Can I make money on my site?

Centertainment1 · 11-01-2007, 07:25 PM

Hi,

I recently made a forum located at www.scienceutopia.com.

Having had some trouble with a kick start in getting members, I decided that I might use AdWords to spread awareness of my forum and hopefully get more hits, traffic and most importantly, members.

However, in order to do so, I require money. Although I have money to pay for this from my own pocket, I thought that a good way to start would be by making a little bit of money from the forum, and using this to finance the AdWords.

If you look at the forum, you'll notice it's quite small. What would be the best and most effective way of making money from this forum (please be as specific as possible and try to provide links)? And would it be enough to pay for the AdWords?

Thanks,
Ctm

Turbine · 11-01-2007, 07:57 PM

Have no fear, Turbine is here to help! Que the theme-song! ... Alright, first thing is first, as you know your forum is a big small/young. Under 1,000 posts could be considered in the first baby-steps of a blooming forum. If you had around 2,000 posts to your forum's name I would suggest actually putting up a paypal donate button, but I don't think you have that kind of connection to your community yet, unless you specifically invited personal friends to help launch it. Either way, my guess is putting up a donation button wouldn't earn you much, HOWEVER I do suggest you do it anyway. A paypal "Donate!" button can be just the extra helping hand you need!

The first thing anyone will tell you to do is sign up for Google AdSense, but to get AdSense working for YOU is to get clicks, but to get clicks and to get MORE you need members, so it's a vicious cycle! Right now, in place of trying to focus on outlets to earn income for your site, work on promoting it's name. Get out there and start beating the streets for like-minded individuals to join your community!

In the mean time, plug your website up with AdSense and add a donation link so you have the outlets open and ticking.

Spreading awareness for a forum that is sub-1,000 posts means you're going to have to work extra-hard and make direct content with your first few strong members. Visit chatrooms through Yahoo! Messenger that match a topic you might find people that would be interested in your forum. MAKE FRIENDS! The strongest initial members that you earn your forum should be your close friends. These people will stick around and be your community's foundation.

If you can social network enough through Yahoo! Messenger chat and mySpace chat you will have yourself a few buddies to sit back and talk on your community forum. By doing this word of mouth will start to take off, and the more traffic you start getting the more likely people are going to start clicking on AdWords, and there you go! The key to money is TRAFFIC, so maximizing traffic right now will maximize income!

Work hard! Forums are VERY good at growing on their own and turning into a monster. Once you put in enough hard work and do enough, your community will evolve into a living thing that can do it's own member recruiting and your community will develop it's own momentum.

Right now all you need to know is Google AdSense, it'll be the exact thing you need to get the income you need. If you can't make it with AdSense, you won't be able to land much more with other services, and it offers you all the features and tools you need as a community leader.

So work hard on your community's member base! Use myspace, use chat rooms, think hard and come up with creative ways to spread the word! Make up cool little graphic icons that represent your forum and make a thread on it in your community asking members to put the icon on their myspace, livejournal, and so on to help get links to your forum for more members. Encourage spreading the word about your great community and how wonderful the topics are! Make it an adventure to be apart of your community! Make it warm and welcoming, and you should be perfectly set, my friend.

And at the end of all this you won't need AdWords to spread the word about your site. You'll be earning income from clicks and you won't need to spend it looking for new members or exposure! Right now in your community's life it is the typical development stage. MANY forums out there don't bother using AdWords to promote their forum because they understand there IS a natural slow period in forum community lifecycle. Ride it out and work through it.

Also! Start looking into "modding" your forum with extra features to make a member's stay more fun! Hope all this info helps! If you have any side questions or comments feel free to send me a private message! Remember, keep a good outlook on things! You are a community leader!

-Turbine.

Centertainment1 · 11-01-2007, 08:12 PM

Wow, thanks loads for such an excellent and detailed reply! I've taken everything you've said into consideration, and they're some great tips!

Thanks.

