First Steps in Monetization Posted April 21st, 2006 in Monetization, Mailbag

Hi Lee. For the admin who is trying to make revenue from ads for the first time, what advice and tips do you have for them? Do you recomend any particular Ad Networks? How will they know which ads suit their community, or where to get the right ads from?

The two main pieces of advice I always offer up in response to this question are test, test, test and take your time. In the beginning, you will need to do a fair amount of research depending on your niche and traffic level. I normally won’t even begin monetizing my traffic until I reach 500-1,000 visitors on a daily basis.

One of the easiest things to begin to play with is Google’s Adsense program. Anyone can get approved for the most part, and it will give you opportunity to familiarize yourself with the different ad sizes, understand where you can place ads on your forum, and it will give you a huge testing playground. I recommend this as the place to start for the beginner. Get comfortable with copying and pasting that ad code in the appropriate places, test for the best ad sizes in different locations on the forum, work with the colors a bit and blending the ads in to the forum, and so on. Once you get your feet wet here, there are many more options such as CPM networks, CPA networks, going after private advertisers and link sales, and so on.

Not every forum owner can turn to the top tier CPM networks for example, as many of them don’t care to work with forums. I know that Burst Media, Casale Media, and Tribal Fusion do work with forums however, but you will need some decent traffic to approach them with your forum. Burst Media is the easiest of the 3 mentioned above to get in to. Depending on your niche, you may not even want to turn to a top tier CPM network, and thus you will need to research your industry to find out if their is an industry specific ad network out there that will better suit your needs.

In the end no matter what you try, chalk it all up to a learning experience and have fun with it. There is so much to take in dring the early days of experimentation, so do take your time.