B³H³ Blog Network

Many people who have popular forums that they’ve tried to monetize with AdSense have probably discovered that their return is nowhere near as high as they expect, even when they do everything right.

Why?

There are two reasons why this is the case.

1. Forums are generally diverse and because of this it’s hard to target ads.  Poorly targeted ads convert badly.  Period.
2. A forum is a place where people come together to talk.  This doesn’t put them in any mood to click on an ad and move away from the discussion to hand.  They want to talk to other like minded humans, not be sold to.

Don’t despair!  The truth is that if you want to monetize a web forum, even a popular one, you need different ways to encourage users to click on ads.  Here are some ideas:

• Review pages
• Articles
• News pages
• “How to’s”

If you have a high traffic forum, then what you need to do is to direct some of your traffic to pages that are geared to getting your visitors to click on the ads!

The world was saddened to hear about the untimely death of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. 

Darren Rowse, proud Australian and ProBlogger, offers a few lessons that bloggers could learn from Steve’s approach to life and his subject:

• Passion
  You gotta love what you do, and you need to project this in your blog.
• Focused on Others
  “Me” blogs (blogs where people talk about themselves) are on the decline in terms of visitors and interest.  Visitors want information important and applicable to them.  A blog that’s focused on the visitor will be a LOT more successful than a blog that’s “me” centric.
• Individuality
  Steve had worked on a personal image that was unique and instantly noticeable.  Stand out from the crowd!
• Optimism
  Optimism is catching.  Take advantage of this.

I’ll end with a quote of Steve’s that Darren posted because I think that it applies to all successful blogs:

“I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.”

What’s a good way to increase your earnings through Google AdSense (or any other ad program for that matter)?  Simple!  Add more sites to your digital kingdom!

This is pretty obvious but I’m constantly amazed how people don’t figure it out for themselves.  After all, one of the main things that a site needs apart from good content is time to mature.  There’s only so much that you can do over time unless you are willing to spend dough on advertising your site.  If you have two sites, and both sites are well placed, populated with good content and targeting niches that are popular and which have ads that pay well, then you will see more income that if you only ran the one site.

Remember though, two sites means a greater workload (although as a rule two sites is not double the workload because there will be crossover), so be prepared for some hard work (also spend time working out whether the income makes the extra workload worth it).