My friend has got a nice general chit chat forum. Its about 10 years old, and it has a decent activity, with about 150-200 posting per day, plus a hundreds of daily visitors from SE. This is a general discussion forum, with no particular ninche. It has discussions related to politics, religion, movies, music, sports, recipes, and so on .. nothing in particular. I would like to know some ways from which he can atleast make up his monthly expenses that he spends on maintaining the forum, which is about 150-200 $ The traffic is mainly from US, and India. I am looking for something specific, so dont advise - adsense, pls also add what kinda placement should work for a forum. Also, are there other ways to earn froma forum? Can an old forum with a decent traffic get sponsers ? Affiliates ? Other ways ? Pls advise eloborately. Thanks !
Being such a general forum this may be a bit difficult... How about every section having a sponsor? I use vBulletin banner rotator mod on one of my forums and each banner can be targetted to a specific section. So if you have 10 sections you can have 10 advertisers. If the forums offers these people something valuable you could even charge members for a special membership (with extra features). Say you have 10,000 members and 1,000 choose to upgrade for $5 per year your friend already gets to double what he puts in. And if the members really like the forum they will be more than happy to support it with $5 per year (depending on what extra bonus you give them). If you PM me the URL I wouldn't mind looking at it to give you more specific suggestions.
Provide a newsletter to all forum members. Send the newsletter once or twice a week. In the newsletter, your friend may recommend certain websites (affiliate links from CJ.com or Shareasale.com and other affiliate networks).
I think that is a good method. With the traffic and activity you have, sponsors shouldn't be hard to fine.