We are a bit of an oddity in the forum world. After 2.5 years of no monetization at all, we decided to start taking ads late this spring. It was a move that we really struggled with, but with the traffic we get and the activity on the forums, we thought we owed it to the development and expansion of the site. With much hesitation, we took the first step and added two banner placements…
The quest to learn about advertising – and particularly advertising on forums – has been an interesting one. I consider myself to be pretty savvy online. If it’s out there, I can find it. The problem when researching a topic like advertising ‘how to’ stuff becomes that the people that I want to hear from about this stuff just don’t talk about it. Granted, I totally understand why they don’t – their business is making money online, so what good would it do to share their “secrets?” It is fairly easy to find lots of chatter on admin boards around the net about basic advertising issues (“How do I make more money with Adsense in my forum?” “What are the be CPM networks?” etc.), but I was struggling to find knowledgable people that had REAL information for me about board monetization. Considering that this is one of the most talked about topics for board admin, you would think there would be more talk about it! Thank goodness I found Lee and BigBoardAdmin.com. I finally started to get some answers from people who aren’t afraid of giving real answers with real dollar amounts and who can provide real solutions to problems. I have learned a ton over these last few months.
One of my main questions involved how to attract large advertisers to a niche board. Large advertisers don’t typically target forums with specific campaings. Why not, you ask? It’s fairly simple:
Message boards have a less than desirable pageviews to uniques ratio. Advertisers like to see more uniques with less pageviews.
Message boards tend to have a great deal of repeat traffic that can tune out the ads very easily (related to #1)
Message boards *can* have more chatty topics than specific advertiser related topics. Thus, the traffic is of less quality, in their opinion.
Message boards are a liability such that their ad could be seen next to an offensive message for a time since messages are generally NOT moderated before posting. In their opinion, they assume a certain level of risk when advertising on a space that has thousands of daily participants instead of one webmaster who carefully places content.
For the record, all of these points are well taken and legitimate. But that doesn’t mean that board admin need to suck it up and not aim for big advertising campaigns. 
Most of these issues can be addressed in a way that could make advertisers happy. Let’s take each of them separately:
Message boards have a less than desirable pageviews to uniques ratio. Advertisers like to see more uniques with less pageviews.
From an advertiser’s viewpoint, they have statistics to prove that the forum scenario is less than ideal, so we aren’t able to change this traditional convention. But in focusing on what we may be able to change, a basic way to get more uniques to a site is to get more pages indexed. That sounds much easier than it is, but I am sure that most board admins have not completely exhauseted all SEO (search engine optimization) options on their boards. There isn’t anyone that understands better than I do that Google can be impossible to crack, and a new board will likely need to be patient, but every new board should be just as exhaustive as an old board when it comes to SEO. Their day will come and it’s best to be ready. (Specific forum SEO techniques will need their own post. Stay tuned for that…)
So let’s say you have worked the SEO to death and you aren’t seeing more traffic. What next? There are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to a site, but they take more daily work. One great tool is article marketing. Unfortunately, this method of driving traffic has been totally hyped by online marketers to the point that it looks like yet another slimy tactic, but it isn’t – it really does work. The basis of this method is that you write articles (or hire a ghostwriter through a site like Guru.com) related to the topic of your board and you distribute them through the hundred or thousands of article databases on the net. You see, this type of promotion is a win-win – since the internet is all about content, webmasters are always scrambling for new, quality content. By providing this to them, you get a link back to your site in the resource box at the bottom of your article.
Now if you aren’t familiar with this type of marketing, you may be wondering why anyone would do all that work to get something on one webmaster’s site. In reality, you are doing that work to show up on hundreds or thousands (depending on the audience of your article) of websites in a matter of a few days. You can use a distribution service like iSnare to send your articles to estabilshed article directories, and from there you are picked up by other internet publishers. If you aren’t sure if this is something worth doing for you, try just one article and test it for yourself. You may be suprised at what you find. If it works, make a commitment to one article a week and track your traffic progress. This method isn’t something that works like magic – it takes time and commitment, but if you are serious about driving new, targetting traffic to your site, you should be able to stick to an article markeing plan.
Message boards tend to have a great deal of repeat traffic that can tune out the ads very easily (related to #1)
Since this is very true, it wouldn’t be smart for a board admin to try and convince anyone otherwise. What we *can* do is to try and put a positive spin on our repeat visitors. These consistent forum members who visit day in and day out are intimately familiar with the products and companies in your board’s niche. Essentially, they are your best salespeople. Every day, they share they discuss different brands, products, etc. with other enthusaistic people. By actively pursuing forum members (who define “word of mouth” advertising at its best) with branding advertisements, advertisers would be making sure they have a place in the mind of these thousand-person unmanned sales teams. You simply can’t pay for the kind of advertising that forum members provided online and offline. Advertisers would be remiss not taking advantage of that. (How’s that for a spin. 
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Message boards *can* have more chatty topics than specific advertiser related topics. Thus, the traffic is of less quality, in their opinion.
This is an easy one to fix. Before you attempt to solicit any large advertising accounts, do some board housekeeping. Make certain that you keep your on-topic areas squeaky clean of spam and off-topic chatter. Show your potential advertisers how relevent all of your discussion is. Show them what great company they will be in amongst all the highly relevant discussion. Make sure to give your hard-working mods a pat on the back for all of their hard work and dedication.
Message boards are a liability such that their ad could be seen next to an offensive message for a time since messages are generally NOT moderated before posting. In their opinion, they assume a certain level of risk when advertising on a space that has thousands of daily participants instead of one webmaster who carefully places content.
I have talked to a couple of different networks about this since it seems to be a question they all ask – “How is your content moderated?” Clearly, this is a huge issue for advertisers. Since we won’t all switch to a model where all posts have to be approved (that would never work!), the best we can do is make sure that your board is clean and free of junk, spam and inappropriate content at all time. This piggybacks with the above concern, but it goes a step further since this isn’t about effectiveness of their advertising – it’s about being associated with liability issues.
To be continued…
by Laua Alter, NoteBook Forums
Very good thoughts Laura!
[...] Now that we have discussed what advertisers are most interested in online, it’s also important to note exactly what we, as forum owners, can do to counter their concerns about advertising on message boards. [...]