French Touch Marketing

I own a forum that has gotten to a cool size (17,798 members and counting).
Currently the forum’s only monetization method is the Google Adsense program.

I wanted to share how I went from a 50-visits-and-$.50-a-day personal website to a 7,500-visits-and-$50-a-day passive income source.

Please note that it took me two years… because Adsense’s always been “funny money” to me and I was super lazy (I actually visit my own forum like twice a month). But you could definitely do the same in just two to three months.
I’m going to replicate this on another forum of mine !

Back to the point… what I first had to realize is ::

• Forums have a strong 100/1/0.01 law to them. Only 1% of visitors will ever sign up, and only 1% of the members will become the super active, content-making, word-of-mouth-sneezing fans.
• Google adsense will make you more money if more people see your ads. Most forum visits are coming from search engines… which meant I needed some serious SEO.
• The more pages you have with good content on them, the better. However this 100/1/.01 rule makes it really hard to get lots of human-generated content. So you have to ask our buddy PHP to give a hand :).. so you can have some computer-generated content, that would still be useful and not considered as spam.

So there’s the first rule :
More Traffic > More clicks > More money.
Wait…
We also have :
More members > More fans > More content > More Traffic.

What did I do then ?

1. Step one : Drive more members to the forum
2. Step two : Convert them into fans
3. Steps three to one thousand two hundred - under writing

– that’s a pretty long post already, so I’m going to split this in multiple posts. If it’s been of value to you, and you have any questions, please ask - I’ll be glad to answer.
There are a lot of other steps I took to build that forum and most of them also apply to any kind of website, so I hope you can take action and make more money following this example.

Tony

Tags: Adsense, forums, get more members, phpBB

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 1:22 and is filed under Adsense, Customers and Fans, English Content, Forum Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.