Hi, I was thinking last night about a website that I had come across where you could pay around $25 for 20 people to sign up to your website (forums, members are etc.). I'll post a link to it here soon... Anyway, I skimmed through the TOS quite quickly and didn't see anything saying that you couldn't charge a signup fee... If you charged $2 sign up fees per user registration, you would be in profit, + they have a 100% moneyback garuntee incase no-one does sign up... I don't want to sound like someone who spends his life bending the rules so i think i'll contact them and ask if we're allowed to make a sign-up fee... What do you guys think? (It's mainly not to make money, it's just to make sure the company doesn't just use proxies or any random person to sign up...)
So you would pay someone else $25 to get 20 people signed up to your forum and then when the people arrive to sign up you would charge them $2 sign up fee. For a forum that you need people to pay to sign up i don't really see any oppurtunity to charge a $2 fee for new users, bad idea IMO and not really feasible if you are at the point you still need people to pay to get visitors. You mean trying to get some reinbursement for your $25 costs per 20 people? and hoping for a little profit on the side And this doesn't prevent the company you are going to be using to use proxies or random persons.
Yeah, it doesn't stop them but, the company would be a bit stupid because they would have to use their own money to sigb up, giving them a loss... Anyway, i wouldn't really get any profit because I would charge by paypal and i would need to have $1.25 per signup to get my money back and $2 - ($0.30 fee + about $0.40 fee as a percentage) = $1.30 So I would get a very small profit... And yes, i DO need to buy visitors because I suck at making websites, i don't have too much quality content to give it and like many webmasters (failing ones) out there i don't have much money to spend on advertising. I do have SOME money to spend on it, just not very much...
He wants to make sure the people who sign up through the service he paid are real users and not scam people from the service. If the service only gets paid $25 and the users he gets net $40 - it obviously wouldn't be fake users from the service because they would lose money. There's a guarantee from the service to get you 20 users or your money back - so he can't lose either way. The problem is the service will never accomplish the goal and just refund your money, because nobody is going to pay you $2.00 to signup for your forum.
Here's some advice: 1. Drop the forum idea until you have more experience. It's way to much work for the beginning return. 2. Learn how to make better web sites, it's really not that hard! 3. A much more profitable (and easy) way to make money from your site is Adsense or YPN. I started a car forum from the ground up - it took well over 6 months of hard work (hundreds of hours) before I had members posting daily. Even after you get bigger and have daily posters you still have to deal with SPAM, you have to keep making enhancements or people get bored and leave, you have to get good moderators to keep things in control - and the bigger you get the more fights and problems you get. A 2,000 member forum can easily leave to the next forum if they get pissed over something. It's also very hard to monetize the value of your users, your CTR's are low and they eat bandwidth like crazy!
yeah, yo-yo, you have the gist of it... I know no-one would pay... lol I'll just forget that idea... I have something similar though as an idea... Do you know of any affiliate networks where the advertiser just pays when they make a sale (or have the option to)? When i say JUST it's because many you can pay per sale but you also have to pay the affiliate network a certain amount per month, regardless of whether you make any sales or not... Also, does anyone know any places where i can get cheap, good advertising?
Thanks for the useful advice I'm allready a member of adsense.... I'll bear your ideas in mind. But how do you gt all your visitors?
Where!? I've never seen a legit affiliate program that charges you to be an affiliate. CommissionJunction, Linkshare and ShareASale are all free (no fees) and have 1,000's of affiliates availabe. Amazon also has one. Google Adwords.
That's where SEO comes in handy. You get traffic free from the search engines by ranking for words that people search for. You could spend the next 2 years reading about SEO and still not know everything . This forum has tons of good advice as does this one.
Your right Yo-Yo, i missed the guarentee part. Hopefully this is true but i think the sign up part doesn't sound good for a fresh starting forum IMO but your right if the guarentee is valid there is no loss he would get the 20 sign ups or not and get the money back.
No experience on that one. I would guess there's free software to do it yourself, but if you want it done right - you most likely have to pay the costs.