The other day Joe from BlackBerry Os left a comment on another post about adding ads to the mobile style and wanted to know how to ad an advertisement above the logo in the vBulletin Mobile Style.

So I thought I would so a post on how to do it:

In your admincp got to your mobile style and find Header, Open the header template and find:

<div id="header"> 

(should be the second line)

And add your ad code above

My current code looks like this

<div align="center"><a href="URL">
<img src="IMAGE AD" alt="Your Ad Text Here"/></a> </div>

This will display adds on every page of your site in the header. For the best results, I would suggest using a 320×50 ad spot.

Please let me know if you have any questions or post in the comments if you need any help.

A couple weeks ago I showed you how to add Goolge Adsense to your vBulletin Mobile Sytle. I got an email from someone looking to add Adsense between the first and last post in a thread.

So I’m happy to share how to do it here.

First open up you mobile suite under your style manager in your admincp

Open your postpit_legacy and add this to the very bottom:

<vb:if condition="$post[postcount] % $vboptions[maxposts] == 1 OR $post['islastshown']">

<center>

YOUR AD CODE HERE

<br />
<br />
</center>
</vb:if>

There are lots of different variables that you can use like showing ads just to certain users or non members or show only in certain forums, etc. This code will also work in the regular vBulletin style.

In the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with vBulletin’s Premium Mobile Style and adding ads here and there. Currently I am testing it out Adsense for Mobile Content.

Adding the ads is pretty easy, In your admincp got to your mobile style and find FORUMDISPLAY, Open the FORUMDISPLAY template and find

<vb:if condition="$show['threadslist']">
			<div id="threadlist">

			{vb:raw pagenav}

add your ad code below. You will also want to align it to the center.

Like I said I am using Adsense for Mobile Content and using a 320X50 size ad. Starting in March I will start selling private ads on the mobile style. I just launched the mobile style this week and want to get a overview of it being used on a daily and monthly basis.

Recently I watched a Google adsense webinar and it was on optimizing adsense on your forum.  Optimzing involves trying to achieve the best possible CTR.  The better click through rate you have the more ad clicks you will receive.  This means more potential earnings.

The Adsense webinar talks about:

• Where to place Ads
• What sizes of ad to use.
• Colours Palette
• Custom Channels
• Placement targeting.

I would like you to check out this because there is a wealth of information located in there.   Go to this Google help link and scroll down, the webinar is called “Make the most of your forum with AdSense“

In a recent article I listed 5 ways to make money from a forum and one method which I listed was having a subscriber/premium section on your forum.

What is a Premium Section?

A Premium section is basically a forum in which only special members can access it. Those special members being the ones that have paid a fee set by you to see the forum. The Premium section will usually contain unique information that cannot be found else where on the web or perhaps access to downloads in which regular members do not have access too.

Setting Up Your Premium Section

Setting up your premium section is very easy. It only requires you to create a sales page, create a premium forum and create a premium member group.

The sales page is where you will give information such as the benefits of buying a premium membership aswell as the prices. You will also want it to contain a link to paypal or whatever payment method you request for your forum.

You will then want to create a premium members group for your forum. This group will have access to the forum of unique information I was talking about earlier aswell as the rest of the regular forum. It’s also good practice to give these members a different colour of username so that they stand out from the crowd, maybe a custom title image or maybe some extra mailbox space on the forum or extra signature space.

Creating the forum is super easy, it’s just creating another forum you just have to set up the permissions of the forum to allow the premium members in and keep the non-premium members out.

Deciding a Price

Deciding the price of the membership is the hardest task. You will have to think to yourself how good is your information you are providing in this forum? How will they benefit from this forum? These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself when deciding a price. You also need to take into consideration if you make it too high that people may not buy and if you make it too low you could lose money. It’s all about personal feeling at this stage. Roughly, I usually set mine about $20 for a lifetime.

Advertising the Premium Section

In order to make the sales you will have to advertise your sales page to the rest of the forum. Create announcements, create blog posts, post on twitter and other social network sites, and most importantly have the page visible and not hiding away. In order to generate sales you need exposure so it’s best not to hide it away.

