It’s been a while since I changed any of the ads on HaloBoards.com and after checking out some adsense reports on the site I decided to make a few changes. The two ads that showed the worst performance are the ones I decided to change. The 160 x 600 skyscraper ad had an all time CTR of .04% while the 468 x 60 footer ad had an all time CTR of only .01%! Clearly those are terrible numbers and that space could be put to better use.

I replaced the 160 x 600 skyscraper ad with an Auction Ads skyscraper of the same size using the keywords: Halo 3;Xbox 360;Halo Books. I haven’t used Auction Ads that much, so that is another reason why I wanted to make a change in that location. The footer is in a poor location seperated from the content of the site; however, I don’t want to bring it up any higher on the page because I feel like there are already enough ads covering the upper parts of the page. In any case, while I was looking at my stats and deciding what to do with the space I decided to check out Google’s referral program. I was suprised to see a wide range of categories to select from with various CPA offers. After looking through all of the offers I settled on a few referrals in the games category. I don’t expect to get many referrals in the footer location, but I wanted to test the waters with Google’s referral program and see how it works out. The only other time I had used their program for is the Adsense and FireFox referrals that have been around for a long time.

I will find much better locations for Google Referrals on HaloBoards and my other sites later, but I was suprised to see all of the referral offers that Google has going on now. I will post back on the progress of these two changes later.

Have you tried any of the new referrals that Google is offering?

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I’ve been reading John Chow’s blog since late last year, which is longer than many people can say. He has really exploded in popularity this year and it’s fun to say that I have been reading John Chow dot Com back before he was making five figures a month from blog income alone. His blog is an excellent resource for people that are interested in learning how to monetize your websites and clearly states to not rely soley on Adsense for bringing in online income.

One of the posts I highly recommend you check out is The Proper Way To Do Affiliate Marketing. I’m new to affiliate marketing, but when you think about the statement he makes in that post, “Affiliate Marketing Is All About The Presell” he’s right. If you can find a way to presell your forum members on various products instead of just throwing up an affiliate banner on your website you will improve your conversions and subsequently your revenue. If you’ve developed a good relationship with your members, they will value your opinion on a product or service that you recommend to them. I will be testing his ideas about preselling by creating various review pages on most of my sites with affiliate links to products that I recommend to my forum members. I will post back with my results later, but in the meantime if you haven’t already checked out John Chow’s blog I highly recommend it, he has some great tips to make money online. If you review his blog he will link to you and send you a lot of traffic.

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The results from this week’s update are not as amazing when compared to last week’s 17,100 jump in results from Google; however, there was some progress from Yahoo and MSN. vBSEO is still working hard to index my site in the search engines and improve organic search engine traffic. Here are the numbers for week 6:

site:haloboards.com (Google) down 100 to 28,300

site:haloboards.com (Yahoo) up 543 to 13,083

site:haloboards.com (MSN) up 14 to 149

The numbers from this week show HaloBoards pulling ahead in MSN search results when compared to GamingVidz, although it’s still at a miserable total of only 149 results for a site:haloboards.com. Yahoo also showed some progress, but Google seems to be taking a rest after last week’s huge gains. I’m very impressed with how well vBSEO has improved indexing my vBulletin forum content, improving organic search engine traffic and highly recommend vBSEO to those of you running vBulletin forums.

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Here are the numbers for Week 11 on my ongoing case study of vBSEO’s affects on forum search engine indexing and sending traffic from search engines. The numbers from this week’s search engine results show some progress, but not as much as we’ve seen in some of the recent updates. Here are the numbers:

site:gamingvidz.com (Google) up 8,000 to 217,000

site:gamingvidz.com (Yahoo) up 127 to 25,368

site:gamingvidz.com (MSN) up 7 to 129

All three search engines showed positive results; however, Google had the highest gain with an extra 8,000 search results over last week’s numbers for a site:gamingvidz.com. MSN has continued to show little to no results since the start of this case study. I gave up on MSN long ago, but I’d like to see at least some double digit gains someday.

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As I’m sure many of you know, it’s difficult to launch new websites, manage the old ones and come up with new ideas to improve a site all while holding down a full time job. I personally work as a game tester at Microsoft (living the dream huh?), and have to commute to work for 3 hours a day round trip. I know just how tough it is to balance a full time work schedule, a marriage and find time to work on my websites. I will be making the move to full time web publisher eventually, but I haven’t figured out a time table for it yet.

