Would you pay to advertise your forum? - Page 2

[hakakahn]

Thanx for the help.
I have done quite a lot of advertising but still want more so if there's any more free stuff I can use that anyone knws about, let me know?!

[Eric HRF]

Yes, I use google ad words. My forum is for and all about wheelchairs, the disabled, and thier caregivers. I have 57 members in less than three months.

I frequent my nemisis and have a link to my site in my sig. :eek:

For ad words, I keep it at $10.00 or less a day. And it ONLY appears on google, not thier affiliate advertising on other websites.

[Dani]

Eric, why do you choose not to show your ad in the AdSense tags on other websites? By doing this, you're opening yourself up to a much wider audience. IMO this helps branding.

[Eric HRF]

It was costing more with no more apparent success. I think the webmasters were clicking daily just for a few pennies from ME!

Eric

[harishankar]

My experience with AdSense has shown me that AdWords is worse than useless.

Nobody clicks on the google ads. Absolutely nobody. It's not worth spending any money to advertise because people turn off ads and you cannot get any clicks.

I've been getting decent traffic on my site, but absolutely nobody clicks on the ads. I've been having the ads for quite a long time now... Nobody seems interested in the advertisements except google (who obviously have vested interests in promoting their ad programme).

Google's terms and conditions are loaded against you too. Just read the fine print in their AdSense program contract.

Neither the AdWords client nor the AdSense client will benefit from google's program. Only google benefits.

If your site is purely non-commercial and you're doing it as a hobby, stop wasting money today on AdWords.

The long and the short of it is: "Nobody cares about clicking on advertisements on websites. Hardly 1% would be curious enough to do so."

[servertweak]

yes i would only if i had a large amount of topic and post

[YoungCoder]

Since I last posted in this thread I have developed some secret methods of advertising that work really well for me :)

[servertweak]

Since I last posted in this thread I have developed some secret methods of advertising that work really well for me :)

Care to share ? i love to know or PM me :)

[Dani]

Wouldn't we all! Wouldn't we all!

[southernlady]

No, but then again, mine is the type of site that isn't for profit. I have added google's adsense to my main site. And as soon as I finish upgrading to 3.5, I will add it to my forum page. Liz

[dj bill]

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

[joeychgo]

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

Would you pay to advertise your forum?

No. I can advertise for free! :mrgreen: ;)

[Tom2]

I use AdWords only to advertise DaniWeb ... but I am a big budget spender. I invest about half of whatever last month's gross profit was, so it grows each month :) Nothing ever comes out of pocket, so the site pays for itself. I have conversion tracking setup, and there is about a 5% conversion rate for new visitors registering on the forums :)

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

[aboyd]

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.

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.

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

[Babolo]

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

[olddocks]

I use AdWords only to advertise DaniWeb ... but I am a big budget spender. I invest about half of whatever last month's gross profit was, so it grows each month :) Nothing ever comes out of pocket, so the site pays for itself. I have conversion tracking setup, and there is about a 5% conversion rate for new visitors registering on the forums :)

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.

[elliel]

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.

[Ben Brignell]

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!?

[TeamRocket]

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

[ShaneMcP]

I would pay if I had a decent forum and site, not for what I have right now though

[excellence]

Hi,

As a newbie here, i must say that this forum is excellent!!

I run many forums and spend a lot of money on google.

I am intrigued by the internet, and although i have many sites, i can't say i make much money from them.

I do offer free image hosting - unlimited images - << url snipped to comply with forum policy >>

More interesting i noticed that one of the admins here was interested in advertising in other forum signatures - i have a piece of software that can post to 50,000 forums at the click of a button - you might be intersted in that - a great way to promote?

[mddv]

well it will all depend on where i will advertise and if the forum will provide a greater return than i spend on advertising the site.

[MajorFm.com]

I have paid in the past for my forum but didn't get much of a responce.

[suprtraffics]

Ya I would pay but not a lot.
I'll start probably with $50 more or less per month and see how it goes and also try free advertising services or link exchanges.

[roryt]

I would not pay for any advertisement, however I think getting sponsors for your forum or website is a very effective way of getting traffic. If you get your sponsor to link to you or maybe have a page about your forum. I think word of mouth is an extremely powerful form of advertisement! The above quote is very tru as well.^^^

[dojo]

I am not willing to pay.

I am willing to work on the theme, mods and create hundreds of topics in just days. I promote for free and little by little I get people sign up and post. My communities are hobbies for me. I don't rush anywhere, not to mention I love growing them slow and steady ... must be masochistic :D

[clarinetalex]

I use AdWords only to advertise DaniWeb ... but I am a big budget spender. I invest about half of whatever last month's gross profit was, so it grows each month :) Nothing ever comes out of pocket, so the site pays for itself. I have conversion tracking setup, and there is about a 5% conversion rate for new visitors registering on the forums :)

Dani, you posted this more than a year ago. Is this still the case? I noticed a more recent post where you mentioned that you don't spend much on adwords. Also, do you really think Adwords is that effective?

[olddocks]

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.

Adwords sucks your money very fast if your forum is of traffic sensitive. I personally experienced this. I was running my site gamecrashes.com which is a discussion forum for crashing games and other problems. I got large amount of clicks even with 0.05$ per click and washed my budget away. Eversince from them i did myself posting very useful content rich information for others. That really gave me half success inviting traffic to my site. I really think that you have to go for old fashioned promotion methods in promoting your forum.

[etechsupport]

Instead of looking for ad, I would utilise that money in referral program and organizing contest on my forum.