Newb Question: Finance Forums

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BNWFinance

BNWFinance

$100/day in 100 days.....
Aug 10, 2006
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Margaritaville
www.myfinanceforum.com
The background:
My partner and I have been working hard to develop a personal finance set of sites revolving around our forums, MyFinanceForum.com. We currently have 3 main sites that we researched, know something about and have some great content about. We tried to focus the sites on one topic each and our Google AdSense seems to be well targetted to the site content. We now have 2 more sites just about ready to go online. We started in January 2006, and it is now near the end of August 2006.

Here's the problem:
After this much time, even with great, targetted content, spiders by MSN, Yahoo, and Google (and great placement on MSN), our traffic is still not enough to generate decent AdSense revenue. We tried some limited link-building activities using Arelis, but still do not have any committments from anyone to link relevant sites (lots of requests to link totally irrelevant sites, though...). Our CTR for AdSense seems fine (around 10-13% or so) but we just aren't seeing the traffic needed to capitalize on this. We recently switched over our main site from AdSense to a PHPAdsNew-based Commission Junction campaign. This was even worse. The CTR fell dramatically and resulted in no revenue for the month of August. We have submitted the site to the usual suspects (link directories, search engines, etc) and the traffic is steady (about 200-300 uniques/month) but puny.

Any suggestions? We're both quite new at this and have been trying to follow the general tips and hints we find, but even with solid content, its difficult to get the traffic. What are we doing incorrectly?
 


From what I've read YPN is a better pick for finance type sites. Have you tried them yet?
 
BNWFinance said:
Is this the YPN you speak of:
http://publisher.yahoo.com/ ?
Click to expand...
Yes. From what I've heard is that YPN is great for finance sites. As for the traffic issue have you tried posting in other finance forums with your sites in your sig? or some cheap PPC, maybe? Also constant work on SEO of your sites could help. Maybe even combining the 3 sites you have (if content related, ie: finance). Otherwise, I'm new at this also and am learning yet myself.
 
Your problem isn't the ad program, its the traffic. You should be seeing 200-300 uniques a day for starters, not a month. Network with other personal finance bloggers out there; there are tons of them and they do give links. I'd give you my list but I just deleted it from bloglines last week (kind of stupid in retrospect.)
 
Andrew said:
Your problem isn't the ad program, its the traffic. You should be seeing 200-300 uniques a day for starters, not a month. Network with other personal finance bloggers out there; there are tons of them and they do give links. I'd give you my list but I just deleted it from bloglines last week (kind of stupid in retrospect.)
Click to expand...

I agree. My partner is the SEO master, so that should be okay, its just the limited traffic isn't what we need. I will check out the finance blog scene as you suggest. Thanks for all the help, everyone.
 
Some advice for you guys..

You're targeting a very profitable niche, so don't worry about ad revenue just yet. Your goal should be to attract new users and keep them there, so that they can tell their friends and peers about it and bring in more, free users. The cash from ads are there without doing much research. Revenue should always be your last priority when making a forum, no matter what topic it is.

Take this forum for instance. I know I can easily slap some ads on top and make this place profitable in under a day, but I don't want to because I don't think the forum is mature enough for it. But then you look at other forums, who start off right away with ad placements everywhere, and that's just plain ugly and makes them seem like everyone else.

Your goal as a forum owner is to keep your forum unique and different from the rest of your competitors. Sure, the revenue is a big issue I bet, even as a startup, but you should not expect to be in the black until you have lots of return users and lots of great topics and content being discussed.

Something else you may want to consider is offering free services to boost usability and value of your forum. Depending on the type of finance it is, maybe make a calculator of some sort, or something that automates some type of financial process. You should be churning out new ideas to increase users and content before you focus on revenue, and that's the bottom line. Because what good is a forum full of ads when you don't have a shitload of people to click and view them?

:2twocents:
 
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