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Before I start this post I would like to appologise to our readers for my long absence from payment blogger. I am in the army for the last 3 months (and I will be there for 9 more months) so time is very limited.

Anyway, enough with me, let’s talk about making money with forums. In this post I wont tell you how to monetize a forum web site, but how you can earn money by selling services and products on other forums. Personally I use these techniques frequently with webmaster forums to sell sites or ads. It doesn’t matter if you are looking to sell a site, an advertising package or some ebook you wrote there are a few things you should take care of.

Reputation

Everything in the business world is reputation. In forums this is even more important as reputation is “trackable”. Most forums have the reputation badge, while others (like DP) have a specific user rating for transactions with other members called itrader. So let’s say you start right now with a forum, you have registered an account with the forum and you are ready to sell your product/service. At that point I would suggest you to stop what are you doing and pay attention to your reputation. Without a strong reputation in the forum it doesn’t matter if you give gold for free because none is going to buy from you.

Building a “name” in the community

Ok that part is time consuming, but it is very important as long as you wish to earn some money in the forum you have just got in. Bellow are a few things that you have to do before posting any offer:

Post in the forums

A member with no posts is not a member. You need to make as much posts as you can. Don’t post stuff like “Thanks, I like this” but try to be informative and helpful to the other members. By showing them that you know about what you are talking will create trust from the community.

Give something for free

People is going crazy when you offer them something for free. It doesn’t matter if this is a 2 page ebook or a descriptive article on a technique you are using. If you give them something for free your reputation will increase so give it a try.

Buy stuff from the marketplace

If there is a marketplace with itrader, then you should buy a few things before try to sell something. This is because this way you will be able to have a positive feedback itrader that you make you look more trustful to your future buyers.

Time to make some money

Ok now you are a well known member in the community with reputation and itrader, so you can post an offer. At this part the most important factor is of course the product you are selling, but still there are a few things that you can do to maximize your chances:

• Try to be as descriptive as possible
• Rate your own thread (yeah people like to see 5 stars in the top of the thread)
• Make people bump your thread. How? Just leave a bit of information for pms so everyone will post “Please pm me details”

That’s it, I hope this article was helpful enough

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Blackhat SEO: Simply means techniques that might get you penalised or banned from a major search engine. Blackhat is a very generic term and the Blackhat Forums do often include email marketing techniques that most would consider spam. This is not an endorsement of such techniques.

Quadzilla opened up his SEO Blackhat forums on Christmas day for a limited time as a Christmas present so I spent half an hour looking round, I was pretty disappointed and I left feeling sorry for those members who spent their hard earned cash on membership.

Let me put some background to this post, Quadzilla Blackhat forums cost $100 a month membership fee, not to steep but enough to make most people think twice. For the $100 you are promised a forum that has some top notch experts and to be fair there are some pretty impressive guys in there. The issue I have is they are not talking.
So what if you are a;

• Newbies ??? If you???re a newbie then you are after questions being answered, so it was disappointing to see lots of unanswered questions, sure most of them were very newbie???ish but still this is not the place to find answers.
• Intermediate ??? You probably will want to go straight to the parasite hosting and large database section and will be disappointed, Syndk8 and Wickedfire have discussions all at a similar level.
• Advanced ??? You will want to go to the labs, to see the sophisticated cutting edge stuff and yep you guessed it nothing sophisticated or cutting edge mostly old posts.

The overall feeling was one of depressing lingering and slow death, which is a shame because it could have been so much more. Of course with 30 minutes I did not read every post and I???m sure there are a few gems but if I???m going to spend $100 a month I expect a forum that is organised, is moderated, has question answered or at least be told my question wasn???t appropriate. I would want to see stickies with the cutting edge latest ideas. I would not want to shift through posts looking in vein for a thread which might answer my question though to be fair this would not take to longer, in that respect it does keep one of its promises, their are not 100s of threads to crawl through.

Quadzilla forums are not the only places to find Blackhat/Greyhat SEO information as already indicated Wickedfire and Syndk8 are both excellent places to find information on various techniques, Wickedfire also offers a paid for area, which is either invitation only or by paying $55 a month which is significantly less.

There is one good thing to come out of the Christmas day present, it reminded me to resubscribe to SEO Egghead a fantastic blog, so not all bad.

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I have held off talking about about Entrecard until I had tried it for a couple of weeks but the results are in.

What is Entrecard

Put simply its a 125×125 banner exchange but you banner is displayed only once per day per site, you pay a certain number of credits to have your banner displayed on a specific site. Credits are gained based on people dropping cards on you and you dropping cards on other sites.

Stats according to Entrecard

Specific stats

Card Drops

Advert Clicks

Organic Clicks – Those coming from Entrecard

Is it worth it?

Well we have had some pretty targeted traffic from Entrecard but its also a lot of work chasing after credits, its very much a case of the big sites get bigger and the smaller sites have to work harder. But it doesn’t have the flaws of a scheme like BlogRush, and no money swaps hand, overall I think its not a bad system but I suspect at the end of the month we will remove the badge depending on how it goes. My Font site has had very little traffic so its currently very much geared towards money making blogs.

