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What criteria do you look at when deciding what type of forum you should start? I’m sure you’ve heard many other people recommend that you should start a forum based on a topic that interests you. The logic if obvious, if you don’t really care about the forum topic(s) than how can you set about creating a successful forum? I agree with this reasoning and even wrote about this a while ago. However, what can you do when the topic that interests you is not a profitable niche?

How I Chose My Niche

As some of you may already know by reading my story about getting started earning money on the internet, I run several video game related forums. I’ve always had a passion for video games and have even played Halo on the professional level. I also sell Halo lessons through my blog (in need of a serious redesign) over at thehalogod.com. In fact, I was even fortunate enough to use the success of my Halo videos to help launch a couple game related forums. However, as I look at the forums I’ve created I can’t help but think about the profitability of the niche I’ve chosen to target on the web.

The Low Profit Niche

I’ve focused most of my web properties around video games and in one circumstance - a single video game franchise i.e. Halo Boards. The question I now ask myself - that I should have done long ago - is how can I really make good money from these video game focused forums? Now I’m not just in it for the money and in fact if my revenue ever grew a substantial amount I would sponsor bigger events, provide giveaways, make improvements to the forum, and the list goes on. However, how can you really expect to make money off of advertising when nearly all of the active members and even the guests that find the site through search engines or other websites already own the video game system and games that most of the conversations center around (as in the case of Halo Boards)? The answer is simple - it’s extremely difficult. Even if the members of the website do click ads you have to remember these ads are still focused on video games which are frequently low paying.

Now the reason why these keywords don’t pay out well is because quite simply the ads that are displayed are for inexpensive items. When you see ads to buy third party game controllers, new video games and xbox live subscription cards you know that because these items hover around $50 there is not a lot of money to be earned with each sale. The advertiser can only make money if the cost of advertising is low enough that the conversions outweigh the cost of the ads. So to even make a decent sum of money you’ll need a lot of clicks.

The High Profit Niche

Now lets look at another example. Let’s say you run a forum focused on HDTV’s and the discussion of new HDTV’s, reviews and anything else related to this “new” technology. Immediately you know that a significant portion of the members on the forum are there to buy a new HDTV and are using your forum as a resource to help make an informed decision. And because of the nature of the forum members that are gathering more info to make a purchase, if they do click an advertisement they’re more likely to buy. This will help prevent your Adsense account from being smart priced but that’s a conversation for another day.

The cost of an HDTV can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. As you can see the products that will display in the advertisements on the HDTV forum example are much more expensive than those being displayed in the low paying niche. Naturally, because the products are so much more expensive advertisers have to pay much more for their ads ad clicks. With one low paying niche forum you could make a couple hundred dollars a month and on the other high paying niche forum you could make a couple thousand dollars a month with the same traffic level and activity. So before you launch your next forum make sure that you are not only interested in the topic but you also ask yourself, “How much money is there in this this niche?”

Lessons Learned

I’m not going to look back and view the decisions I made as a mistake, because starting those forums is what got me into earning money on the web in the first place. I also had a lot of fun doing it, but now that I’ve learned some lessons I’m certainly going to do more extensive research to determine how profitable the niche is.

Have you ever made this “mistake” before? What factors help you determine which new websites and forums to run with?

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I’ve held this post as a draft for a couple days because I didn’t want to announce the page rank update too early, but the flucutations between page ranks seem to have steadied out finally so I think it’s safe to announce it now. I’ve seen page rank updates accross all of my websites and the flucuations have just been back and forth between the old rank and the new rank, so even if it’s not done fluctuating I believe it’s safe to say the new ranks I’ve seen will stick around.

The good news is that with this update my blog’s page rank moved up from a PR2 to a PR4 which will mean I should be able to sell links on this blog easily after I finish implementing the OIOpublisher text link code. Although there are many people that have tried to discredit the value of Page Rank because of Google’s recent adjustments to high profile bloggers that sell links and sponsored reviews, it’s important not to lose sight of the value of Page Rank. Some ad networks even require it in your application so having a higher page rank will help to improve your chances of getting in. Either way, I will sell links off this blog, but I haven’t decided if I’ll require the nofollow attribute or not.

