How to make money running a message board.

Posted on | March 3, 2008 |

One way to make money online is to set-up a message board and run an online community. There are 2 popular ways to monetize a forum: (1) premium membership and (2) advertisements.

Members are usually willing to pay a reasonable one-time or monthly fee for extra privileges such as more spaces in signatures or access to a private forum that offers additional tips and tricks. The admin can offer premium membership for such access.

Running ads is the more common way to make money from a forum. Advertisements can be any or a combination of the following: (1) direct paid advertisements, (2) banner advertising networks, (3) Pay Per Click (PPC), and affiliate programs.

In direct paid advertising, the forum can directly offer ad space to interested parties. One can also join banner advertising networks such as project wonderful where buyers look for websites they can place ads on. Pay Per Clicks like AdSense is perhaps the most common ads we see in forums. Finally, admins can sign-up with affiliate programs and place ad banners around there forum so whenever anybody clicks through and buys something, they get a cut of the profit.

However, making money is simply not a matter of simply plastering ads around the forum. For a web-savvy clientele, such as webmastering or gaming forums, Pay Per Click usually don’t work well as the audience are already jaded or ads-blind. The best options for such forums are premium membership or direct paid advertisements.

Lastly, an admin’s first concerns should be to bring in members and encourage activity. Once the forum is pretty active, then it’s time to bring in the monetization schemes.

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