I've decided to give back to the DP community with some tips concerning forum monetizing that I've picked up over the years. As many people don't know how to monetize properly once their forum picks up speed, I felt I should help out a little bit. 1) Banner ads: Forums are notorious for AdSense not working. While AdSense may get you a couple of clicks here and there, often the ads are simply left to rot. Selling banner space to either local businesses if the forum is geographically centred, or to other webmasters for a fixed monthly price usually ends up being a better option. This works especially well if your forum has a high page rank. The forums at SomethingAwful.com for example charge $80 per banner ad put on their site for two weeks. At any given time there are often 10 ads rotating, resulting in at least $160 per month. I suggest testing AdSense. If you cannot make more than you would with a monthly banner ad, change your style to the banner, as it will get you more money. It may even pay the hosting bills! 2) Charging members: This is a terrible idea for a start-up, but once your forum is up, running and getting a steady stream of new members, offer a "premium" or "gold" membership giving paying members extra privileges such as a custom title, a larger number of allowed signature links or even their own forum. Even a simple $5 from 100 members will net you $500 for some changes which cost you virtually nothing. However, I must stress: do NOT do this until your forum is successful. 3) Set up a "bank" between your forum $$ and PayPal. Namepros is the perfect example for this system. Members can buy, sell or trade NP $$. They can spend them on items in a store (such as custom titles or stickied threads) or sell them back to the bank for money via PayPal. Given as to earn NP $$ somebody has to start of having bought NP $$, this system almost guarantees you profit, especially if you charge a small commission on the "exchage rate". 4) Sell physical items relating to your forum. This may not work incredibly well with new forums, but once you're established, offer to your members forum t-shirts or similar items. Then find a company which will print your shirts, per order, at a relatively low price. Even a CafePress store should work well. I hope you find these tips useful and help you to monetize your forums. They aren't all for brand new forums, but good things do take time and with work you can make a lot of money as a forum owner. And, of course, any tips others might have are more than welcome to be posted here
Brilliant tips. I agree with adsense not performing well on forums. Just to add more to your tip on banner advertisement; if your forum has a lot of pageviews then you may even consider trying a CPM network. I've heard good reviews for Kontera so you may even consider trying that.
Well, if it doesn't perform well, then how come Lee Dodd has been able to make a lot of money using Adsense on his forums?
I don't think he/she/it meant that AdSense will always perform poorly on all forums. Of course, there are forums where AdSense does perform well. You have to test it on your forum, as was mentioned. However, due to several factors AdSense is not always the best mechanism to use to get optimal return on your forum. On forums (and here I make a generalisation) you get a low CTR so you'd need lots of ad impressions to get a good return. Also, (and here I make another generalisation) the ad blocks are mostly well away from the principal content area, usually on the periphery where, I think we can all agree, they stand a lot less chance of being clicked.
Forums tend to have more repeat visitors (members mostly) and they become banner blind. I've been running a community for three years and to tell you the truth, no matter where I put the banner, they will ignore it. The ad link unit in the header near navbar performs way better than a banner in between posts. Kontera offers in-text advertising (just like intellitext). You can find out more at http://kontera.com
What about here on DP? Does anybody know what makes DP the most money? I see it has banners and Adsense.
thanks for suggestions! But it's better to sell banner n top of the page, it looks something different rather than just site
thanks for the tips, but, how do i set-up a "bank" on my forum? I have seen one forum with that, but I think the admin is selfish enough not to tell me as i have asked several forum questions but said he knew nothing. yeah right.
Kontera has performed great in my forum area.. Subscriptions to a 'premium' section of the forum also does very well.
It depends. What kind of forum are you running, and what version? (IPB, vBulletin, etc) Some have bank mods that you can add on, some don't.
you just need to download a package from smf. you can find packages on their forum located here http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?board=59.0 search for smf shop, if you found the thread, download the package and install it on your forum by going to the admin panel, click packages, click download packages, then upload the zip file from your computer. if you using the default smf theme, the package should work immediately. if you're using a custom theme, i suggest you to get a copy of the files (ie. index.template) from the default folder and then replace the ones on your custom theme. hope that helps