Forum Project I Update

[wmspringer]

Show of hands...how many people from the original forum project are still in? I went out looking for appropriate sites to put in my links section, but I could only find three relevant project sites that appeared to be still updating.

Anyway, here's where I am on mine: I now have my site looking pretty much the way I want it to, with my forum up and running (although I don't know if I have any real users in it yet) I still have very little traffic and very low adsense earnings, but I've just started some advertising that I hope will improve that.

Twenties Retirement
Forum

[maxtower]

I am still in.

www.howtobuywebsites.net

I actually have a couple regular readers now that I am posting regularly. Maybe a few more months of this and I'll have enough traffic to monetize.

[lgas]

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I am still in.

www.howtobuywebsites.net

I actually have a couple regular readers now that I am posting regularly. Maybe a few more months of this and I'll have enough traffic to monetize.

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I think you meant "not $50k nice" in your post about movie vault.

Edited to add: I like your site. I subscribed. I use NetNewsWire which puts a big subscribe button in the bottom of the window. I took a second to look for the RSS subscribe link before remembering I could just click the button in NetNetsWire... I eventually noticed them at the bottom of the page, but I think you'd be better off making them more prominent. Or at least adding one of those orange RSS buttons at the top of the nav part of the page as well.

[maxtower]

Yeah, I want to ad feedburner, but I want to make sure I have a couple of subscribers first. I am going to switch themes(skins) on the page soon anyway. I don't like red too much. It makes my head hurt.
Thanks for correcting my post. I'll go in an edit it now.

wmspringer, I guess its just you and me carrying the torch. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[lgas]

I was never officially a participant in the original forum project but FWIW, it inspired me to get off my ass and do some of the projects I wanted to do anyway, so I consider myself an honorary particpant.

I've put up a couple of sites that are tangentially related to the forum project:

The Residualist - My blog about passive income. I haven't attempted to monetize this yet other than to sign up for AGLOCO and include my affiliate link in a post about it. My plan is to wait until I have lots of good content then try to attract a large audience before implementing AdSense, text link ads, etc. etc.

RubyRoll - This is a blog aggregator for the ruby programming language. It's monetized with AdSense. So far it's been up for a couple of months and I've made $11.03. Not exactly a huge win, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons when creating it and I now have the software ready to turn around and apply to a different (more profitable) niche in the future. (For what it's worth, the Ruby programming language is probably the least monetizable thing on the planet, at least in terms of internet marketing tactics). This site did also land me a couple of inqueries about hiring my consulting company (which I promote in the About page) for various gigs. I didn't close any of the deals though because none of them were worth it.

As mentioned in another post I've also tried some direct AdWords->ClickBank arbitrage which so far I have spent about $80 to make about $20... but again it's been a great learning experience.

[wmspringer]

howtobuywebsites I'm already linked to; I'll have to check out that passive income blog.

Igas, did I ever tell you your avatar makes my head hurt? [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[maxtower]

I think a lot of the easy money on Adwords is gone. You should try MS Adcenter because there is less competition. Also I have heard Adbrite can be profitable.

I'll link to both your sites.

I would have thought ruby would be more profitable, but tech types don't click many ads I guess. You would do better offering something they would want and be willing to pay for.

[lgas]

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I think a lot of the easy money on Adwords is gone. You should try MS Adcenter because there is less competition. Also I have heard Adbrite can be profitable.

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I'll definitely check into these.

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I'll link to both your sites.

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Thanks, I appreciate it.

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I would have thought ruby would be more profitable, but tech types don't click many ads I guess. You would do better offering something they would want and be willing to pay for.

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I think there are many reasons why ruby is a bad choice, among them:

1. As you said, techies in general are not often inclined to click ads (and are more likely to have ad blockers installed).
2. "Ruby" probably attracts ads for stuff like Jewelry stores, etc. Although I think in general Google is smart enough to figure out the right context.
3. "Ruby on Rails" is a very popular framework in the ruby community and I think it attracts false positives for stuff like trains and railroads. Again, Google probably figures it out pretty well, but for example I added my site at StumbleUpon and somehow go classified as having to do with railroads or something. I have tried to fix this many times but it keeps winding up there again and again.

But most importantly:

4. Ruby is free. Ruby on Rails is free. There are a couple of commercial tools that relate to ruby on rails, but for the most part people use free IDEs, free plugins, free templates, etc. So, there's just not a lot of stuff to sell or people to buy it in the "ruby" niche. If I had the time I would approach some of the vendors that sell expensive IDEs, debuggers, etc. (or even cheap but awesome ones like TextMate) and try to do direct affiliate/ad sales... but I don't have the time... yet.

Another problem is that a lot of the stuff that might be monetizable in the ruby niche is not ruby specific. Like most major users of ruby/rails probably spend or influence spending on lots of web hosting decisions, hardware purchases, etc. I'm not sure if Google or anyone else is smart enough to serve these types of ads.

[lgas]

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Lgas, did I ever tell you your avatar makes my head hurt? [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

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I don't know if you have specifically, but I get that a lot. As soon as I find a cooler one I'll change it, but I haven't found one that strikes my fancy yet.

[maxtower]

Igas,

One thing you could look into is hosting affiliate sales. Ruby would seem to be related to that, since ruby developers are likely to need hosting at some point. I think hostgator pays out quite a bit to affiliates.