Want to monetize forum, only 0.04% CTR!

[Delphinophile]

Hi! I am the owner of a forum with about 1500 members, several hundred of which are regularly posting. The site is two years old, and gets much higher traffic during weekends, as it seems to attract mostly teenage males who are out of school. Traffic varies by day, but we usually get 300-400 uniques per day, with some days spiking into the several thousands.

Here are my site stats below:

We earn $35 to $40 a month off of adsense, with only several clicks a day. Thing is... We only get a few clicks per day, and our CTR is a dismal 0.04%. Does anyone have any ideas, black, grey, or whitehat that could improve revenue off the site? I am not sure how I can get more clicks without getting banned, but it seems a pity for a site with decently valued ads and high traffic to get such low return.

If posting the link to my forum would help, I would be happy to do that.

 

[bryanon]

CTRs for forums are always a lot lower compared to static sites, blogs and the likes. This is due to the fact that most people who visit your forum find what they're looking for you, as well as that you get a lot of return visitors who aren't interested in clicking on PPC ads.

You're probably able to do a little bit better than 0.04% though. The first thing I'd do (if you haven't done it already) is include text ads within posts, so that they would show up between the 1st and 2nd paragraphs of each post for instance. This is pretty annoying, hence you could consider upgrading your veteran members (or even all members!) to a no-ads usergroup and only display the ads to guests/newbies.

Another thing you might want to consider is running targeted CPA ads rather than Adsense. If you find a few offers that are relevant to your niche then you will almost certainly do better with these than you currently do with Adsense (unless your site triggers high paying ads).

Good luck!

 

[kez1000]

Why not email all of your members a click bank offer or something

 

[Delphinophile]

One thing I have considered is to try to promote an Amazon Affiliate link. I think that because I have a lot of loyalty from members, I might even have a shot at them always coming through my site using the referral link!

Does anyone have other ideas?

 

[mike2000]

You can sell advertising for relevant products/services etc. in your forum.

 

[backflip7531]

is the forum focused on some niche? try to find CPM ads for it...

 

[Bonilla]

Do you guys think the fact that his site mostly attracts teenage boys that the monetization might be a problem? I remember being told that teens don't convert that well as they are usually broke and not buyers. Could be wrong just curious if this is the case.

In regards to monetizing the site further I think selling ad space is a very good idea. Also work your list. List is money. It always is.

 

[moozig23]

I think best thing for teenage boys are email submit type ads.

Also, if you have regular members that care about the forum, you can ask them to fill in some incentive offers or CPA lead survey, etc. and give something in return(such as status boost or what not).
Ask them to do something like that once a month "To keep the forum running" and you have some nice money.

 

[macdonjo3]

Forums are expected to get a low CTR. I got a 0.5% on my forums.

 

[brent360]

Hi Delphinophile! I recommend that you do what 2ch does.
You can read more about it in the Wikipedia article on "2channel" under the "Referral" section.

Here's a quote for you:

2channel uses a referral system for any links to external websites posted on the forum. People clicking on a link are first sent to a page filled with advertisements on the ime.nu domain where a link to the actual site is placed. Apart from collecting revenue from the 2channel visitors it also attracts website owners of the linked pages who check their statistics and can't link it back to 2channel.[22]...