In addition to my blog, several of my other websites improved their page ranks as well. In fact when I wrote about how Text Link Ads was finished back in March I mentioned that one of my forums, Xbox Live Arcade was hit and suffered a PR4 drop to PR0. At the time I believed this was due to the fact that I was running TLA code on the site and after seeing this month’s page rank update it looks like I’m right. The site has since gone up to a PR2 and I expect it will make a full recovery when the next page rank update occurs. So it’s nice to see that there hasn’t been any permanent damage. In fact, this just helps to prove that running TLA on your websites is a big risk and why I recommend that you only use it on websites that you don’t care lose their page rank.

How did your websites fare with this latest page rank update? Do you agree with my assessment of TLA?

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Today the winners have been announced in my free advertising giveaway that celebrated my blog’s first birthday. For those of you that might have missed it I ran a short contest for some free advertising on this blog that you could win by posting about the contest, subscribing to my RSS feed via email or stumbling some of my blog posts.

Without further ado here are the random winners (thanks Randomizer.org):

Winner of the 468 x 60 banner ad is:

Hyder who blogged about the contest. You may remember him as the designer of this blog! Some may think this looks a little shady, but there were hardly any people that linked to this blog contest and that was the only way to win the 468 x 60 banner.

5 Winners of the 125 x 125 ads are:

contact [at] thatblogsite.com
enews [at] dennisedell.com
gndoro [at] gmail.com
rajgaurav [at] msn.com
Phil Benwell who blogged about the contest

Overall I viewed this contest as a small success. I’m glad that I was able to give away the free advertising to so many RSS readers but it would have been nice to get more people that linked to the contest. I’m going to write a follow up post about running the contest and provide my ideas for improving my future blog contests as I already have thought of a lot of things I could have done differently.

Anyway, you have until April 12th to contact me via chris [at] chrisguthrie.net with your blog ad that you’d like to run.

Also something to keep in mind is that some of the RSS readers that won have been subscribed to my RSS email feed for several months now, so you should sign up for my RSS feed now if you’re interested in winning future prizes. As long as you’re a verified email RSS subscriber you’ll be eligible for all future contests that involve RSS subscription.

Click here to sign up for RSS subscription via email

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It’s hard to believe that I wrote my first blog post one year ago! For most of 2007 I blogged casually, made a lot of mistakes, and learned a lot. In fact, nearly all of the growth my blog has experienced came from early 2008. But rather than try and wrap up an entire year in just one blog post feel free to check out my archives on the side bar or you can also read five of my favorite posts here.

In any case, to celebrate my blog’s first birthday I’m offering up 5 of my 125 x 125 advertising slots and the 468 x 60 banner ad that runs just beneath the blog’s header. The contest will run in a similiar fashion to my blog rush advertising giveaway.

Here is how to enter the contest:

Blog about the contest

You receive 10 entries in the contest by blogging about my Blog’s Birthday Free Advertising contest. You do not have to dedicate a whole seperate blog post for the contest although I’d appreciate it if you did. In fact, if you want to just mention the contest in a weekly wrap up and link to this post that would be fine too!

*Blogging about the contest is also the only way to win the 468 x 60 banner ad.

Subscribe to my RSS Feed via email

You can earn 5 entries in the contest by subscribing to my RSS feed via email. Only verified subscribers will be eligible, so make sure you log into your email and click the link to verify your subscription. Also, as long as you stay subscribed to the RSS feed you’ll also have the chance to win prizes for any future contests I run on this blog that involve RSS subscription.

StumbleUpon my blog posts

You can also earn 3 entries per post you Stumble in this contest by simply going to one of my blog posts and giving me a “thumb’s up” via StumbleUpon. You may only use 3 stumbles as entries in this contest (for a total of 9 entries), but I won’t be upset if you like what I write enough to stumble more of my posts than that hah hah. You can simply send me a message via StumbleUpon and mention the posts you Stumble’d and I’ll tally your entries. Feel free to send me a friend request while you’re at it too.

I will tally up all the entries for the drawing of the five 125 x 125 ads as well as the blog posts for the 468 x 60 banner ad. Remember you do get 10 entries for blogging about the contest which will help your chances at earning one of the 125 x 125 ads in addition to helping you possibly win the 468 x 60 banner ad.