For those of us that still hold down full time jobs while running forums or websites on the side you may ask yourself all the time, “How can I find more time to work on my websites?” Well, I am going to give you a peak into how I get website work done and hopefully you’ll be able to learn something from me. As I write this post, I’m currently sitting at my work desk after arriving 50 minutes early. I used to come into work earlier back when I first started this job 9 months ago, but slowly started leaving later and later until I got to the point where I would be late to work if one section of my commute took longer than scheduled. So I’ve decided to start coming to work early again so I can spend all of that time working on my websites. If you work at an office, I’d highly recommend doing this, you’d be suprised by how much you can focus on your website work by coming in early when most of your co-workers are still asleep or driving to work. If you commute in high traffic areas, you may also receive the benefit of avoiding some traffic that would have otherwise kept you on the road longer, thus wasting more of your time. The key is to try and find times to work on your websites that complement the type of person you are. As an example, I’ve found that I’m moving towards more of a morning person now that I’m out of college and so I find that it isn’t that hard to get up extra early for work knowing that I can use that time to work on my websites.

Another way I’ve found success in getting website work done has been by writing lists of work I need to do on a site by site basis. After having a detailed list, it’s easy to pick out the items of most importance and start working from there. I also don’t let myself stop working on a task until it’s finished. I’ve found that it’s important to never stop in the middle of a task because I often spend a fair amount of time figuring out where I left off and what left to finish it, so I make sure to avoid starting a task that I can’t finish within my allotted work time.

How do you find the time to work on websites while holding down a full time job?

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Well, I knew it would happen. HaloBoards has just received it’s tremendous surge of new search engine results as can be seen now from a site:haloboards.com search on Google. This surge has occured at around the same time GamingVidz.com saw it’s first boost in search engine results from Google. vBSEO has been doing a great job of indexing my two case study forums and has helped to increase organic search engine traffic. Here are the numbers for week 5:

site:haloboards.com (Google) up 17,100 to 28,400!

site:haloboards.com (Yahoo) down 3 to 12,540

site:haloboards.com (MSN) up 9 to 135

Five weeks ago HaloBoards started with only 6,176 results and in one week vBSEO increased search engine results for a site:haloboards.com search by 17,100. This one week increase accounts for nearly three times more search engine results than the site ever accumated naturally for the 8 months the site was open before enlisting the help of vBSEO. I couldn’t be more pleased to have purchased my vBSEO licenses and I recommend purchasing one for your vBulletin forums as well.

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It’s time again for another update on vBSEO’s affect on search engine indexing for my biggest forum GamingVidz.com. GV, as it’s affectionately called by it’s members, has well over 230,000 posts and nearly 5,000 members. I believe vBSEO is having an impact on sending search engine traffic to the site as has been shown in previous posts and it shows no sign of stopping. Here are the numbers for this week:

site:gamingvidz.com (Google) up 39,000 to 209,000!

site:gamingvidz.com (Yahoo) down 340 to 25,241

site:gamingvidz.com (MSN) down 1 to 122

Google pulled in another five digit gain with a 39,000 increase in search engine results for a total of 209,000 when doing a site:gamingvidz.com. When I started this case study, a site:gamingvidz.com search on Google only resulted in 34,300 results. I recommend you use vBSEO on your forums to help improve search engine indexing and gain organic search engine traffic.

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In my previous post, I mentioned that I was going to look into the new Google Analytics site to try and come up with more detailed graphs and figures for my vBSEO case studies and I’m happy to say I just did that. The new Google Analytics has been out for a while, but I wanted to continue using the old version so that the graphs I posted would have the same look and follow the same formatting of my previous updates. This however will not be possible because on July 18th, 2007 it will be discontinued. Fortunately, the new version of Google Analytics is much better than the old one. It is packed full of more detailed information, statistics and an easy way to compare data from two different periods of time. I will go back and update the vBSEO case study posts with new graphs and more detailed information this weekend. My goal has always been to control as many variables as possible while trying to run a case study on vBSEO’s impact on increasing traffic for a forum.

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