How should you start a forum? There are a few points that are extremely important to kick off a forum and getting new members! The first one is be dedicated as an admin. You should be the top poster in the beginning and create new topics to discuss. This should not be 10 new threads or something, but better make that a few hundred!

After you made a good amount of topics you can start promoting your forum! Get on relevant forums and get the word out about your forum. If people are browsing your forum and it has good and interesting topics on it (which you created before) people will join and even better, post!

If you succeeded to get around 100 members and they are posting on your topics, don’t stop! Reply again to them and create even more new topics. Create a community! A very good tactic is also to start contests! Some people will say: “people will only join because of the contest”. This is wrong, if you are running the contest for like 2 weeks, you have 2 weeks time to convince the people to stay at your forum! And they will stay if they feel accepted and there is a good community.

In the past we started a few forums as well and they succeeded, sold for good dollars! Recently we acquired a new technology forum and are trying to make this one an active place to be and make some good money from it!

The final words for getting a forum active: Don’t give up and be active!

Lot of webmasters gets too excited and are going to spam everywhere they can. This is not the right thing to do. It might get you a dozen of visitors in the first few days, but your reputation is screwed. For a good post on how to build your reputation as a blogger, check out this post from ViperChill.

Don’t promote your website when it is still under construction. No one wants to be on a website that is done for 50%. You should start promoting when your site is fully functional otherwise visitors might get bad impressions and will not return.

Wrong methods of website optimization. We still see websites that uses this method to hide text by changing its color with the background color, making it invisible to see for visitors (at first sight). Your site will get penalized for these actions, so better not try them. There are a lot of other black hat techniques that we are not goinig to discuss here, it might bring you at wrong ideas

We hope you got a idea now what not to do. Hope you learned something from it!

The following two strategies are often a quick fix for underperforming AdWords campaigns:

1. Optimize your landing pages for your visitors

Attracting customers to your website through Google AdWords is one thing. It is a completely different thing to persuade visitors to your website to fulfill the goal of your landing page, e.g. to buy your product.

Google AdWords cost you money as soon as a potential customer clicks on your AdWords ad. It makes no difference whether your destination URL is up or not, or whether the potential customer leaves your website prematurely because it loads too slowly.

If you want conversions, your landing page must have a clearly defined goal. It must guide the visitor and it must contain a clear call to action. Your website visitors must be able to see within seconds what’s in for them when they visit your website.

2. Optimize your landing pages for Google’s spider

Google uses the Quality Score to determine the position and the cost of an ad. If possible, include the text of the AdWords ad and the most important keywords on your landing page.

It often helps to optimize the landing page for the keywords with the highest click through rate (CTR). A web page that can get high rankings in the organic search results will also get a high Quality Score for that keyword.

Google’s Quality Score also includes other factors. Actually, Google uses four different Quality Scores to determine when and how ads are displayed.

Using tightly themed ad groups with related landing pages is the first step to get better results with Google AdWords.

Know how to promote your blog! In the past we had another blog running and with that experience in the back of our heads we are going to make Monetize Pro a real brand! First promoting it by commenting a lot on other (related) blogs. With good comments on other popular blogs, you are on a very good way getting traffic. People read comments and do click through!

Another way to promote your blog is making guest posts for other blogs! This is most likely one of the best techniques to promote your own blog! You should make these blog posts of very good quality so people are becoming interested in your blog and what you have to say on your own blog! This is something Monetize Pro is definitely going to do in the future.

Interact with other bloggers. Don’t hesitate to link to other blogs. When you give out links you are getting links back. It will be very hard to make your blog a success without the help of others. You need backlinks to gain popularity and getting more visitors!

Make sure your content is useful and people can do something with it or learn something from it. Ofcourse you can ramble about several topics that interests you, but don’t do this too much.