This is my first post so be gentle, I am looking at setting up a forum (layout of this forum is very good),, this will be based around health, the exact niche area I can not go into at this stage, however if the marketing etc is done properly I expect it to be popular as this are will grow in the next 5-10 years. My issue is how to generate income, I will not be charging a joining fee and I will not be selling products directly (although this is something that could be devloped later), i know there could be income from banner adverts and links etc, are there any other ways to manage the costs and bring in income?
Forums may generate very high income to your pocket, especially the big ones. The key to money is number of visitors. the more people you have visiting your forum, the more money you'll make. There are loads of affiliate programs out there, lots of pay-per-click programs (such as Adsense for example) and alot of other methods to earn cash. A very important thing that is crucial to your income is ad placement and picking the right ads. if your forum is related to the health subject, make sure to place relevant and good quality ads so that your visitors will have an interest in clicking on them - and maybe later, buy the products. Anyway, i wish you good luck with your forum!
you already know about ads... here are other ways: > something like vip area for which they have to buy subscription. > a category for example like "advertise your medical product and service here" it can be free and you can charge for making some posts 'sticky' there. > your regular emails. you can sell ad space on email bulliten you would send to all your members (monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, or yearly! you know!) Those are quite a few stuff you have APART from ads on site. Hope that helps!
Wow, I was not expecting such a great response (especially on a bank holiday, mind you I bet everyone is indoors).. I am certain I am going to run with this idea, and whilst I have an appreciation of IT, I know web marketing is a very scary place. I will need to look for a company that can provide me with an end to end solution, a copany with 1-50 people (SME), they will also need ot be able to give me advise as above and lots more, i.e. hosting, guidance on moderation, and mainly marketing and income generation. I know there are companies out there that specialise in niche area's, are there ones that can do everything and do it well? Thanks in advance Av
When the forum become more popular sometime they make it paid ! or start a paid section.eg : sitepoint Our Shawn is very great ! He didn't make our forum paid yet !
adsense will help only if your site has many users or visitors..whatever..put it should genereate many impressions...then there is a good chance of revenue from adsense..
Does adsense really work on a forum? Nobody seems to click them... What do you guys think? Many thanks!
I am not sure if this is true or not but the owner of DP makes $10k p/m from adsense on DP forums alone.
well as everyone said place some advertisments and join affiliate programs, another thing you can do, you can make a part of the forum accessible only to paid members and you can charge them a small fee per year.
Users might not click, but today many of the DP threads rank very good on google, and when some people who come to DP via google finds the goodgle ads which looks like Link, they click.. Usually most of them still don't know that the adsense ads are ads actually....
I think a forum like investorshub, whereas you are talking about investing and the different realms of investing
One question from me is why limit the potential to the forum only? I think a forum is the same with other type of site, in regard that once you have a good amount of visitors, you can try any ideas to make money (of course as long as you keep your visitors happy). Don't limit to dig a gold mine with one tool only, for example is sitepoint, they're selling books which is closely related to webmaster topics and I believe their users base is a very good market for the sales. Think about how to get a large users base first and money will come to you.