Okay everyone. I have had sites and forums with lots of traffic before...but making a site and getting genuine adsense cash from it...there is something new for me. I need some help with this.
The simple answer is people. You need traffic. You need people to see it. Not everyone will click ads, only a few people might. That number will only be significant when you have a lot of people. You will always have more than half less ad clicks than traffic. Sometimes you don;t make any money on clicks.
Lisa tips are pretty good! I also find her last tip on creating lots quality relevant content for your visitors interested in your very specific category like "golfing for newbies".
It is relatively easy to get traffic through autosurf, paid to click ads like adwords and posting links on your twitter, digg, myspace, youtube, and other social accounts, but I find those people are not really interested in your website or ads since the audience on Myspace can be very diverse and not very interested in specific topics like "vegetable farming, golfing, unicode vs ascii characters, and non-teen oriented topics"
I think creating an audience/fan base by being friends with bigger more famous Youtubers, and Bloggers in hopes they will give you a shoutout/plug for your website or youtube channel is more useful in the long run since your audience and fans will be interested in your products or ads then some random visitor.
Also, if a lot of people favourite your videos on Youtube, your videos will also be in their favourite list on their Youtube channel and they might even embed your video on their blog or forum. Always watermark your videos at the beginning and ending with your website link.
Also, make sure your titles, descriptions, tags (don't tag spam) for your Youtube videos are very descriptive and talks about everything in your video.
The videos on Youtube should be related to your websites topic.
If you do not like making videos on Youtube, you can try article marketing. Article marketing is posting articles with your website link at the bottom which are in the same category as your forum and posting them on other bigger websites like Articlebase, Azinearticles, Articlecity.
You need traffic for sure otherwise no one will be able to click the ads on your site. But if that's covered, you will probably need to know where is the best place to place your ad: http://i26.tinypic.com/2w5k1af.jpg
It might be best to wait at least one month before putting ads on your site because you have to devote the first month heavily to content and building traffic. Without traffic, ads mean nothing. So just having the building of content and promotion and traffic building the first month before using adsense or other monitization services.
Believe me, it makes more sense, since you won't really make anything in the first month anyways.