Affiliate Marketing Journal

Very few people who own or run an online forums started out with teh aim to make money – they generaly start out as the are passionate about the topic. Forums can be run using free forums hosted software and not cost any money to maintain. However, if you are not using the limited free versions, the costs can add up. These costs include the domain name, the software and the hosting costs, just to begin with. If you want to factor in the time of the owner or administrator and the time of any moderators or other staff involved in running the forum, then the costs quickly add up to potentially being a lot of money.

Eventually you are going to want to generate some income to cover the costs of running the forum and even make a profit. Forums are not necessarily a good business model unless you get a considerable amount of traffic in a popular niche. There are several ways to monetize a forum from asking for donations to charging for content to selling advertisements to participating in affiliate programs.

A common way to monetize a forum is to ask for donations, but it tend to not bring in a lot of money. It is easy to set up and those that donate can get special privileges, such as access to larger private message mailboxes and the ability to change their user title. If you want to charge members to access content in private forums, you generally need to have good content publically available to attract members to sign up to access private forums and have even better content there.

If you have advertising slots available on the forum, then you can use pay-per-click advertisements such as Google’s Adsense program. Many forum owners report that this is a good way to generate revenue. These same spaces can be promoted to potential advertisers to place their advertisments. The slots can also be used to run affiliate advertisements with banners for products relative to the niche. These could be from popular affiliate programs such as Amazon.com or one of the many regional eBay programs.

One particularly useful way to run advertisements on forums is to geotarget by the use of something like OpenX on a forum. As visitors to a forum are worldwide and most advertisers are only based in one country, they are much more receptive to advertising if their advertisements can be geotargeted to just their market.

It is possible to monetize a forum by a number of methods. Just how much can be made will depend on the overall traffic to the forum and the niche that it is in.