AdSense Tips

Making AdSense fit your forum site

When you run a forum site, ad placement and formats are key to designing ads that will be successful but not intrusive to your regular users.
Map

Placement: Display your ad units where repeat users will notice them

* Because forum regulars tend to skip the header and go straight to the meat of the thread, placing your ad unit above or below the first post can be more effective than ads next to the logo.

* Place a leaderboard immediately after the last post. This provides users who make it to the end of a thread with a 'next step' when the content ends. Try to avoid placing it after the footer, though, as your readers will likely move to the next thread without seeing the ad.

Formats: Adapting your design for multiple ad units and limited space.

* Using multiple ad units, you can use a variety of formats to fill ad space throughout your site. Placing a skyscraper above the fold on the left side of your forum seems to produce slightly better performance than other positioning. However, when using multiple ad units throughout the page our horizontal bias still favors the leaderboard. Our heat map provides more details.

* Use horizontal link units, which are small enough to fit near the top of your forum just below the header. For the regular forum visitor, link units offer a wider range of relevant topics to browse.

However you choose to implement your ads, keep in mind that forums are highly interactive sites with regular users. Be sure to blend the ads nicely, so they don't appear overly intrusive - but don't blend them so well they mislead your users! Every forum site is different and you know your community best, so as always use your own judgment to create the most positive experience for your users.

Tip for making the most of revenue opportunities: Like most sites, forums can benefit from opting in to image ads. Supporting image ads increases the pool of ads - particularly cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) ads - bidding to display on your site. Since forums tend to have lower clickthrough rates than other types of sites, CPM ads can improve revenue without the need for clicks. Keep in mind, however, that CPM ads come in both text and image formats

RSS Feeds

RSS is short for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. To put it plainly, it is a way of distributing content information in an XML format. RSS delivers information as an XML file, and this XML file is called an RSS feed. This feed contains information as designated by the site's owner. So back on topic, RSS is used to distribute content to whoever wants it. By requesting the appropriate RSS feed, an end user can quickly find out the latest information posted on a website.

An aggregator (also known as a feed reader) accumulates RSS feeds for you, and distributes that information to you as you want. Some require a program to be uploaded, some do daily emails, and others integrate right into your browser. RSS is about distributing content quickly and easily. It also increases efficiency - instead of having to visit a site every day, by using RSS, you can automate the process and be notified when an update occurs.

How RSS works:

Example 1:
Your name is Mr. Joe, and you are a fan of five different blogs. You also end up wasting a lot of time visiting these blogs. So you turn to an RSS feed aggregator, and add their RSS feeds. Now, once a day (or however often you want), the reader will check the RSS feeds for each site, and notify you when there is an update.

Example 2:
Your name is Mr. Joe, and you live in Britain. You have a little website, and would like to have the latest sporting news on your website. You of course do not have time, so you turn to BBC, and use their sports RSS feed to incorporate sports news into your website.

Hence you can give RSS Feeds on your site to make the task easy for the users. Also RRS Feed can be optimized & used for increasing rankings of your website.

Article & Story Submission

Article writing and posting is an effective way to promote your website. By submitting articles to article directory websites not only get one-way link, but also helps in pulling traffic to your website from the targeted market. Article plays an important role in search engine optimization (SEO) - it is all about pulling traffic to your website and for this, crawlers need to be directed for fresh and original contents. That means if your article is fresh and rich with keywords, then you will get a good page rank in major search engines.

To get a good page rank in search engines, publish lots of articles to article directory websites and blogs for free to get a good number of URL links back to your website. It helps in many easy:

• If your article is nicely written and is original, chances are high that other editors will republish it in their respected portals. The more people use your articles, the more links to your websites. Ranking with search engines is determined by the number of quality links to your website.

• Major search engines like Google, Yahoo rely on keyword rich articles. For that, you have to include well-linked keywords in the title of the article.

• Submit your articles in article directory websites with high page rank. This way you can pull their traffic to your website.

• Add photos and pictures with articles for a greater visibility and to make your article more attractive.

Blogging

A blog (the same as "weblog") is a type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent ‘post’ (or entry) at the top of the main page to the older entries towards the bottom. Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites.

Why start your own blog when you can simply use a website? The reason for it is one of the most effective means of Internet-based communication & is relatively easy and requires little time & investment. Again, it can be an additional advantage to your website.

Blogs are a great way to spread information that is difficult to find. Even though the Internet has vast amounts of information, it is not easy to locate that information. By creating a blog, users can contribute hard-to-find information as matter of eliminating the hassle of searching hours on end to find all of that information in a centralized location.
Not only do blogs provide information, but they allow others to comment on topics and provide further insight. In this respect, blogs act as a social network, a community of users forms. With more and more people participating in blogs, they have become a very useful to finding information fast and easy.