Adsense

Place your ads at the right place. Positioning the ads is an important thing.. Not sure if you have placed it at right place or not..

Groovystar,

I've run a forum that had quite a bit of traffic. I found that the regulars, who make up the bulk majority of traffic, become blind to the ads very quickly. You could place them right in their faces, but that's only going to annoy them as well. You could try to put them near things that get clicked on a lot, but that'll create low converting clicks and you'll end up smart priced.

I'm not trying to invent a doomsday scenario. I just never had luck with Adsense and forums. I'd DEFINITELY put Three huge image banners in the archives. That traffic will all be from search engines, and you can get the impressions and quite a few clicks surprisingly from there. But on the main forum, I'd find a better way of monetising. I failed at Adsense on a forum. Maybe you will do better. Or maybe there is a better way.

By the way, I've visited your forums from your signature before. I think it's pretty cool what you have going on. I haven't read the books, but RPG's are soooo fun.

lol thank you! They are a lot of fun! Mine doesn't follow the books, either, it just appeals most to fans of the books, and uses the same setting. Ours is just expensive to keep going, I pay $50 a month for hosting it because of its high traffic. The problem circles back to my very poor numbers of guests coming in, because I had a feeling that it's guests clicking the ads most often. I figure that over time, word of mouth will help.

I'm trying to expand discussion of other fandoms as well as Warriors, since a lot of our members are fans of other things too and we have long had a fandom area but it has never been very active. So we revamped it a couple of days ago and will see how that goes. I remember how the Pojo started out as just a pokemon forum but over time they became way more successful by expanding to other genres.

Thanks for your feedback, guys! If Adsense isn't so great for a forum, do you know of methods that are better?

I was just on another forum related to computers and noticed they had Kontera links. That might be something you could try, since it'll target other things than just Warrior Cats (I'm guessing that's what Adsense is doing?). That may help you target random things you'd never think of. I hear it's not super easy to get accepted into it, but I'd say that's worth a shot.

Thank you for the suggestion, what is Kontera?

It's a "contextual in-text advertising" program. So basically, maybe someone randomly in your forum ends up typing the word "camcorder." Kontera may underline that word, and when someone hovers over it, it pops open an advertisement. The ad disappears if they stop hovering over it. If they click it, you get paid. So rather than targeting the page, it targets words, which would probably be better for your forum, since it's mainly around that book series.

You must be in a low paying niche. Play around with ad positions/colors and see what works.

Ad relevancy is an important thing. I just checked your forum and the ads are quite irrelevant. I don't know maybe it is because where I am located and I don't know much about your visitor profile either. But, note that your forum is not a niche based-forum, it is a RPG forum and you will not find much relevant adsense ads for that.

Maybe you could try a bigger image-only ad block which will mostly have online game ads. Or other than adsense, you might try finding something(an affiliate product, an offer) that will appeal to your visitors.