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Advertising on your forum
by
14 Jan 2006
I just posted this on my site and thought I would share it here as well. I've decided to write this up for those looking to monetize their forums with adsense. There are a lot of great articles out there but I wanted to share my experience with it on forums specifically. Keep in mind that even though this is geared towards vBulletin that the principals can be applied to any forum software. Much of this is subjective to your personal tastes, this is my experience and what has worked best for me. Your feedback and comments are welcome. SEO Your Forums It is best to first make sure your board is SEO'd, even if it's just basic mod_rewrites for redirects, turn those ugly looking URL's into informative, content rich page titles. A couple of free mods for VB can be found here DC SEO vB URL Rewrite to SEO your forums and vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator for vBulletin 3.6.x, 3.5.x & 3.0.x for a great sitemap generator which will really help deliver your content to search engines. There is also a paid product available for vBulletin called http://www.vbseo.com/ which many people have reported a great experience with. It's very comprehensive and has loads of options and the creators appear to have an excellent knowledge of SEO. It's not cheap but in the long run it can pay itself off over and over again. Deliver different ad schemes to your guests Most forum guests out number registered users by a marginal amount. This is to your advantage and the base of your targeted audience. Many believe that targeting ads towards registered members fall flat because most registered and experienced forum surfers learn to ignore them. With this in mind, removing ads for your forum members creates a more pleasant surfing experience which keeps them coming back to a cleaner looking forum. There are a couple of considerations to this though, one is that removing ads from members can reduce the https://www.google.com/adsense/glossary#E and will result in fewer impressions though it will most likely cause an increase in the https://www.google.com/adsense/glossary#C. This can be a trade off depending on the sort of ad compaign you choose to run. Alternatively, some webmasters choose to serve ads to both by leaving a minimum campaign of ads for members while boosting it up for unregistered users. Look and feel of your ads Making your ads look a part of your forum is important. Ads that stand apart from your site design are much easier to tune out. Ads that share the same background color and font are the most successful, also matching the border color with the backgroud color makes it look less like an ad and more like site content. Ad Placement Google has some great recommendations for forum ad placements here https://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/six-adsense-optimization-tips-for.html?sourceid=ASO&subid=us_en-link-opttips&medium=link To add Adsense to the second post of each thread see here http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/index.php?t=157022 Likewise, you can add your banner code to most templates to taste. The most common are forumdisplay, showthread, navbar (will place ad on the top of everypage) and footer. Adsense Search placement Utilizing googles Adsense Search is another way to increase your revenue. Something I've recently implemented is putting the google search code at the top for guests. Leaving the default board search feature off for guests will promote the use of it and reduce server load. Here is the code for VB to put it at the top of your forum for guests only: In the navbar template find: Code:
<!-- / nav buttons bar --> Code:
<if condition="in_array($bbuserinfo['usergroupid'], array(1, 3))"> <br> <!-- SiteSearch Google --> code here <!-- SiteSearch Google --> </if> Adsense Terms of service It is very important to understand and comply with the https://www.google.com/adsense/policies provided by Adsense. Failure to comply can and most likely will result in the termination of your Adsense account. A quick search for https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-36%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=banned+by+adsense at the time of writing this article renders 492,000 results which is pretty self explanitory. Other major advertising companies With the exception of Fastclick all of the sites below make no mention of NOT placing ads on forums. However, most require that their ads are placed https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=above+the+fold. Contextual advertisers such as YPN and Adsense explicitly say that their text ads cannot be combined on the same pages. Casale http://casalemedia.com/31539.html Budsinc http://www.budsinc.com/content.htm Fastclick http://www.fastclick.com/publishers/agreement.html Burstmedia http://www.burstmedia.com/release/join/eligibility_req.htm YPN https://publisher.yahoo.com/legal/prog_policy.php Chitika https://chitika.com/mm_terms.php?application=true Tribal Fusion http://www.tribalfusion.com/SmartPublishers/contract.html Getting accepted into the majors with a forum site This is not always an easy task, certain advertisers such as YPN and Adsense rarely deny a site and their TOS is fairly forgiving, allowing the publisher to place their ads where ever they want. Getting into one of the other sites listed above is a not nearly as easy. One of the reasons for this is that forum sites have a lot of sporradic impressions that are not easy for the publisher to track or target, especially on a dynamic site. This is one of the reasons so many forum sites get denied or get their accounts terminated. Setup a static and informative home page When a publisher views your site, they are looking for static content related to your site and target audience. Just sending them a link to your forum will mostly likely result in a generic letter of denial. Setting up a portal or a static (html) home page for your site will do wonders. Try to be as informative as possible while keeping in context with what your site is all about. Articles that are listed on the front page can be helpful as well, even if it's just grabbing a post from somewhere on the site and publishing it. Publishing ads on new forums Before a forum site is able to generate revenue it is best that it's populated with both users and posts. Placing ads when starting an unpopulated forum gives the appearance that the site is only there to make money and can potentially turn users off to the site. A new sensation that is becoming quite popular is https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=pay+to+post+on+forums to boost a new site. Most of these places will charge a reasonable amount to register users and create posts that are relevant to your site. This may be a good avenue for those who don't want to pour a lot of money into advertising. With the exception of YPN and Adsense, most publishers require several thousand unique impressions per month before a site will be considered. Cheating the search engines Trying to trick search engines is probably the worst thing for a site. Although it may go unnoticed for a little while, eventually the site will either get caught and thrown into google's http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/article55.html or have your Adsense account terminated and banned. Things to consider; https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=google+cloaking and https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=google+keyword+stuffing will usually get sniffed out by the search engines which in turn will severely hurt the site's placement and page rank. Though they are easy to implement and tempting, it can only serve to harm the site in the long run. Search engines have become very smart and can easily detect this. Doing the right thing By setting up a well SEO'd, easy to navigate site with interesting and targeted content, your site will get noticed. Eric Thurber http://www.forumtools.net |