Been roaming though this forum for a while. I run a forum specific to my industry. It will never draw millions of visitors. I draw 3200 unique vistors and 6500 visits per month. I have banner advertisers from my industry and really dont want adsense conflicting with them. I'm looking for something else to generate some revenue. I guess more traffic from my industry would bring potential advertisers in, but not sure how to find more. I send out 1500 newsletters 2 times monthly, partly to current forum members. Feel free to ask me more info. Really like this forum u have. Thanks www.thelaundryforum.com
Maybe you can add paid member subscription, so they will get some benefits. Sell goods in your forum will be good to generate some money. You can also do link sales if your PR is good.
if your amount of pageviews and unique visitors are increasing then you could consider asking more per add from your banner advertiser.
I actually decreased my price a couple months ago to increase sales, and that worked. Really can't raise them for a while now, economy hit my industry pretty hard. Most have been with me since the beginning. Need that something I could sell, or a way to find more from my indusrty that I havent found yet.
your best chance is increasing traffic, that usually help earn more. as per marketing newsletter is a great way. other then that make a list of forums, social sites...etc in your industry. then work on a routine. marketing is always a trial and error process. keep the ones that works, discard the ones that doesn't perform.
You can actually use some affiliate program but to earn money money, you gotta spend more time on creating more information post and keep your forum more active before you can earn more money
my advice is to stay far from those two blogs, as you won't learn anything from them but just waste your time
Making more definitely starts with traffic. Maybe you could get some auto-followup messages going out each time threads get a new response similar to DP. Also, get current members posting more, a forum that receives very little traffic is usually very boring unless there is a steady stream of new users and messages.