Sources of Income for an Online Forum

By affilateguru, on January 9th, 2010

Those who own or run an online forum mostly do it because they are passionate about a topic or a niche. Forums can be run without costing any money by the use of the free forum hosts. 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. A donation button via something like PayPal is easy to set up. Those who donate can be given benefits such as a larger private message mailboxes. To get members to pay to access content in private forums, there has to be really high quality content available publically so people will be attracted to pay to access even better content in the private forums.

You can create banner slots on the forum and use these to place Google’s Adsense advertisements or other pay per click programs. This program has been very useful on most forums for generating income. Those same slots can be sold to advertisers to carry their banner advertisements. 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 eBay.

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.