Alright, so here's the plan.. I'm about to start working on some forums. The forums will be dedicated to money and have sections such as Personal Finances, Investing, Debt Consolidation & Refinancing, etc.. I know this is a lucrative market, seeing how that's what my day job consists of (Debt Consolidation and Home Mortgage Refinancing). So far I've got a great group of outsources lined up that i've used on other projects to do about 2,000 or so posts to get things looking active. I've also got someone who I'm going to pay to spend 10-20 hours a week posting on similar forums with a link to my website in his signatures. Now, on to my main question, hopefully those of you with forum and adsense experience can tell me if this is a reasonable start. Week1 - $0/day Week2 - $1/day Week3 - $3/day Week4 - $5/day Week6 - $10/day Week8 - $20/day Is that a good projection for the first months of an aspiring 'money forum'? I'd sure love any comments and input on this.
I think it takes longer to get your forum making that kind of money dude. First off who are you hoping will be clicking your ads? The people that come through links in forum sigs? You wont get a dollar a day if thats the case. You need to seo your forum, get loads of backlinks, get loads of pages listed in search engines, Get out the sandbox(least nine months), build a community, give them a reason to actually use the forum and come back. Then mess around with adsense placements/affiliate placements channel tracking. After all that you might start making some money. You have got the right idea though to get the forum looking active and encourage most people to sign up. But you need to think traffic source. You might want to get advice on seo on forums. What forum software are you planning to use?
Thanks for the reply Huntz.. I didn't mention SEO because I thought it was assumed for all websites that SEO is a must. I'll be running vbulletin along with VBSEO mod. Also, i've got about 15 pr2-pr5 websites and blogs in the same industry ready to trade links once i get the forums up, so that should be a very basic start for the first few weeks. I've also got some writers ready to pump out articles daily for an articles section to help with some SE hits.
Now your talking. And what domain are you going to use? A new one which will start in the sandbox on an older one?
Its hard to get a good CTR on forums... good paying keywords isnt enough.. If my forum was to get me a 10% ctr id be the happiest man on earth right now
I'll be using a new one unfortunately Depends on what you consider a good CTR.. as long as I can get about 0.7%(which ive done on some forums I used to run) or so I'll be happy.. with keywords that should (and from what ive seen on my blog) get about $1-$3/click I think a 0.7%-1% CTR would satisfy me.
It took me over nine months to get out the sandbox to start seeing the low end of the results im expecting. Mind you i never had a budget like you have for posts/articles. Good luck.
I run a forum in the "money" cath but its on my native language. The forum is 2 years and im earning on average $2.5 each day. My CTR is around 0.1 -0.02. Im now trying new placements and hopefully i can manage to get higher CTR. (800-1000 visitors a day) PM me asap if you can make this happend!
Staale.. PM me a link to your forums, I'm pretty experienced with adsense tweaking on forums, i'm sure I can help you out some.
May I ask how you determined getting out of the sandbox after 9 months? Was there a big spike in traffic, getting found for targeted keywords?
I knew i was out the sandbox because i jumped into 1st/2nd/3rd places for all the terms i was targeting. I also had a big traffic spike.