MrCat · 11-02-2007, 06:05 PM

Once your site has lots of targeted traffic, you could opt for xml feeds also - as a PPC publisher and make some added revenue.

If you manage to have a high PR, then selling links is another option

andygen · 11-02-2007, 07:20 PM

For forum it need to have people to be active there.
From what I visit it just now, you may need find some close friends to support it.
Good luck

Jonathan_Hue · 11-06-2007, 07:06 AM

I would suggest going for Squidoo.com

Construct yr page, run Ads on it to earn commission, join networks or groups....guess what, completely FREE!

guinanie · 11-06-2007, 08:01 AM

I would suggest to use affiliate program and yahoo publisher

Richard Overvold · 11-06-2007, 08:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Turbine

Have no fear, Turbine is here to help! Que the theme-song! ... Alright, first thing is first, as you know your forum is a big small/young. Under 1,000 posts could be considered in the first baby-steps of a blooming forum. If you had around 2,000 posts to your forum's name I would suggest actually putting up a paypal donate button, but I don't think you have that kind of connection to your community yet, unless you specifically invited personal friends to help launch it. Either way, my guess is putting up a donation button wouldn't earn you much, HOWEVER I do suggest you do it anyway. A paypal "Donate!" button can be just the extra helping hand you need!

The first thing anyone will tell you to do is sign up for Google AdSense, but to get AdSense working for YOU is to get clicks, but to get clicks and to get MORE you need members, so it's a vicious cycle! Right now, in place of trying to focus on outlets to earn income for your site, work on promoting it's name. Get out there and start beating the streets for like-minded individuals to join your community!

In the mean time, plug your website up with AdSense and add a donation link so you have the outlets open and ticking.

Spreading awareness for a forum that is sub-1,000 posts means you're going to have to work extra-hard and make direct content with your first few strong members. Visit chatrooms through Yahoo! Messenger that match a topic you might find people that would be interested in your forum. MAKE FRIENDS! The strongest initial members that you earn your forum should be your close friends. These people will stick around and be your community's foundation.

If you can social network enough through Yahoo! Messenger chat and mySpace chat you will have yourself a few buddies to sit back and talk on your community forum. By doing this word of mouth will start to take off, and the more traffic you start getting the more likely people are going to start clicking on AdWords, and there you go! The key to money is TRAFFIC, so maximizing traffic right now will maximize income!

Work hard! Forums are VERY good at growing on their own and turning into a monster. Once you put in enough hard work and do enough, your community will evolve into a living thing that can do it's own member recruiting and your community will develop it's own momentum.

Right now all you need to know is Google AdSense, it'll be the exact thing you need to get the income you need. If you can't make it with AdSense, you won't be able to land much more with other services, and it offers you all the features and tools you need as a community leader.

So work hard on your community's member base! Use myspace, use chat rooms, think hard and come up with creative ways to spread the word! Make up cool little graphic icons that represent your forum and make a thread on it in your community asking members to put the icon on their myspace, livejournal, and so on to help get links to your forum for more members. Encourage spreading the word about your great community and how wonderful the topics are! Make it an adventure to be apart of your community! Make it warm and welcoming, and you should be perfectly set, my friend.

And at the end of all this you won't need AdWords to spread the word about your site. You'll be earning income from clicks and you won't need to spend it looking for new members or exposure! Right now in your community's life it is the typical development stage. MANY forums out there don't bother using AdWords to promote their forum because they understand there IS a natural slow period in forum community lifecycle. Ride it out and work through it.

Also! Start looking into "modding" your forum with extra features to make a member's stay more fun! Hope all this info helps! If you have any side questions or comments feel free to send me a private message! Remember, keep a good outlook on things! You are a community leader!

-Turbine.

In that case, I need some help making money with my site too! hahaha

x3mario · 11-06-2007, 09:18 AM

You can make money on your site by putting an adsense on it or if it is rank well and have a lot of traffic you can sell links. Another one is you can sell your site itself.

