Another fun twist to the Google PPC saga and it will certainly be interesting to see where it all ends up. I will keep you posted on any major news that surfaces on this front.

I just wanted to post a picture and say thanks to YPN for sending me this Christmas gift. The thought was very kind and being able to participate in the beta program for the past 15 months or so is even better! I look forward to a profitable 2007 with the Yahoo Publisher Network!

I was very interested to see something that I felt coming for some time now. Adsense has finally shed some light on what is and is not allowed in terms of using images next to Google Ads on your sites. I figured this was something forum owners would be interested in reading….Enjoy!

The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking an advertisement. Often, this page is optimized for a specific keyword term or phrase.

I liked the idea of making a page look exactly like what the user searched for. If I searched for “rusty blue widgets” and the page I arrive at has “RUSTY BLUE WIDGETS” I think “Wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for!” and I’m much more likely to scroll down and read more. I decided to apply this same concept to my programming forum. I already have about 200,000 pages listed in google, and around 80% of my traffic is organic. So making every page a “landing page” seemed like a good idea.

I replaced my welcome message near the top of each page with the parsed out keywords from the search engine referrer. If a user searches for “C++ Sleep” and arrives at my site, they will see “C++ Sleep” in the welcome box and “Register for free and post your C++ Sleep Questions”. You can see an example of this by searching for C++ Sleep on google and clicking the first result.

Since implementing this change, I have seen an almost 80% increase in the number of registrations and my depth of session has increased by over 50%. I’ve also seen a slight bump in CTR and eCPM from AdSense.

I would highly suggest implementing some sort of landing page script if a lot of your traffic is organic. I adapted the code from here.

UPDATE: Michael from RC Nitro Talk put together a tutorial to create landing pages for your vBulletin forum. Thanks Michael!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

I price my ad space based on what I’m currently getting from TribalFusion or AdSense. So depending on the month, a spot may be worth $2.00 CPM, or $5.00 CPM. It also depends on what the advertiser wants. If they are looking for a long term campaign, then I want to work with them from the very beginning. So what do you think? Should a Media Kit include prices?

You can view my 2007 Media Kit here.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

The advantages of having a portal in addition to your forum are huge. It doesn’t make a difference if your forum is one day old and without members or 2 years old with 25,000 members.

The benefits are as follows:

• It provides you with a platform to build content your users will enjoy
• It will get you in to more CPM networks
• CPC ads perform better on “content” pages, so it will increase earnings
• Can be a great help in the SEO game when targetting certain keywords with the content
• It shows the community you are working to “improve” their user experience
• It separates you from the forum only crowd and provides an increased perceived value

This is a short list, but I think there are even more reasons that you could think of as to how this will benefit your community, your earnings, and the overall health of your site. If you are serious about building something “special”, then don’t wait. Get your portal in the works now!

After talking with a few of my members, I discovered I wasn’t the only one experiencing sluggish page loads, it was everyone. So, I began the search for a new dedicated server. The one I had was a Dual 2.4Ghz Xeon server with 2GB of RAM. There were about 50 other sites on the server including 2 or 3 large sites. The average load was 2-3. If you know much about servers, a load of 1+ will start to slow down your pages. I decided I needed a truly dedicated box, with more RAM, and faster hard drives. I also wanted something with RAID for peace of mind. Brian from HondaSwap.com suggested SoftLayer.com. They had a really good selection of servers, with RAID, for a descent price. I chose the Dual Opteron 248 with 3GB of RAM and 3 73GB 10k RPM SCSI HDDs in a RAID 5 array. Not much faster than my old server, but does give me the option to upgrade to the dual core Opteron 270 at a later date.

The server was provisioned a few hours after I ordered it, and after about 2 weeks of testing, I moved my site last weekend. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve already noticed an increase in traffic, page views, and ad revenue. What does that mean? Simple:

Slow Servers = Less Traffic, or more importantly, Faster Servers = More Money

The move itself is a totally different story. I had to mod_rewrite 220,000 pages and change the entire linking structure. Read more about that in my next blog entry.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

Most of us know by now that part of “test, test, test” is to do some split tests (A/B testing) when optimizing ads for the most revenue. I am very happy to see that Google has finally stepped up to the plate with a free tool that webmasters NEEDED. Enjoy!

Registrations were just as high. First time visitors were just as high. All the stats that pointed to growth and healthy community seemed to be telling me that all was fine. But my stats for page impressions had dropped about 10-20 per cent. Instead of 50,000 page views per day (or more! Sometimes over 70K!) the page impressions showing up on Google Adsense stats and in my urchin had dropped to an average of 45K. It didn’t make sense.

I had wondered if we had over-loaded the pages with too many graphics, causing the page loads to be so long for many of our guests. Might be. I haven’t received a single complaint from a member so I don’t know.

I wondered about settings and would sometimes log into my admin control panel to stare at the settings, hoping something would magically jump out at me to tell me what happened in that upgrade. I wondered about the repeat visitors and the members who weren’t coming back as often.

One setting I found to alter was the “show number of posts” per page setting. Instead of 20 posts, each page would show 10 instead. This works only on those threads that are long and I only saw a small difference. Not even worth mentioning since we don’t have a lot of threads that are long.

The upgrade gave us some great new features as we had to spend 3 months re-customizing the software to add back all the special features our commumity enjoys. One of the features our staff raved about: content from the latest reply in a thread discussion in email notification. Several times our staff discussed the concern for this feature. On occasion when we had to remove replies, that content had already gone out to the members subscribed to that thread. We had discussed removing the content for that purpose.

But it wasn’t until I read Chris Kenworthy’s post here that I realized here was one issue that could make a profound difference.

Yes, I did it. I removed the content from our email notifications. It was an easy decision based on our experience with content being sent to members we had removed as inappropriate. It was an easy decision based on the many non-geeky women who join our website as their first online experience and assume their email notification is their one reply and they wonder why they don’t receive more. It was an easy decision to encourage members to head back to the forums to read their replies (more than one) and for the discussion to continue.

I edited the “language and phrase” email body for “notify”. It was easy and can be reversed at any time.

And yes, my stats are back on track which means a climb in revenue from advertisers and an increase in forum activity. Those members returning to read their replies may reply again or start another discussion.

Consider trying this out for a while to see if you find a difference in your traffic. If you don’t, you can always put it back.

by Kathy @ HysterSisters.com