Hey all,

I am trying to start a couple new online communities with the hopes of using Adsense to make some $$. I am using Adwords to try to promote but so far I am not getting much response.

So my question is with using Adwords...HOW are you promoting? Seems like no one is clicking by just having the title of NEW ONLINE FORUM so I am struggling.

Any words would be helpful...

And I would happily pay for advertising in order to build my forum up.

Peace,

DJ Bill

It all depends on the forum and what the liklihood of success is

No. I can advertise for free! :mrgreen:

I got here through a Google ad... so advertising works...

To answer the original question, yes, I would pay to advertise my Web sites. I currently do Google Adwords with a $10/day cap, and pay a max of 20¢ per click. I don't typically hit the $10 limit. Google usually sends about 30 people my way each weekday (almost nothing on the weekends). Of that, about 33% (10 people each weekday) sign up. My site started in late March, with the ads kicking in around late April, and it has about 550 members.

I put up AdSense ads on my site, and it brings in almost exactly what I pay out (AdWords charges me roughly $130/month, AdSense pays me about $120/month). So I'm not paying much to advertise.

My AdWords ads average a 2% clickthrough rate (for every 100 views, I get 2 clicks). However, I have some ads with nice high 40% clickthrough rates. They just don't display a lot, as they're really, really, really targeted.


Oh God, no, that wouldn't work. That's not what you want to advertise. Your forums are about something right? It's not just random, aimless chatter, is it? You've got a focus on a celebrity, or a product, or a market/genre that interests you, right? Like say, a forum about Clint Eastwood, or a forum about gaming, or something specific? Advertise THAT. Let's say you're doing a Clint Eastwood forum. OK, you should get the name of every film he's done, and then enter the film names -- in quotes -- as keywords for your ads. That way, only if someone enters the full film name, will your ad appear. What else? Hmm. You pick out some of his famous lines ("go ahead, punk, make my day") and enter them -- in quotes -- as keywords. Lastly, you pick some really subtle little things that ONLY FANS would bother to type into a search engine. Like that he was the "mayor of Carmel, California." Put that into AdWords, in quotes as usual.

Next step? Be sure your ad title is right in line with what they searched for. "Clint Eastwood Forums" or "Discuss Clint Eastwood" or "Eastwood's Best Movies." You know? So the person sees the ad and thinks, "ohhh, I'll just take a quick peek." It's like candy at the register -- you don't usually go into the store to buy it, but if you're at the register and you like chocolate, you might grab something. Be chocolate.

OK? Now you've got really targetted ads. You can be fairly certain that the only people seeing these ads are fans, so that's going to do two things: give you fewer views, but more clicks. Over time, you can expand on your keywords to see if widening the audience still pays off. For example, maybe you'd shorten the Eastwood quote to "make my day" and see if that works. Or try variations, like "make my day, punk" (which Eastwood never said, but people seem to quote it like that nowadays, so maybe it'll do wonders).

If you can generalize the concepts I just outlined, your ads will be very successful.

As an interesting aside, you don't want to play with the ads too much. I mean, get in there and revise, revise, revise over the course of a week or so. But then take your hands off. Google will watch how the ads work, and will optimize it. It takes a week or three, but all of the sudden, the ads start getting a lot more clicks. Usually from "content ads" when they suddenly start running in volume. The second you touch the keywords, something horrible clicks off, and the whole thing resets, and you have to wait a couple weeks for the optimization to kick things up a notch again. Because of that, I only mess with the keywords and ad text rarely (I've done it once during setup, and once a few weeks ago for an overhaul).

-Tony

Of course I would advertising is the key to getting members.(And so are referrals.)

i think the most important is how much the site attract on discussion topic. As otherwise spending money would be of waste on forums! As far as cscgal is concerned he was definitely successful with daniweb.

I can't afford to pay for an ad-free board so I wouldnt pay for advertising at this point in time. It isn't a revenue generating board, it's just for fun, so I will stick to word of mouth etc for now unless things change massively.

I'm more than happy to pay to advertise my forum once it's running.

However, I have just started a forum and obviously these things have to start off SOMEWHERE ... it launched 2 days ago and so far I have 8 members and hardly any threads.

I'm just wondering if anybody has tips to get things moving.

I'm more than willing to invest in advertising once it's running... but how do you get it running!?

Truthfully, I have before. In fact, I bought Google Ads and they did pretty well.