You may already be aware but just to be sure everyone is, forums and community websites have notoriously horrible click through rates, even when we blackhats run them. To illustrate this point, A friend of mine, a blackhat like you, has a new (couple month old) website which has about 500,000 to 1 million page views a day on average. That’s great right, right? Well, it’s a forum based site and the click through rate hovers around a dismal 1.2%! As good blackhatters, or ones in the making, it is imperative to understand what the reasoning for that is and, once we get that, how to bring that number up, way way up!

Now to deduce what’s happening it doesn’t take a rocket scientist. The main problem is that the majority of the traffic is coming from repeat visitors. They’ve been lurking around long enough to have become “add-Blind” to it. So, what can we do about that? A few things!

First I’ll quickly give a tip to all of you forum owners, this can be applied to your websites, blogs not just forums. I start out with an ad-free site. No ads. Then implement features I know my users will be clicking on, I monitor their behavior and then, when I feel I have enough traffic, enough return visitors, I slap the ads where they are least expecting to find ads, in spots they click a lot.

So we have to be very strategic when using ad placement techniques to improve the click through rate, not just that, as blackhats we can bend the rules a bit and get away with things

Ok first of all, where on a forum, are most of the clicks taking place? buttons. The Post and Reply buttons! That’s where you place ads, under or above them, common sense right? Invaluable data nonetheless.
Something I always do, is prevent people from using the Quick Reply feature at the start of their forum experience, then I introduce it when I’m ready to place my adds, quick reply means you click a button, and it has a quick reply field pop up, no reply page to load or anything, it’s faster and saves them time. Ads go under or above that too.

Why are member there in the first place is the second question we ask ourselves? to learn, yes, and what else? PROMOTE their sites, through…their posts and, yes, yes it’s sneaky, it’s the naughtiest location for our ads and its directly below our members signatures. You see the reason for putting ads below a members signature is so powerful, is because it is horribly misleading! It suggests to readers that the ads are actually the posters website/favorites but who cares as long as people click your ads!

Then comes another point, forums and thread topics are long to read, as in they have a ton of scrolling to them. With forums that have 15-20 posts per page, it can take a while to scroll to the bottom, which takes our attention off the content and onto the scrollbar. People click that a lot too! So what’s the deal? How can we benefit from this?

Well first of all, out of all the people that use the scroll bar, you have to realize that only 5% click the little up and down arrows, 15% use the mouse wheel to quickly scroll, and 80% drag that bar down and up manually, by….here it comes, clicking on it and dragging it up or down. Yes, clicking* that’s the keyword you have to look for all the time. This method is very straightforward and it not only works well for forums, but any site with a lot of content.

Simply place your ads right beside the scroll bar and set your right margin to “0″.To do this right, match your website and ads background to the color of the scroll bar!

There’s lots more you can do but I’ll keep that for another day. Keep in mind, when it comes to optimizing your adsense on your forum, you have to think like a member/user, think what may and may not work on you if you were on someone elses site, think outside that damn box you’ve been stuck in your whole life.