Contest ends April 9th and random winners will be announced on April 10th. You must claim your winning prize via emailing me chris [at] chrisguthrie.net and include your 125 x 125 banner ad by April 12th or the prize will be given to another randomly drawn. The ad slot will run from April 12th to May 12th after which if you would like to pay for the ad slot to continue running the ad you can do so (see my advertising page for pricing details).

Please note: I do reserve the right to ask for a different website or 125 x 125 banner ad if I deem the content to be inappropriate, although I’m sure there won’t be any problems.

Good Luck!

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Hello everyone, if you were wondering why I haven’t posted in a while it’s because I’ve been working with my great designer over at Weborithm on this new custom theme. Sergio over at SOSfactory did the character design, but the rest was done by weborithm.

I’m still working on a few modifications on my end here, but overall it’s finished.

What do you think of the design?

And yes - I am a Seahawks fan, but that wasn’t the reason for the choice in colors.

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For those of you that have been long time readers of my blog you may remember a post I wrote about the YouTube partner program after it first launched. I sent in my application so long ago I almost forgot I had applied.

Now after nearly three months I’ve finally heard back from YouTube about my application being denied. With the size of Google/You Tube I don’t think I can weazel my way into this publisher program like I’ve done in the past so many times. However, I thought I might slip into the program by barely meeting the requirements. But I really don’t have time to maintain a steady stream of halo videos that the program requires.

I plan to apply again using the profile I set up for one of my forums that receives user submitted game videos on a regular basis, but for now I believe the profile is still too small (see it here). However, I still believe video is a great way to help bring in new visitors to your website though as most of the people on YouTube will have never been to your website before anyway.

Seeing the email from the YouTube partner program reminds me of the Adsense Video Beta. I’m also really interested to see how people are doing with that program, as I am going to need way more video views to make it into that program.

Has anyone here made it into the YouTube partner program or as an Adsense Video Beta participant? If so, how have the programs performed?

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When it comes to monetizing websites, you should never rely on just one source of income. The logic behind this is obvious and if you haven’t heard of this concept by now, you really should start looking at using multiple different publisher programs to earn more money from your websites - (Check out my recommendations here if you’re looking for a few ideas). If your main revenue source starts to decline and you aren’t using other revenue streams it can be disastoruous so if you aren’t doing this now take the first step and start to use more than one publisher program on your websites.

While utilizing multiple different publisher programs on your websites is important, I’d like to take it one step further. You should also always be consantly experimenting with various publisher programs that offer the same type of advertising solution. In this case, I’ll be offering up some numbers on two different in text advertising programs. After running Kontera’s Content Link on one of my forums for several months I decided to try another in text advertising option - Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt. After negotiaiting my way into Vibrant Media’s program, I finally got the ad code installed on my forum a little over one month ago. But before I get to the numbers from Vibrant Media, I’d like to show you how Kontera performed on Dec 10th to Jan 10th:

Not that great huh? For 17k impressions it made just over $5. However, it’s important to note that 7 days into the above time frame I set the ads to only display to guests because I felt they are too intrusive for members. Either way, you can see why I wanted to try out a different in text advertising option to see if there was anything else that could do better than $5 in a month time period even though it was only on 17k in impressions. Here are the results from Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt program:

(Thanks for the misspelling of my company name by the way)

Wow this one did even worse! I logged into my account after running the ads for three weeks and saw that there were 0 clicks! Are you kidding me? I actually emailed my account rep over at Vibrant Media to see if there was a problem with the ad code and he assured me that there wasn’t. He ended up changing the link colors from the blue that matched the color of the links on the site back to the standard green but this didn’t do much to change the outcome. I wasn’t generating a ton of impressions, but it’s funny that for displaying close to 60,000 impressions the ads were only clicked 3 times!

Now that I’ve finished running IntelliTxt for a month, I may try out AdBrite next. I’d really like to find an in text advertising option that performs better than Kontera or I may just remove in text advertising completely because it already only accounts for a very small portion of the chunk of the pie. What I’ll probably end up doing is keeping the if conditionals to only display the in text ads to guests anyway though. It’s also important to note that while Kontera’s Content Link made more money than Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt on my forum it may be the opposite for you depending on your website’s niche, demographics etc. I can’t stress this enough, if you want to increase your online income than you must experiment with a wide variety of publisher programs!

Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss out on the next update to this ongoing case study of in text advertising when I display the results from AdBrite.

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