Internetmarketingoff · 11-06-2007, 09:48 AM

adsense, space ads, kontera, etc...

theawristocrat · 11-07-2007, 01:46 PM

If you have decent traffic, Adsense would be a good option.

Turbine · 11-07-2007, 02:18 PM

As a sidenote to those of you who found my previous post (AKA book of text) useful and would like to follow up with me for further assistance and/or guidance, go ahead and send me a private message through this forum with your specific questions and I'd be happy to lend an experienced hand!

Community members get my professional advice at no cost. It's a "give back to the community" thing.

And back to the primary topic at hand:
Mister Centertainment1, I don't see any AdSense! Get to work! Huff huff! And also: Move your forum to a different directory! It is NEVER a good idea for a serious community to route their forum to their default root dir. You don't want to lock yourself into a situation where you cannot put something up in your primary root dir like a community homepage.

You CAN, however, throw an HTTP redirect from your main root to your /forum, so move your forum immediately and get it out of the way, because later down the road you will want to make a homepage (IF you are serious about this community) and having to rely on subdomain redirects is very sloppy and largely unnecessary because it's too simple to move the forum and edit the config files to reflect the changes. Get to it! Once you move the forum, assign forum.scienceutopia.com.

Also: Use and promote Science Utopia rather than Science-Forums. The latter sounds very bland and generic, and far too SEO-oriented. I feel that you are focusing very hard on PageRank and SEO. You aren't trying to rely on search engines to promote your forum, are you good sir? Remember, the people who are really interested in SEO are people who are trying to sell items, sell services, promote goods, and so on. You're running a community. Don't invest yourself in practicing too aggressive SEO practices because optimizing for "Science forum" isn't going to land you near as solid, new, fresh and long-term members as social-networking and using your human resources to it's full potential.

In short: Building a community through Search Engine hits- Not so good. Build a strong community through word of mouth and chain reactions.

Also: If you really want a good ranking let me tell you a secret: Time. The bigger your forum gets, the more members it gets, the more interesting and thought-provoking conversation, the more backlinks from other sources. THAT really helps your search engine ranking, so do whatever you want to do with your community and don't worry about the search engines so much, and don't do things like not moving your forum from it's poor location to a better location (ie: /forum) because you're worried about the possible negative things that may or may not happen to your search engine ranking.

Get to work! Start making something great! You can do it and you might make a penny while you're at it! (Or a little more)

-Turbine.

swapw · 11-07-2007, 06:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Centertainment1

Hi,

I recently made a forum located at www.scienceutopia.com.

Having had some trouble with a kick start in getting members, I decided that I might use AdWords to spread awareness of my forum and hopefully get more hits, traffic and most importantly, members.

However, in order to do so, I require money. Although I have money to pay for this from my own pocket, I thought that a good way to start would be by making a little bit of money from the forum, and using this to finance the AdWords.

If you look at the forum, you'll notice it's quite small. What would be the best and most effective way of making money from this forum (please be as specific as possible and try to provide links)? And would it be enough to pay for the AdWords?

Thanks,
Ctm

Ctm,

I can see that you have a good head start. Keep in mind though that it's very very important for you to connect with your members!!

It's also important for you to get your word out there to relevant sources!! Meaning other science forum or something complimentary. It will give you a lot of help in getting your forum off the ground.

Do join communities such as Mybloglog and start a blog! It's free and it also help funnel traffic into your forum. I'm sure that people from your forum would like to get to know you too! Why not let them into your world a little bit? It won't hurt.

-Swapw

spacefem · 11-07-2007, 07:34 PM

well, first change the logo at the top of your page, the one that says, "Our Community". That's make the whole site look more legit

Personally, I don't think forums are a great way to make mad cash online. Your regular visitors aren't going to click ads every time they go to a page, they're there for discussion, not making you money. I agree that the paypal donate button is okay, but if your members think you're in this for profit, they're not going to like your site.

