I’m a proud owner of a computer forum that receives around 7,000 unique visitors/day. In keeping the forum tidy, I’ve implemented only one 728×90 banner (max. 6 ads in rotation) at the top. One of the banners in rotation is a Google ad, which as with most forums, gives me a sad CTR of less than 0.2%!

So I looked around and found Kontera’s ContentLink publisher program. What it does is that it scans your page content and turns certain keywords into links. When a visitor hovers his/her pointer over the link, an advertisement like the one you see above is displayed. You get paid if the visitor clicks on that link.

All you do is customize the color of the links and paste some Javascript codes into the body of your webpage. It doesn’t go against Google’s TOS which means you can now have up to 3 different variety of ads on your website - banner ads, Google ads and Kontera ads.

I installed Kontera on both the computer forum and my main website, so I have no way of telling the proportion of earnings each contributed because there’s no channel-tracking feature like in Google Adsense - I’m quite certain over 70% of my clicks came from the forum.

After 7 days, I earned US$89.54 (approx. RM313 or S$136) from 93,000 ad impressions. The CTR and earnings-per-click weren’t fantastic, but it still performed better than the existing ads on my forum and is certainly enough to pay for my dedicated server.

(click to enlarge)

The thing to note is that your forum members may not be too enthusiastic about your new Kontera ads, so my advice is to show the ads only to your guests. This can be done by making use of the different user groups in your forum software, and can be a good incentive for the guests, i.e. to register themselves to stop the ads from showing.

I use InvisionBoard for my forum and the codes I used were:
<if=”$this->ipsclass->member[’g_id’] == 2″>
<!– Kontera ContentLink –>
** your Kontera Javascript codes **
<!– Kontera ContentLink –>
<else />
<!– No adverts for you! –>
</else>
</if>
The Javascript codes were pasted at this location, right at the bottom:
Look & Feel –> *skin* –> Edit Template HTML –> All Global HTML –> global_board_footer

So if you’re not making money with your forum, try giving Kontera a spin - you may be pleasantly surprised! :)