Once you have a decent amount of traffic and a decent memberbase you may feel it is time for you to start to cover your hosting costing for the month or make a profitable business. In this Blog post I am going to list 5 ways of making money of your forum.

Pay Per Click Advertising (CPC) – Adsense

Adsense is the most commonly used CPC advertising programs for forums. With good traffic and good positioning this program can turn over three to five digits per month covering your hosting and your mortgage ;) Make sure you blend your ads with your background and that your don’t harass your users by putting them in awkward positions that would annoy them.  You would just lose traffic.

Pay Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) – TribalFusion

Tribalfusion is an ad network which pays you money every time an ad is displayed one thousand  times on your forum. This can be very effective for forums because the amount of page views you get  daily are excessively more than you would get from a website or a blog.

Subscriber Section

Having a section which has only available to members who pay a small fee to access is another great method of making money from your forum.   A subscriber section.  Members pay a small fee to get access to exclusive forums and downloads.  Sometimes if your community is that well established and setup people will just subscribe just so they can help the forum out.

Advertising Spots

Offering spots where other companies and users can place their ads on your forum is another way to generate money from your forum. For example a company will pay you $20 a month to display their ad continually. The more popular your forum becomes the greater the price advertisers will have to pay you to get their ads in your spots because you will start to receive more offers from different companies. This method only tends to work if you have a well-known and established forum in your niche.  As marketers only want the best for their companies.

Affiliate Marketing

It’s not a big method in the forum administrating industry but you can still sell products from your forum. For example if you have a designer clothes forum you may go to designer shops online and look for affiliate programs associated with that site. You then receive a commission from the products that your users buy from that shop.

These are just a few methods which you can use to generate money from your forum. Without constant traffic you will generate nothing from your forum. It is important to realise that with a community you won’t be able to produce any income therefore it is important to build up a member base first before adding ads and other money generating methods.

Do you find these methods effective? Do you use other methods? I would love to hear so don’t hesitate to post a comment.

Photo by AMagill

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