Monetizing my traffic

[stuboo]

I'm the newest member to the forum and am pleased with the upbeat nature of the community thus far. I'm glad I signed up!

Here are the stats for my site
2,500 uniques per month
40,000 page views per month
3,000 registerd users (in forum)

I currently have Adsense set up on my site and in my forums. I also do some affiliate promotion and am working hard on increasing traffic so that I can sell space to advertisers and listings to those who want to post job openings (It's a job search site). I make about $40/month from all of my advertising. Needless to say, I want this to increase.

What else can I do to monetize the site more? Do I have enough traffic to expect more that $40/month from the site?

Feel free to check it out - http://www.pharmboard.com - to view the forums, you must login.
user: test
pass: test

[Chuck Brown]

I'd recommend (if you haven't already done so) that you read and implement what Joel teaches in his book. I don't know where your traffic enters the site...but, I am surprised not to see a big Adsense block on the front page. And no Adlinks at all on the site?

I don't believe in trying to correlate traffic and potential Adsense income in some comparable way with what other webmasters are experiencing. Each site is different...topics, the ads they pull, how targeted your visitors are, and the amount that the ads pay per click. You are in competition with yourself. I'd suggest viewing it that way. Find out how you can most effectively incorporate ads in your space. They should be highly visible, but not overbearing or "cluttery".

So...I would say...yes...there's a HUGE chance that you could do better than you're doing. But I don't think you'll know until you start testing.

I will give you this one little tip...in case you haven't read Joel's book yet:

I used to use the 120x600 skyscrapers like you're using on some of your pages. When I switched to the 336x280 ad blocks placed just below the page title...nicely incorporate using the same background color as the site and complementary title, text and link colors (without a border)...my income doubled overnight.

I hope that helps a bit. Good luck with it.

c-