http://www.nycmetalshows.com/
http://www.metal-shows.com/
http://www.returntothepit.com/
http://www.amimetalornot.com/

they all have "sponsor links" at the bottom of the page.
this is how they work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense
basically this site gets a little bit of money for people clicking on the links.
so if you look below and see something that you like, a click on it would help support this site in a non-intrusive manner.

If you read the rules, I can't really ask people to click... but I can state the facts above and you can read between the lines.

I also still have direct marketing banners at the top of the page

I clicked...I x'ed out...He wins!

these don't appear to link to the kind of sites that infiltrate your system with spyware or any of that shit.

Am I looking for a Los Angeles Blues band?

HELLS TO THE YEAH

um, youre advertising "black christian singles"??

THATS EXACTLY WHATS I WAS LOOKING FOR!
THANKS RTTP!!

Enter the 5th Door
Seeking bold new experiences? Visit the Official 5th Door Blog
www.the5thdoor.com

THERE'S A 5TH DOOR?!?

I'm still exploring the possibilities of doors 1, 2 and 3 - do I have to find out where the 4th door is, or can I skip straight to 5? Will I need hand cream?

it's right there behind the knee.

ok, the support that people showed yesterday for rttp through the links at the bottom of the site was awesome. That level of support wold completely pay for this server. thank you.

UP

thanks.

please be very wary with the way you are directing your user base to click google adsense advertisements. i am of the opinion you are breaking our terms of use. also, might i suggest integrating amazon / ebay affiliate links with cds / merch relevant to bands being discussed in a thread? this is relatively easy to do, and would offer a couple of things:
-you won't be breaking google adsense's ToS by directing your users to click ads they aren't truly interested in
-over time, click through ratio will go down, your traffic won't convert well on the backend for the advertiser, and therefore your adsense quality score will drop, leaving you with less clicks that pay less per click
-with amazon or ebay (or similar) affiliate links, contextually based, you will be showing your users items they are truly interested in, and will remain relevant constantly, therefore they will be more likely to click through and make a purchase, earning you a commission
-one thing to note, this commission is not just for the item in question. with ebay, i believe the cookie lasts a full 30 days and anything the user bids on and wins or straight out buys, you will earn a commission on. i believe the amazon cookie only lasts for that session (sucks)

i think you will start to see your daily adsense rev drop very quickly, and i encourage you to look at other options. (perhaps there are some metal / extreme music themed affiliate programs that pay better that i am unaware of?)

-Concerned Google Adsense Representative

a couple points to add:

-if you want to target your google adsense ads better, you need add better meta tags, e.g., description and keywords. also, i would make search engine friendly URLs, you could easily make the page name be the title of the thread with prepositions and conjuctions taken out, separated by dashes (better than underscores in most SEOs' opinions)

-with the ads in the current position, your CTR is going to be piss poor. this means your quality score is going to go shit all the sooner... not sure what else this adsense account is used for, but i bet you get a lot of page views around here and your CTR will most likely be deplorable, because of the smallish user base (mostly return visitors), poor contextual targetting, and poor positioning / integration (although the colors do match lol).

my advice would be to try and blend in the ads better and place them above the fold if you are intent on running them. replace the banner ad with a similar adsense block for thread pages.

honestly though, i would get some aff links cooking with the amazon web services (pretty darn easy api to use) and possibly work out a deal with some merch places for sending traffic / sales their way.

just my $0.02.

-Concerned Google Adsense Representative

that was extremely normal

the ads on the bottom are getting better at targeting this site. it's going to take time for them to get better. So like I said above, I hope that if people see something they like, they click on it. This thread is just a reminder to point people in the direction of the ads below... since people mostly ignore ads, but they listen to somethings that I say. I'm actually working on removing the ads from pages that contain certain things, including this thread, but I haven't had time.
All the "find a wedding band" and whatever are down here \/ \/ and on www.metl-shows.com will disappear to be replaced with better ads. I've already seen it happening. Soon the ADs will be focused as well as the ones on http://www.dpreview.com which is a site that I do click on the targeted links to get to some photo sellers.

as for affiliate programs... carina has tried them and it pretty much failed. This google adsense thing is just a test. if in the long run, it doesn't work or, I will remove them and either continue to lose money and just try harder on the real banner ads at the top. Thanks though, maybe I would try that affiliate thing, but I doubt it... we are all just bleeding stones here I guess. there is no money in metal/hardcore. I would rather all the images below be targeted and generate less moola than a bunch of shitty "Find a Wedding band", "Need a wedding band", and "oh look a wedding band" links that are on http://www.metal-shows.com/

I like how there is an ad below that says "Beat the Adwords System"
that is a strange coincidence.


as for "keywords" you are 10000000% right... I didn't even have any keywords until a couple days ago. This page doesn't even have any...
some pages that do have them:
http://www.metal-shows.com/
http://www.nycmetalshows.com/
I JUST did it a couple says ago and I was waiting to see how it worked through the google webmaster tools before migrating the keyword interface to this site... the google webmaster tools have RTTP's highest index as being 2 man 1 horse or something like that. gawd...

oh and if the ads start match better, I will look into moving them.. mostlikely to the upper right like carina is going to do.

