tony spencer

Martinibuster has a great post today on how to maximize your Adsense revenue on forums. I was going to post my additional tip on his blog entry but it looks like he has comments turned off so here goes.

In Martini’s entry he advises that you should edit your user’s forum post title’s to maximize the content theme of the page so that Adsense will retrieve targetted ads.

Rewrite member post titles so that they are COHERENT and MEAN SOMETHING. “Help,” and “I’ve got a Question” type titles are not going to help your forum rank well so why do forum operators not edit them to something meaningful?

This is absolutely true and furthermore it has a great impact on the future organic traffic you could receive from each post created. However, if you are running a successful forum with many posts created each day it would be extremely time consuming to manually edit all bad post titles. Also, loyal members get a bit pissy when you start altering other user’s posts.

Instead this method has worked extremely well for me. Create a sticky post which will be displayed at top of each forum with the title:

DON’T POST TITLES like “I have a question”

In the body of this sticky post:

Please don’t create posts with title’s “Can someone help me?” and “Help please”. Use the subject line appropriately.

Help us understand what your post is about in the subject line. You’ll have a better shot at actually getting the acvice you are looking for and it will help everyone else who is looking for the same information.

Thank you.

Also ask your moderators to refer any users to this sticky post if the user continues to write “Need help” and “Question” titles. I hardly ever see these anymore in my forum. Don’t work yourself to death. Get your userbase to do the work for you!