Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Competitor Analysis’ Category

Many Adsense users believe that Adsense revenue derived from forums is not as lucrative as revenue generated from regular content sites (all things being equal).  Well, I’m here to set the record straight and say it is very lucrative, but you need to know what you’re doing.

First of all, unless your website is generating at least 1000 unique visitors per day, don’t quit your day job!  One you’ve started hitting these visitor numbers then there are a number of opportunities to increase the revenue on your forum (my experience and the content of this post is about Invision Power Board, IPB) a great forum software and one I’ve used to power one of my very large community sites for over 5 years now!

Here are a few tips to help you maximise the revenue generated from your forums:

1) Ensure that your forum is very well targetted, general discussion forums are very difficult to monetise (unless your visitor levels are in the millions per month)

2) Install Google Analytics on your forum (it now has an adsense addon) and know which parts of your forum get the highest amount of traffic.

3) The adsense ad unit that’s worked best for me is the Large Rectangle (336X280) placed on the top left hand corner below the navigation bar (only in the highly trafficed subforums)

4) Do not be tempted to add Adsense code on the index of the forum.  it will only increase your ad impressions and decrease your CTR (this will eventually decrease your eCPM and eventually kill your revenue!)

5) Ensure that you’ve also included the same Ad block mentioned above on the lofi version of the forum (again top left hand side of the page above the Navigation).

6) Make sure you include the same block in the forum portal if you’ve activated it (act=home)

7) Finally, and this is really important!  Do not use the forum’s internal search engine but instead create a Google Internal search engine and include adsense for search on it, this has worked wonders on my site!

Hope these tips help you to better monetise you IPB forum!  Good luck!

Do you research your competitor’s seo strategy and activities?  If you don’t then you should, this is the only way to beat them at their own SEO game.

Firstly lets define a competitor. Comptetitors are not necessarily your traditional bricks and mortar competitors.  Your online competitors are the websites with the number one to five positions in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the keywords you’re targeting.

Now that you’ve discovered your true competitors, its time to start researching their seo strategy in order to discover why they are ranking on top of the serps.

There are a few things you can do immediately to get an overview of their seo strategy:

1. Perform a site colon search for their url on Google.  This will show you all the pages in their site listed in Google.  So for example if you’re trying to research my site, you would typed in the Google search box site:omarkattan.com. Analysing the results of the site colon test you can quickly find out if their doing seo or not and if they are, you can find out what keywords their trying to target in their meta tags.   

2. Next, go to Yahoo! and perform a link colon for their url.  This will take you to Yahoo’s site explorer where you can start researching your competitor’s link popularity.   Make sure to select the drop down options of “Except from this Domain” and “Entire Site”  This will exclude any internal links and will show links pointing to the entire site, not just the homepage.

3. Go to Technorati and type in the domain name into the search box.  This will show you how popular your competitor is in the blogosphere

4. Go to Google image search and type the domain name in the search box.  his will show you if their images are optimised to show up in the search results (an increasingly important factor) as Universal Search is becoming the norm.

5. Go to YouTube and type in their URL, this will show you if their optimising for video search, again a universal search biggy.

The above are but a few factors you can measure, there are many more, but if you start with the above, you’ll be in a better position to implement a winning seo strategy.