#
Eagles of Death Metal Fan
Then You Should See "Shine A Light" The Rolling Stones Live In NYC! 4/4
www.ShineALightMovie.com

LOL, close but no cigar.

well i think it's great you are considering your options as to the best route of monetization. i stop by here every once in a while and hadn't been by in a few weeks until today.

def get some meta keywords going - pull them from recurring keywords in the text of posts. you know php, i am sure you can figure out something. for instance, for a consumer electronics site i run, if the page is about Canon Digital Camera XYZ, i do something like

$metas = array();
$keyword = 'canon digital camera xyz';
$mods = array('get', 'buy', 'purchase', 'cheap', 'order', 'get', 'find', 'discount');
shuffle($mods);
for ($i = 0; $i < 2; $i++){
$metas[] = $mods[$i].' '.$keyword;
}
$output = '<meta name="keywords" content="'.$keyword';
foreach ($metas as $meta){
$output .= ", $meta";
}
$output .= ' />';

you get the idea - with a little creativity, you can get some good modifiers to add to a band / song / cd / label names and pull in more search engine traffic via ranking for more keywords.

and then for your meta description just use the first 100 words or so of the OP.

as far as getting better targetting for your adsense ads, along with putting up proper meta tags, and search engine friendly URLs (which are the number ONE deciding factor in which ads show, namely keywords in the url), this should def help out as well:

http://www.jensense.com/2005/08/22/section...lows-you-to-ignore-on-page-content/

lady is kind of a dummy, but she knows some stuff when it comes to adsense. use those delimiters creatively and you will have even better targeting.

one last point, i seriously hope you aren't saying you click on your own ads, when you are occasionally "interested" in them. this is AGAINST the TOS and WILL get you the BOOT once you are caught, and there is NO ONE to listen to your cries after the fact. if you click through then click the back button a lot, this will further show google and their advertisers that your traffic is poor and will only further lower your quality score / cpc on the whole.

peace

that's the plan with the keyword stuff.
except I didn't think to shuffle them.

and I would do this:
foreach ($metas as $meta){
$outputInner .= (isset($outputInner))?", ":""). $meta;
}
and get rid of the extra ,

I've been looking into keywords cause the STUPIDEST links come up on google for searches when they should be coming up with rttp. gd.

yeah, I read that in the ToS where they said something about that. I will have to come up will just have to c+p the URLs to see things that I want to see. Luckily, they put the URL on the bottom so I can listen to napalm death or shop relapse. don't be evil™

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil

I'm also slowly going through here: http://adsense.blogspot.com/ slowly.

hehe

yeah you get the idea about the keywords, just jotted that down real quick.

one more thing that may be of assistance, this little page is pretty good for testing out what type of ads will display given a certain keyword. note what happens when $_GET['key'] is not set, if you are running on a local server, you should see a bunch of crap for compression tests and pressure testers and performance testers - OR, if you put it on buyflowersandroses.com, you would see flower ads - NOT mortgage ads, becuase it isn't in the URL. BUT, just submit a query and you can see a general idea of what ads will display for that main keyword.

http://pastebin.ca/967039

oh yeah, just replace the XXX pub_id with your own obv.

HTH

neat.... though I really want to re-code the site for this:

before anything... though i don't see that happening any time soon.

btw, you would only see those "test" ads if the file was named something with "test" in it.

notice how the metal based keywords have predominantly ringtones advertisers bidding on the top spots on the adwords contextual network. there are certain third party scripts you can use to track what advertisers your users click the most, and then you could go to them and look for an affiliate program or some sort of whitelabel setup, essentially cutting the middleman (adsense) out of the picture and reaping the financial rewards!!

alright i've got to get back to work hahaha enough free advice

yeah, eventually it would be ideal to port over all the forum content to something like vbulletin and use that, and then just have your other content up on your own custom coded part. or you could use a great open source, PHP -based CMS like drupal (very search engine friendly and relatively easy to dev for) and their multitude of plugins, which does include a forum btw. you could add social bookmarklets and other goodies that help your user base market and promote the site for you - both virally and as far as the search engine bots are concerned.

as an aside, i think you would be surprised what people are into as far as affiliate stuff goes. don't just think sales based stuff - plenty of lead based, cost per action affiliate programs out there. i have a funny feeling that an online dating site banner link would do pretty good here :-D .

Only if it delivers 3-year olds and has a trash pickup service.

I would not go to something canned ever. that is not why/how this project started.

yeah it started with the intention of hitting it big --pushin' H2's and having ass-isstants schlep E-quip nucka!

*short on breath*

I...clicked...everything...I could...Rev...

however, i did notice there was no ads under the "label" part of ther site. just a heads up.

oh and by the way... i think this add takes the cake on them all...

Get B-Buckles Instead
b-buckles are a great way to wear your non-maternity jeans forever!
www.MyBBuckles

hah

if today was indicative of the ad revenue.. I would not keep them.

it's hilarious that the ads think that this is a religious site. wonder why.

there are some relevant ones though..actully found a site where to get metal shirts and the prices were pretty good.

i wouldnt know... im not allowed to click.

I clicked on one for the mulatto null Fleshlight.

tight.
I added a couple banners today. I checked the google stats and they weren't as bad as last sun/sat, but not very good at all. I hope monday is a good as last monday.

depending on the page sometiems they are pretty cool and other times totally random and off topic...lol

maybe it's just me, but it keeps saying "the page cannot be found" for those ads!

skynet blocked me.
I need to remove them

I wish that google didn't block me. This would be nice right now.

I'd take out an ad, but we don't have much to promote right now. Maybe after the 7" is out.

Seconded. Will take ads out when the final Drive-By album is done