I know this topic has been brought up, I just have not found the solution I am looking for. I currently run a forum for a niche consumer electronic, which seems to have a dedicated following. I average about 2,000 uniques daily, with about 10,000 pageviews. Running adsense and chitika combined yeilds me about $10 a day, with a CTR of about 0.4. Sad, I know. Does anyone have any recommendations for a better program for forums? And those that do have forums, whats your secret?
Adsense is probably the best if you don't get much CTR rates as you can also earn CPM from them and you can place the ads below the fold if you wanted to whereas with other CPM services you normally have to have the ads above the fold. Have you tried YPN?
I have a large forum as well. It's for a popular classic rock group. With over 2,500 members and many thousands of page views a day.... The only thing I have ever been able to get these people to buy was eBay feeds from CJ and cd's from Amazon. My conversion rate is just horrible. I hope you have better luck then me.
Sell advertisement on it. Such as banners. A popular one I go to has a script in Vbulletin where a banner refreshes every 30 seconds up top...
Should I email companies directly? Or use a banner/affilaite network? What do you think I should ask for in terms of payment for top banners?
Where can I find these affialite banners? Is there a place like text-link-ads.com where I can directly sell space? Or should I contact companies directly?
AuctionAds is good for niche forums. Searches ebay and shows auctions relevant to the keywords you specify. If clicks the ad and wins the auction, you get a % of the money. It was worked well on my forums.
Adsense is the easiest but you wont really make loads of cash with it on your forum. A friend of mine who runs a famous BMW forum makes money from advertisers. He actually actively look out for huge companies OFFLINE and ONLINE ones to advertise on his forum. According to him, he makes more this way then using adsense
Create a banner and put it where you want to sell. In the banner, put the text - Banner space for sale and get them to contact you. You should be getting emails in no time. You can sell banners in the top, middle and bottom section.
You may want to consider building a content section in addition to your forum. I've done that for my diet forum and it has worked out pretty good for me. I have CJ ads on my site but I think I am going to get rid of them. None of them are converting and right now they are just a waste of clicks. btw - is it against Google's TOS to to state your earnings and click-thru rate?