Want to try it without working hard?

We have a few credits to give away for those who want to try it, so for your chance to win simply tell us your thoughts either in a comment or trackback to this post or one of the follow up posts marked with win logo!

• First price – 150 credits
• 3 Runners Up – enough credits to advertise here

small print; what I say goes, credits given only for valid comments or trackback if your comment doesn’t get published you will not win, winners will be selected at random from valid entries and contacted via email for comments, or via the sites contact form if trackback. hey you get the idea! Good luck
Closing date oh shall we say a weeks time which would be Christmas day! 25/12/2007

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Facebook opened up its advertising to make it easier for anyone to publish ads on their network, we all waited with baited breath and after a month or so the results are in.

Facebook Ads….
Sort of sucks

The general public jury
From comments here and around the web the overall consensus has been little or no visits from Facebook users, on the good side those reporting visits have high conversions. Chatting and gathering statistics the highly targeted ads, those looking at specific gender, age and location had the highest click through rate sitting at just under 0.5% while un-targetted traffic was sitting at the 0.42% mark these are not staggering statistics. Conversions were much more positive with the a conversion rate for affiliate offers at just under 6% which is staggering high one user was reporting a conversion rate of 86% though by his own admission he had under 100 visits. Blogs and social sites converted better then more traditional sites. Zip and email submits also did well but many people reporting that ads were being cancelled. This was the biggest complaint Facebook advertising standards policy is incredibly patchy with users being banned for little or no reason while others were getting away with murder (not literally) out of my 4 test campaigns I had 1 blocked as having sexual references! In case you are wondering here is the sexual reference in question,

Come on boys and join the party

Clearly a deeply offensive phrase! Overall few people were grumbling about the spiral costs of campaigns but I suspect this was more due to the lack of volume which meant that most people paying per click were not reaching their daily limit.

My own experience
My little test which I discussed here, had a series of 4 campaigns running on it, 1 was blocked as above 1 had a CTR of 1.2% and a conversion rate of 4.6% and while it ran I covered costs and made about 3% profit on the campaign. The second campaign had a much lower conversion rate and a much more tighter demographic, its CTR was 0.8% but was rewarded with a higher conversion rate of 4.9% however with the increased cost per click this campaign barely broke even. The final campaign failed miserably resulting in just 4 clicks and no converts.

Facebook needs to play fair?
So what went wrong why such low clicks? Well it goes back to why you were targeting Facebook users in the first place, they are a walled garden Facebook ads are not striking and do not appear within the users normal click area so many users simply don’t see the adverts. But the real issue is with Facebook ad policy I’m all for rules don’t get me wrong but you need to apply rules fairly which from my experience and the feedback given they seem not to be doing.

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Sorry for the vanishing act, a period of being unwell and of course Nick in the Army now! means we were a little light on posts.

Which one is the devil?
Unless you have been living under a large stone for the last week you couldn’t have failed to notice to massive corporations signed a rather large deal. As of last week limited tests were being carried out to provide PDF writers the ability to embed adverts into their PDFs. The adverts are provide by Yahoo and are on a PPC basis, if you happen to live in the US you can run along and join the beta program for the rest of us we will have to be content with the information on the Adobe Labs site.

So how does it work?
PDF writers upload their finished works to adobe site, the PDF is then scanned and adverts inserted into the PDF. These ads will then display in the right hand side of Adobe Reader see a screenshot. A couple of obvious limitations jump out of you, the ads will only be displayed in Adobe Reader, and no doubt will make your PDf unusable in other readers, what happens when the Ebook is read offline? I know it might not have occurred to Yahoo but we don’t all live in a connected 24/7 world.

So will it work?
Well Ebooks have something of a bad image indeed Jon the admin at Wickedfire went so far as to create a thread providing backdoor access to some of in his opinion worst Ebooks out there. The idea was if people saw how bad these books were people wouldn’t waste their money do I condone his actions? Not really but I have even less sympathy for the Ebook writers many of whom are scam artists. On an interesting aside the stunt has sort of backfired with the thread becoming one of the most popular threads on the board with people requesting books not as Jon hoped to see how bad they are but to save buying them. Advertising in Ebooks is normally done through affiliate links, sponsored pages etc in much the same way as traditional magazines use advertising. The medium doesn’t allow much flexibility so this new revenue stream may tempt people to drop or remove prices from their Ebooks this for many books would be a good thing but ultimately you are placing your faith in a locked system which many people will not be part of, it is like having your advertising running through an ActiveX control.

PDFs in Search results
One indirect benefit of this hook up will be the technology used to scan documents to determine what ads to place this could have a direct effect on how Yahoo Crawls and ranks PDFs in search results, this could mean an increase in PDFs on the front page of SERPs. Many people ignore PDFs and other media in their search strategies but it maybe time to re-evaluate this.

Final thought
Currently Adobe and Yahoo currently only plan to show ads on PDFs that have passed through their filter system but the functionality will be (or is) built into every Adobe Reader how long before they press the button and include ads in all PDFs? If that is a scary thought have a look at Foxit PDF reader as an alternative for windows.