Creating a forum Part 6 – Monetizing the forum

This is probably one of the “creating a forum” series post that may interest you the most.

We are always seeking ways to monetize our sites, and perhaps the majority of us know how to monetize a blog, but when trying to do it in forums, they often stumble with some doubts and difficulties.

Making money with blogs is easier

One point you need to take in consideration is that blogs are easier to monetize. You will get some revenue after a few days of work, but with forums it is a completly different thing. The process is more demanding and will require more attention from you. The process can sometimes be frustrating to us, so be patient.

Analyse your options

You need to think how do you want to make money from your forum. There are several options out there, some may result very well, others may not. What works well for your blogs may not work for a forum.

So let’s see what options we have:

1. Pay per click ads: This is the obvious option for the majority of webmasters. PPC ads can work pretty well on forums, but to achieve that you will need try several types of ads and spots.
2. CPM ads: this is an option that ALL webmasters should take in consideration. CPM ads are a great way to monetize your forum, but they are only good if you have some decent traffic. Take my example (dahh.net) I have CPM ads, every new visit brings me money. It isn’t much but it add’s up. As a bonus, from time to time i have conversions that bring me an extra buck or five . CPM ads, in my opinion should be only used as a secondary source of income.
3. Pop Ups: these type of ads usually pays on a CPM base, and they pay better than the ordinay cpm ad, but it will annoy your visitor, so this is a type of ad that i don’t recommend, unless you have a more “obscure” forum.
4. Paid subscriptions: You may charge your members for special access to certain foruns or to change their rights. This is a good option if you offer some services like PPC training, secret tips, special content like many adult foruns have.  SMF 2.0 is able to do this easily.
5. Email Marketing: This can bring you more profit than all others combined. Imagine the value that email marketing can have in your life. Gathering an email database that you can control is priceless. If you can have a couple of thousand users in your forum, you will have a gold mine! You just need to select the right “pay per lead” campaigns to send in a mass email. Imagine the potential! This is by far my favourite one. You just need to remind that you need to disclose that you will send advertising offers from time to time directly to their email.

Ad Management

This is all very pretty to talk about, but not if we don’t have an easy way to implement the ads. Doing Email marketing and paid subscriptions is easy because those features are already present in SMF. but placing banner ads in the forum is a different issue. You need to edit the code to insert your banners. But fortunately there is a mod called “Ad Management” that will make your life really easy.

You can get ad management mod on SMF mod site. Just upload and activate it through the package manager. If you are using the Default theme then you don’t need to edit the template files.

In your admin panel go to “Ad management” inside “Forum Configuration” section. Click on Add Ads and insert the code. Then just choose where you want the ads to appear. It is that simple.

I have not told everything about Forum monetization. There are several useful tips that i can share with you, but i will leave that to the e-book i will write after completing this series of posts. It will be Free for Rss subscribers.

Final Considerations

As i have said, monetizing a blog is easier than a forum. In fact, forum monetization can be a challenge. It took me some time to monetize dahh.net, but my patience paid off.

There are some factors that could potentially make this easier. I recommend you to make a forum in English. The potential of users is incredibly big, and it will be more likely to bring you new users, specially users from US, that usually convert very well.

Look for valid alternative. Don’t bee afraid to try new advertising companies. Some may result better than others. For example, if you have a tech forum probably tech related ads (like widgetbucks) will generate more revenue.

Be patient. You won’t make a decent buck in a week, or in a month (unless you are a particularly skillful lucky marketeer). It took me two years to successfully monetize my forum, but to reach that level i had to do many mistakes, some very stupid…. But i was learning from scratch and monetizing the forum wasn’t my main objective. And it still isn’t.