It always amazes me how partners are scared of revealing google data, does no one see anything wrong in a company like google saying you can't share data about your own advertising stats? There's something very totalitarian, 'our product is crap but don't tell anyone' about it all.
I have a message board that does 0.08% on average and that's good, a few articles and it jumps a bit, I still increased annual income by over £1000 on that one site but with the occasional article should be able to get that up to £2000.
The best place to sell things on a message board, is in threads, a standard MB link in a link box, affiliate link, should get the clicks, sales depend on the products linked to, naturally.