If you are building a community site and think that it might benefit from having a forum, this could be a great thing, and the main reason is that you don’t need to create any content, other users will do it for you!

The only thing you need is to keep them engaged, posting regularly and you got yourself a winner!

Now the only negative side is that CTR in forums is usually low, but this can be some extra income.

Here are the steps you need to do:

Install WordPress

Skip this if you already have a WP site.

Install and configure the bbPress Plugin

This is the best Forum software for WP

Use a theme with bbPress support

I recommend you go to Themeforest, and search for a theme which works fine with bbPress

Create the forum list

You can also create subforums and categories if needed.

Install this free plugin to add Adsense units

It’s called bbPress Advert Units, and it lets you choose where you want to add your ads inside the forum.

Add your Adsense ad units and decide where to show them

These are the options you have:

• Between posts
• In the body of the first post
• At the top and bottom of topic pages
• On individual forum pages
• On the top level forum page

That’s it! As long as you have a reasonable amount of users who post in the forum, you should get more and more content (meaning more and more visits), and your revenue should go up

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In my opinion, Google Adsense is the best paying advertising solution for your site.

It has the highest number of advertisers, and the bids are usually higher than in any other network.

However, it is not the only solution.

Here are some reasons why you might want to use another alternative:

• You like testing
• Your Adsense account has been banned (yuck!)
• Your website does not adhere to the Google guidelines
• Google is the devil and you do not want to get near anything that starts with a G.

For those cases, here are the best alternatives:

Media.net

It gives you access to the Yahoo! Bing Network, meaning lots of advertisers. The downside is that they are a bit strict, and that they need to approve each site you want to place ads on.

Infolinks

They have what is called “In text ads”, meaning they will highlight certain terms in your site and add a link there. It has good reviews, and it’s one of the biggest networks.

Chitika

They are a big advertising network. You can get paid via Paypal, and the minimum payout is $10.

Clicksor

They have multiple ads formats. They won’t approve every single site you submit, so it might be a bit hit or miss. Minimum payout is $50, and pay via Paypal or check

Bidvertiser

You can get paid via clicks or conversions. The advertisers bid on the sites they want their ads to appear. The minimum payout is $10, and you can get paid via Paypal, check or wire.

PopAds

They are specialized in popunders. Approval and account creation is a pretty simple process. The great thing is that you can claim your payment any time you want. If you earn at least $5 a day, you can even get paid daily.

PopCash

Similar to PopAds, they have a ton of inventory in many countries, with desktop and mobile traffic. You can get paid via Paypal, Payza and Paxum.

Vibrant Media

Good company with a catch: your site must receive a minimum of 500.000 page views (not visits) per month, and getting approved is not so simple. They offer different kind of ads, like popups, banners, in-image…

Adversal

A bit less strict than Vibrant, you can get approved if you get 50,000 page views a month. Minimum payout is $20, and they have popunders and other ad formats.

PropellerAds

A very popular network with pop-unders. They sspecialize in the following niches: entertainment, videos/movies, games, dating, finances, software, gambling and more, which to be honest, are not the best friends with Adsense, so if you have a site related to those niches, give it a try.

Amazon Display Ads

They have what they call “Amazon Native Shopping Ads”, where they show contextual ads (similar to Adsense), with Amazon products, based on the keywords of your page. But instead of getting paid per click, you get a commission from every sale (this is good if most people purchase, not so good if they don’t).

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Back in april 2004, Google introduced what they call “Smart Pricing”.

Before that, advertisers had to pay their bid price for each click, regardless of whether they made money (ie, a sale) from that click, which means some of them were receiving tons of clicks, but not so many sales.

So, in order to avoid people fleeing from Adsense and moving into other platforms (Yahoo back then [Bing Ads these days], now Facebook, etc), they did the following: for pages that were giving advertisers few sales, they lowered the price of each click, which means that advertisers pay different prices depending on where the click comes from.

Before Smart Pricing came in, the only thing us (publishers) had to focus on is sending as many clicks as possible, but after that, we need to take into account the quality of those clicks if we want to get paid more, simply put.

The thing is, since Google is so opaque most of the times, we don’t know for sure what affects Smart Pricing, so the only thing we can do is try to get quality traffic. However, these premises seem to be correct:

• Smart Pricing is calculated across the whole Adsense account,  so if you have some high quality sites mixed with low quality, your ad prices might go down overall.
• Smart Pricing is evaluated on a weekly basis, which is good, since that means that if you fix what needs to be fixed, your earnings can go back up quickly.
• Smart Pricing is tracked with a 30 day cookie, so sales for an advertiser can come within 30 days (the visitors don’t need to purchase straight away).

So what can you do if your earnings are getting lower (with a similar amount of clicks)? I can recommend 2 things:

• Try to see if one or more of your sites (or pages) might be causing this. If so, temporarily remove ads and see if after one week your revenue goes up. If this does not help, check with other pages, until you find the culprit, then remove ads from that page altogether.
• If you are driving paid traffic to your sites, stop that for a week and watch again your revenue.

Here are some tips on how to prevent Smart Pricing

• The main thing is, try to keep advertisers happy. If they make money, you make money (and Google on the side), everybody is happy.
• Make sure to have high quality content on your site (which is likely to attract “better” visitors)
• Try to get most of your traffic from high quality sources (search engines being the best)
• Keep your content relevant

So that’s it! Since Google does not give away too much information, we can just guess, and do trial and error.

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Here are the 3 parts of the equation involved:

Keyword Research

One of the most important. Two reasons:

1. Since you are aiming to rank your site at the very top of Google, you will need a keyword (or ideally more) that you can rank more or less easily.
2. As we saw before, different keywords have different EPC (Earnings per Click)

Traffic

This one is pretty simple. No traffic = No money

The best traffic source is SEO traffic (people who find your site via Google).

There are also some people who try to get cheap Facebook clicks to drive traffic to their site (usually with viral content), and expect to make more money with Adsense clicks than what that traffic costed. I haven’t personally tried this myself so I cannot comment on it.

So we are not only talking about quantity, but also quality.

CTR

The % of visitors who click on your ad. To improve this you can work on:

• The site theme
• Different ad sizes
• Different ad placement

So that’s mostly it!

Spend some time doing proper keyword research.

Then work on getting traffic

Once you have those two (which are, in my opinion the most important), test and tweak, so you can maximize earnings.

Then rinse and repeat 🙂

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Here is a list of some of the best optimized Adsense Themes.

However, and before I start, let me clarify something: there is no doubt that having a good, optimized theme helps improving your CTR.

But bear in mind there are still many factors for having a successful adsense niche: the quality of the traffic, the niche…

Why am I saying this? Because one might thing that by having a good theme all the work is done, when in fact the theme is just one of the factors.

So here are some of the themes that I like:

CTR Theme

This one is especially designed with Adsense in mind.

Link | Demo

Divi Theme

Not just for Adsense; it’s a feature packed multipurpose theme.

Link | Demo

Admania

Multiple layouts, mobile optimized

Link | Demo

Truemag

According to their own description, “Truemag’s ad “hotspots” are strategically placed throughout this content-driven theme to attract the eye without compromising the user experience”

Link | Demo

SociallyViral

Created to get viral traffic, but it’s also optimal for Adsense

Link | Demo

AdMag

Great theme for a blog (magazine style) with responsive Ads system

Link | Demo

Clickbump

It offes multiple themes in one. Some of them are not too attractive, but they have been built with CTR in mind, so no complains about ugliness if it makes money 🙂

Link | Demo

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