Forum or Blog for adsense?
Having made both forum and blog sites I can tell you that there’s a pretty big difference between the two. If your forum site is successful it’ll generate more money for your time. The users of the forum will generate 99% of the content for you so that part is done. All you have to do is make sure to place some ads on it that people will notice and moderate the forum a bit.
That said, it’s pretty tough to get to the point on a forum site to where the users are generating 99% of the content, it can take many years before you’re getting 50 posts a day. And it’s hard to attract users to a forum that isn’t full of posts, why would they want to come and post a topic if there aren’t already a lot of users? Most people coming to a forum have a specific question they want answered, they won’t spend the time to post a thread if they don’t think there are qualified users in the community to respond to them.
A blog can be easy or hard depending on what niche you’re going after. If you make the blog specific enough (shopping for cars instead of just shopping in general) you’ll get some traffic, but you don’t want some traffic, you want a lot of traffic with a blog. In order to gain that extra traffic you need to write original content for your blog posts. Search engines can detect duplicate content and they often don’t index the duplicates, they’ll just give the site that has more credibility (not yours if it’s full of duplicate content) the link in their search results. Aside from unique content you want your posts to be up to date. You won’t get much traffic if your blog only gets one post every two weeks.
Writing posts on a blog are not that tough. Using software like wordpress or blogger.com you can easily log into your blog as the admin and write a new post. Often you’ll be able to find someone else that has written about your blogs topic, you can just summarize what they’ve said in your own words. You can also copy/paste a paragraph or two straight from their article that conveys the point of their topic. But if you do so post a link to their article at the end of your post so that your readers can get the full story (plus you should always give credit to the original writer). Also do this sparingly, remember that duplicate content on your site will not be indexed.
If you can get a group of regular readers of your blog you’re more likely to get them to link to your blog from somewhere else on the internet. This is like user on a forum, except instead of generating the content the users are driving traffic. If you can get your blog on some blogrolls you’ll start to generate a lot of traffic.
Ad placement:
Getting traffic is only part of the equation. Now you’d like to convert some of that traffic into clicks on your adsense ads to make some money. Here, layout is key. Google has some heat maps to show where on the page that ads get clicked the most. The hot spots are the top middle of the page, the left side, and the bottom middle of the screen (place an ad just above the fold in the middle). For a forum site this seems like it would be an easy task. You simply put an ad at the top of the thread page, one down the left side, and one right after the first post on the page.
The disadvantage to forums is that there aren’t many out there that are optimised for adsense. If you write a blog you’ll easily find over a dozen themes for wordpress that are already made, freely avaible, and are optimized for putting adsense code on your website. You’ll have to know a good amount of programming to place the adsense code into your forum site.
