The next step

I can see I need to read up about this, I just fear that in a congested niche it will work out expensive.

 

As I feared the chosen keywords are very expensive, the cheapest is £1.50 per click ! Manchester United is £3.25 per click !

 

Means you will have to work hard on building natural links
Steer well clear of the back link wonder software that's on the market
You can do a lot more damage than good with it
If you have external rss feeds enabled on your site, submit to rss engines, so you can get links from niche sites
Even directory submissions will get you a slap, four of my sites are presently on penalties from directory submitting three years ago

 

Thanks for the info, but I'm quite up to date on the Google penalties that Panda and Penguin introduced, Football forums seem loathe to let you post links though, Blogs seem more approachable.

 

Would you want someone posting a link to a competitor on your forum?
Then the members you have worked so hard to get, go there
From time to time I even block advertisers in AdSense if they are in my niche

 

don't bid for the top. bid 10 cents.

set a small daily limit on the spending. stop the action when you are getting close to your overall limit.

make a nice landing page that will interest people. since you are running a forum, the landing page could be the most interesting thread on the forum. make one if necessary.


*** iirc, you only have a few days after opening an account, to apply a code for some free or discounted adwords credit. so get that done asap if you have opened an account.***

if you can't find one, ask google to give you one. godaddy also might have some codes if you ask.

 

Your link goes to one page. maybe consider it going to the forums?
Also it is offputting to see the "Sorry, you are not authorized to view this page" seemingly in many places.

 

You should as a guest be able to read the whole forum, can you give me some for instances ?

 

If you follow your link it goes to one page, on the right side it says:

 

There are a number of known bugs in that module, due to be fixed in a later version. You can however remove that particular message by checking the 'Can See Who's Online' permission in the Admin CP, Usergroup Manager, for Guests.

 

Didn't realise that, thanks for the tip, fixed now !