PROGRESS THREAD: (oddball)

[oddball]

Been trying to start doing business online lately and finally started. My first project was a website, one that provides information to the viewer. google adsense is my for now source of income. I am hoping that I can get enough visitors per month to eventually get actual advertisers.

I have had this site up for a few weeks now. Looks good, still working on it though. I add info and more pages every here and there. I am having some problems with google adsense atm, have to work on fixing that. Basically I am working on getting it to show up on google, bing, yahoo, as close to the first page as possible now. My goal is to get it on the first page, but I have some really big competitors.

I don't want to limit myself to one project so with a friend at school we are working on some more projects. One of our big ones is a forum to argue on. I'm not sure if it will be hit or miss, I figured I would try it though. I think if I make it nice, and get some people to start posting it could grow big. So far I have it hosted, working on the home page, and the forum is in the making. I have the main topics for the forum but I think it needs some fine tuning. I need to work on figuring out how paid memberships will be broken down as that will be a huge source of revenue. Hopefully we can get some big advertisers too.

I have a couple more projects we are working on that i will post in a little bit.

Please, please, if you have any information to help, lmk. Thanks.

[oddball]

Been working on the forum a lot the past 24 hours. At first I had planned for the forum to be the home page of the site but when I made it I made it so its www.xxxxx.com/forum (not sure if its considered spam to post it, so ill be safe and not). At first I was not happy but its great now. I made a homepage with topics and current events. So this will help with SEO I hope and make it more appealing. Viewers can take a quick look and there are links to forum topics.

[sunbridger]

Forums have low CTR for adsense. Not the best place to spend your time because they are inherently non-commercial and require significant time to manage (keep spammer away, mods, security, etc). Not to mention you'll need a critical mass of people for the forum to not be dead.

Imo, the return on hassle spent is not worth it. Especially if it's just arguing/political topic - CPC will be low.

SEO'ing that content site would probably be better use of your time.

I'd also remove adsense until you are building links, and only add it back when you have significant traffic.

[oddball]

adsense wont be on the forum, thats going on our other site. for now the forum will just exist. then I will offer paid memborships

I want to have more to the forum then just arguing. it will be a general forum too, i have an off topic but need to figure out how to expand it.