can take advantage of it. The new season of Idol will be coming up and I'll be looking at how I can leverage that two years later. Ok.. To not just totally run off at the mouth, the important things are what? Not necessarily in this order. - Mentality (most important) - Targeted Traffic - Ad Blending and Position - Using the CPM ads to maximize your traffic - Research. Know your market Before you simply put up a forum and expect it'll work do some research. You wouldn't open a video store across the street from BlockBuster unless you had something better than they did. Same is true here. You can't expect to enter a niche that currently has a number of major players and expect to take away anything from them, this is not Field of Dreams, building it does not mean you'll be successful, unless you have something tangible to offer that they don't. Be different than the other guy.
Nicely said. I also second that putting a leaderboard under the nav bar works well, as I have tried that before and increased my earnings significantly. Just make sure you don't piss off too many of your members/guests or else they'll leave, which is something you don't want to happen.