Watch The Money Role in…

Now you have your subscribers section set up you can watch the money role in. I find it’s a great way to make money of your forum and if set up correctly you could make a decent bit from it. You just have to make sure you have the member base and the activity count to do it.

Time For You to Talk

Do you have a subscribers section? Do you feel it’s a good way to generate money from your forum? What price do you recommend? Post yout thoughts below.

Once you have a decent amount of traffic and a decent memberbase you may feel it is time for you to start to cover your hosting costing for the month or make a profitable business. In this Blog post I am going to list 5 ways of making money of your forum.

Pay Per Click Advertising (CPC) – Adsense

Adsense is the most commonly used CPC advertising programs for forums. With good traffic and good positioning this program can turn over three to five digits per month covering your hosting and your mortgage Make sure you blend your ads with your background and that your don’t harass your users by putting them in awkward positions that would annoy them.  You would just lose traffic.

Pay Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) – TribalFusion

Tribalfusion is an ad network which pays you money every time an ad is displayed one thousand  times on your forum. This can be very effective for forums because the amount of page views you get  daily are excessively more than you would get from a website or a blog.

Subscriber Section

Having a section which has only available to members who pay a small fee to access is another great method of making money from your forum.   A subscriber section.  Members pay a small fee to get access to exclusive forums and downloads.  Sometimes if your community is that well established and setup people will just subscribe just so they can help the forum out.

Advertising Spots

Offering spots where other companies and users can place their ads on your forum is another way to generate money from your forum. For example a company will pay you $20 a month to display their ad continually. The more popular your forum becomes the greater the price advertisers will have to pay you to get their ads in your spots because you will start to receive more offers from different companies. This method only tends to work if you have a well-known and established forum in your niche.  As marketers only want the best for their companies.

Affiliate Marketing

It’s not a big method in the forum administrating industry but you can still sell products from your forum. For example if you have a designer clothes forum you may go to designer shops online and look for affiliate programs associated with that site. You then receive a commission from the products that your users buy from that shop.

These are just a few methods which you can use to generate money from your forum. Without constant traffic you will generate nothing from your forum. It is important to realise that with a community you won’t be able to produce any income therefore it is important to build up a member base first before adding ads and other money generating methods.

Do you find these methods effective? Do you use other methods? I would love to hear so don’t hesitate to post a comment.

Photo by AMagill

Ad placement can be a very picky thing.  We spend multiple hours a day trying to pick the best ad positions for our forum and sometimes it still fails us and we have to go back and spend more time on this matter.  Putting ads in your forum is a very debatable subject.  Some people say it destroys traffic, some people say it’s fine.  My opinion is if you place your ad correctly it will not destroy the professional look of your forum.   In this Blog post I am going to give you my tips and what worked for me on ad placement.

Below The Nav Bar

The first place I recommend and which gave me good click through rates is just beneath the navigation bar.  When the user loads your homepage (or any page) for the first time this is what the user will see straight away.  That’s good.  If the user sees the ad that will increase the chances of it being clicked therefore putting money in your pocket.  I can’t stress enough though that you blend your ads into the back ground.  There is nothing worse than a distracting ad and the matter of the fact is it will hamper your traffic.

Put Ads In between Posts In Threads

Another place that worked for me was the ads inlined with threads.  For example displaying an ad after a certain amount of posts in a thread.  I experimented with this a lot and found no real difference between what posts you put the ads after but my results showed me that after the first post and tenth post produced the most income.  The differences were very little.  So I don’t think it matters where you place them when they are inlined as long as there is one ad after the first post.

Don’t Put Ads In Thread Starter Posts

I have seen a lot of forums do this.  It’s method I don’t recommend as it’s very ugly looking.  It makes your forum look unprofessional and one could only imagine what it would do to your traffic.  Let’s have a little think.  If you have ads in your thread started posts on your forum and you are competing with a forum of similar niche and rank where do you think the visitors will go to?  Yeah, the forum that does not have ads in the started thread posts.

Rapping It Up

The key to successfully positioning ads is to make your forum look professional.  Don’t stick them in places where they look out of place, make them fit in nicely with their surrounding.

Do you have different ad tips?  Do you use ads at all?  Come and tell us, we love to hear from you.

Picture by Stephen Edgar – Netweb