Could you offer me any tips on areas I should be considering to promote my site further to get some
regular members, as well as strategies for overcoming obsticles I’ve encountered thus far?

This is the latest mailbag question from a TFF reader that is struggling to market his forum. The reason it is proving difficult has to do with the stance certain other communities are taking on the subject matter of this reader’s forum. I will attempt to offer some insight in to how you overcome this and build a successful forum.

If your site can’t be marketed in the early stages through some of the traditional methods, you have to get creative. This is going to begin with building from within your existing forum. You can do this through a referral program, exciting contests, giving the community things to talk about and really working on the community feel with your forum. This is the whole thought process behind Viral Marketing, you want to get people talking about your community. Of course, you will have to provide top notch content to keep the users coming back!

Beyond your own forum, you can use many of tricks and tips found in this prior article as a part of the “In the Beginning” series. There is plenty to do in terms of advertising your forum without having to do it in free advertising sections on other forums. Work hard, be diligent, set realistic goals, and make it happen!

I was wondering if you would share with us how you have your adsense / YPN channels setup?

I want to begin by thinking John for his question. Several months ago Google Adsense raised the limit of channels you could use to track different ads on different sites to a limit of 200. I only use about 80 total channels across both YPN and Adsense. I am definitely not channel hungry as are other webmasters I know. I like solid breakdowns on stats like everyone else, but there is a limit to my pickiness.

For all of my small sites and forums, I use a single channel to track that site’s performance. I only get more exact when there is a good bit of money on the line. Channels are important for the simple fact that it will help you more clearly define which ads are performing better, especially if you like to do a lot of testing like I do. On one of my largest forums, SprintUsers.com I use a total of 14 channels. It used to be closer to 20 but I got rid of some of the unnecessary channels recently. I have a channel for each different ad unit on the site pages, a channel for each different ad placement on the forums, and a channel for each different ad placement on the archive of the forums. This help me to send trends in ad performance as well as trends in traffic to different areas of my site. I hope you enjoyed today’s mailbag post!

Hey, I really enjoy reading your blog! I got a quick question about your post on AzoogleAds. You stated December and January both made around $45k; where these ads all served through the forum itself, or did this include e-mail too?

Thanks for the question Andrew. The revenue generated comes from multiple sources, not just from the ads (or links) on the forum. I also have some content pages on both Zelda Universe and Sprint Users that perform very well. None of the income comes through emails however. At this point I avoid using emails to make money, and only email with our monthly newsletter or with important site updates. I hope this clarifies some things for you. Best Wishes!

I opened up a forum related to soccer. I had one in the past, however on a free host, so I am pretty familiar with forums. However, this new forum of mine is still in its early stages, and with almost two weeks gone, I only have 7 members (5 who are staff including myself and a second admin user). It has been really frustrating for me to get members, I have tried signature links but they arn’t really working. Any tips would be appriciated, and please tell me what you think. Any comments, suggestions and contructive criticism is would be great.

This is one of the most common questions I receive. I want to refer you a post made just a few weeks ago, titled “How do I get members?”. This alone will help you to get the ball rolling in the right direction on your new soccer forum. I would also recommend you scope out the competition and determine 3 main areas where you can improve upon things your successful competitors are doing. The idea is that you need to do something different and/or better than they are doing. The final suggestion I will leave you with today is that you need content and lots of it. Good content though, not copied content or filler information. You need up to date content that will draw the user in to your forum. Best wishes!

One of the main problems I see me running into on my forums is which ads are compatible with each other. Can you display adsense and azoogleads in the same page? Az and Ad? YPN and Az? Any limitations on where to put.. above the fold, below the fold, etc?

This is the first installment of me, the Forum Jedi, answering questions sent to our mailbag (mailbag@theforumfix.com). This question was spawned after my recent posting about the profitable AzoogleAds network.

To answer the quesion of compatibility, one must look at the various ToS agreements with the ad networks. Now, Azoogle doesn’t care what other ad networks you use, but Adsense and YPN do. The only stipulation regarding other ad networks that Google and YPN make is that you cannot have any other CONTEXTUAL ADS on the same page with their ads. Azoogle IS NOT contextual advertising. Azoogle is a CPA network that allows you to place text links and banners (in multiple sizes) on your site. The idea is to use numerous revenue generating programs to make your forum profitable!