I have a forum that is just under a month old now. It just hit the 100 member mark today & is growing rapidly. I feel it has lots of potential, but I have tried ads from Adsense, Chtika, & other affiliate programs and am not seeing very good results. $0.50 a day tops. usually about .00-.15 cents. I want to know if there is a specific program that performs best for forum owners that will generate more revenue then these other programs. Any help is appreciated. Alan
Established forums that have been around for years utilize paid subscriptions as a huge part of their monetization. Down the line, if your forum has quality content or something that people would be willing to pay a nominal fee to view, you can charge membership fees and what not. I have a brand new forum too, and I've been able to make some good cash off affiliate offers -- Commission Junction's program in particular. Pick an advertiser/product line that's related to your niche and figure out what would make your forum members want to sign up/buy the product. For example, perhaps your forum is about poker and other card games...you'd want to advertise poker sites that members could sign up for.
You only have 100 members and your forum is less than a month old, that's why you're not making any money. It has nothing to do with your ad selection. Get back to us when you have 10,000 members and are only making .50 a day. If making money was that easy everyone would be doing it. As you're finding out, it's not that easy.
To me, your forum is still receiving a low amount of traffic and thus, marketing should still be your priority instead of monetization. Also, your site might also not out of Google Sandbox yet. If it is out already, it tends to receive a good amount of traffic from Google and these traffic will then raise your Adsense revenue.
How many forums do you know that make money?? How many members do they have? Forums should not be set up primarily to make money, If a year down the line you have thousands of members then it's time to look for ways to monetize. if your aim is primarily to make money then a membership site would be a better option but you need to provide value for money.
I've seen a lot of forums that have a paid subscription option with such benefits as removing ads, access to special area, increased inbox (not really sure that was such a popular option). If you're just starting out this is not going to be so profitable for you but it's something to keep in mind for when your user base starts growing...
As soon as you reach the 10k members you could start selling emails I have a community with more then 30k members and i use it to promote my own new websites, olmost everyone is an succes. I might start selling emails for other websites... As for earning money with a forum, use ads targeting your niche.
try to keep your mind for seo of your blog so you can get organic huge traffic and more users , by this you will get more clicks and more money
To make decent money from a forum, you need to have lot more members. You need a lot more traffic to make good money from adsense or any other ads.