Hi there all! I run a large (ish) forum; July Stats; Hits: 3,572,814 Pages: 480,018 Uniques: 70,154 Pages in Google c120,000 PR: 6 I rely on pretty poor results from the following Advertisers; Adsense: c$200pm Burst: c$40pm Afilliates - next to nothing I also receive donations from members from time to time and this helps to pay for the hosting etc. My reason for posting is 2 fold; 1) Does anyone have any tried and tested (cheap or free) ideas to reward my donors to the site, without patronising them? 2) Considering my traffic, should I be making more money, or is that about right for a forum? I have been lurking here for ages and really appreciate the tips I have gained already..your comments are greatly appreciated ZubZub.
For your donors,you could give them extra privileges like some ad space in the home page or custom user title . You could even make a special "gold" sub forum for these chaps.If they do not have signature priveleges in place already,you could give them that.There are loads of stuff which you can do, but this is what comes to my mind right now. Your forum gets pretty decent traffic,though.As for the money you make,could you please tell what kind of forum you are running ( I mean webmaster or gaming or what).Ideal revenues vary slightly from forum to forum depending on the people who visit there.
Hi, thanks for the reply. I like the ideas you have come up with, although I was hoping for maybe something tangible...even software that I could give away. I don't know that my membership quartile would need to advertise. I run a Computer Tech Support forum and by nature has fairly transient short term membership (i.e: ask a question, get fix, leave). I do get a lot of repeat visitors tho' and the "active" membership is somewhere near 1,000. I don't hide any part of the forum that contains posts, so membership isn't MASSIVE as most visitors are searching for fixes via Google, Yahoo, MSN or our Link Exchanges. You only need to register to actually ask for help. ZubZub.