Forum Promotion 101: The Basics - Monetization

October 11th, 2007

First of all, before I go into any depth about forum monetization, let me say that if your main objective is to make money online then a forum is not a good choice for you. Forums are notoriously hard to monetize. But, if you are just looking to make a little cash on the side to cover your hosting costs and maybe some promotion, then read on. That is not to say however that you can’t make good money off of forums - you can, you will just work ten times harder.

So, onto the good stuff - money! In this article I will be talking with you on how plan a future income stream from your forum. Since I have already talked about the importance of topic, audience, and design, which all tie into monetization, this article will not be as lengthy.

We can break forum monetization down into three parts:

1. Deciding what kind of offers our audience will be interested in
2. Finding appropriate companies to sell through
3. Implementing those offers

Basically we need to know what they want, who has it, and how to effectively sell it.

Appropriate Offers

The first step should be pretty easy since you have already pinpointed your audience and have designed your forum based around their interests. You want to show them ads that they will be interested in, based around what your forum topic is. Continuing my previous example, if your forum is about the XBox 360 game “Gears of War”, then showing your members ads to buy that and other video games is a good choice, while offers to “lower your credit card debt” most likely are not. This is probably common knowledge to you, but it’s an important part of forum monetization.

Finding Appropriate Advertising Companies

This part can be somewhat hard if you choose a really obscure niche. Otherwise, you can almost always find offers relevant to your topic. Google Adsense is a perfect example, although let it be known that generally Adsense has poor performance on forums. Amazon associates will always have relevant items for you to sell and you should be able to find at least a couple good affiliate offers at CJ, Azoogle, Clickbank, or Copeac. Look around, be creative.

Implementing Advertisements

This is probably the hardest part when it comes to monetizing your forum - how do you implement the ads so that they will get attention? You can’t just place a banner in the usual header position (try it if you want but you’ll see how blind your users are to it). You have to be creative and test things out. It may take you a while to find a offer/placement combination that has any success.

Some of the best placements I have seen are inserting the ad after the first post in a thread how it looks like another post between the first and second posts. If you are running vBulletin, check out this thread at vBulletin.org (you’ll have to validate your license first) or this thread at vbseo.com. If you are using phpBB, check out these two posts.

Also, some people have success with placing the ad at the very end of each thread, before the quick reply box. This way the user is not in the middle of reading the thread, like they would be in the above example. Another way is to implement ads into the category and thread listing view - this is a little more difficult but I would imagine that the results are better. For example, make it how the first thread title in each forum category is actually an affiliate link or an Adsense block.

One more idea is to find sponsors for each category. Each sponsor gets a small image and tagline right next to the category name on the forum homepage for $x a month. Check out the forums at Rapmusic.com to see what I am talking about (just the first example that came to mind ;)) Branching off of this idea, try selling sponsored sticky posts. If you are creative there are a hundred possible ways to monetize your forum.

Try searching for forums that are in your niche and see what kind of advertisements they are pushing and how they incorporate them. Remember, if you just stick a leaderboard at the top of your forum you won’t get but a few cents. Monetizing forums takes a lot more creativity and testing than it does to monetize a regular website. Also, don’t expect big results anytime soon - like I said above, if your main goal is to make money, then a forum is not for you. They are hard to profit from and take a lot of time and effort. But building one can be a very rewarding experience!

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