Plugging the Revenue Holes in your vBulletin Forum
October 1, 2008 by Soliloquy · 3 Comments
All serious webmasters have spent hours working on monetizing their vBulletin forums, making sure their AdSense ads are correctly positioned, colored, and filtered, and that their Search Engine Optimization is top-notch. But many leave small gaps in their monetization strategies; their AdSense ads might be showing too many public service announcements, for instance. Or members could be recommending books and movies from Amazon to each other without your affiliate ID getting in the links. Such things may not affect your bottom line very much each month, but over time, and with increased readership, these losses could add up. In these tough economic times, it’s worth taking a few minutes to plug these revenue holes.
Amazon
You don’t have to be actively pushing books, movies, and other items from Amazon to make a few bucks from it; sometimes your members will happily do it for you. You can use the Dynamic Amazon Links mod to insert your Amazon affiliate ID any time one of your members links to an Amazon page. Simply follow these steps:
- If you haven’t already, go sign up for an Amazon Associates account.
- Download Dynamic Amazon Links
- Edit the functions_amazon_links.php file to include your associates ID, then import vbulletin-plugins.xml via the Plugin Manager. The Dynamic Amazon Links plugin also works with Amazon.de and Amazon.ca.
There are other mods like Geek Auto-Linker that do much the same thing, but Dynamic Amazon Links is free and easy to implement. GAL has many other functions and can even format those Amazon links with product images, so if your members want to do book or movie reviews for each other that’s something you should consider.
Through the Eyes of the Color Blind
Did you know about 1% of all males have protanopia, the most common form of color blindness? If you’re getting 1000 men visiting your site each day, that’s 10 who may have trouble distinguishing your ad colors. Run your page through the [url=http://colorfilter.wickline.org/]Colorblind Web Page Filter[/url] to see if you have any trouble reading it.
Put Adsense Banners in your Archive
I’ve discovered that some of my overseas members actually prefer to browse in the archives; it loads faster and doesn’t have any distracting graphics. If I didn’t have my AdSense ads in the archive, they’d probably never see any ads at all. It’s very simple to implement, too. Download the mod at Put AdSense Banners in your Archive.