Maybe I'm biased, because I'm not into all the grabby web commercialism like some of the world is, but I think a discussion community should be about meeting people and making friends. If you make some money, that's cool too. but it shouldn't be priority #1.

Turbine · 11-07-2007, 07:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spacefem

Maybe I'm biased, because I'm not into all the grabby web commercialism like some of the world is, but I think a discussion community should be about meeting people and making friends. If you make some money, that's cool too. but it shouldn't be priority #1.

Forums are a fine way to make a bit of side cash. Anyone who tells you forums are incapable of making any kind of substantial revenue are simply not educated in the way modern revenue generation works.

With inline, targeted and focused ads, the chance of people clicking on ads is very high. Remember, just a click is all it takes to earn something. People attend communities to be apart of a community, but if the topic comes up about where to buy x equipment and a user spots the advert saying "Buy x item here!" and they click on it, that IS money in the pocket and it DOES happen all the time.

AdSense is a very advanced platform in which to deliver ads. Content-targeted advertising is amazing and content-driven adverts are VERY capable of generating profit. I'll also take the stance that putting up a donate button and putting up adsense will not harm the community as a whole, and has no ill-effect on the community what-so-ever. This is not the days of the pop-up, but this is the day of the payment-per-click.

I'll also let it be known that all SORTS of people advertise. Not just people who are SELLING something. If the community members start a threat about gaming and see an ad about a nice sci-fi game and they click to check it out, BAM that is another payment. I suggest you re-evaluate your opinion for community advertising because it IS possible to make a bit of money.

With that I will also say it only goes this way: A community is made and the webmaster puts some ads up for some side-money.

A community that is made specifically for running ads? That is a different story. A community that is promoted, designed, made and is alive for the soul reason of bringing income will always suffer and will never sustain a solid member base. People aren't stupid, but people are cool and if the community is good and solid they'll click on a few links knowing they're helping the community. Asked or not asked to do so.

I will end with this: Communities are a perfect place to run ads. Don't start a community for ads, though.

-Turbine.

backgammonnn123 · 11-07-2007, 10:50 PM

Sounds like a good forum. I will help u out a bit by signing up there in a few days

.

Nikhil · 11-08-2007, 03:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Turbine

Have no fear, Turbine is here to help! Que the theme-song! ... Alright, first thing is first, as you know your forum is a big small/young. Under 1,000 posts could be considered in the first baby-steps of a blooming forum. If you had around 2,000 posts to your forum's name I would suggest actually putting up a paypal donate button, but I don't think you have that kind of connection to your community yet, unless you specifically invited personal friends to help launch it. Either way, my guess is putting up a donation button wouldn't earn you much, HOWEVER I do suggest you do it anyway. A paypal "Donate!" button can be just the extra helping hand you need!

The first thing anyone will tell you to do is sign up for Google AdSense, but to get AdSense working for YOU is to get clicks, but to get clicks and to get MORE you need members, so it's a vicious cycle! Right now, in place of trying to focus on outlets to earn income for your site, work on promoting it's name. Get out there and start beating the streets for like-minded individuals to join your community!

In the mean time, plug your website up with AdSense and add a donation link so you have the outlets open and ticking.

Spreading awareness for a forum that is sub-1,000 posts means you're going to have to work extra-hard and make direct content with your first few strong members. Visit chatrooms through Yahoo! Messenger that match a topic you might find people that would be interested in your forum. MAKE FRIENDS! The strongest initial members that you earn your forum should be your close friends. These people will stick around and be your community's foundation.

If you can social network enough through Yahoo! Messenger chat and mySpace chat you will have yourself a few buddies to sit back and talk on your community forum. By doing this word of mouth will start to take off, and the more traffic you start getting the more likely people are going to start clicking on AdWords, and there you go! The key to money is TRAFFIC, so maximizing traffic right now will maximize income!

Work hard! Forums are VERY good at growing on their own and turning into a monster. Once you put in enough hard work and do enough, your community will evolve into a living thing that can do it's own member recruiting and your community will develop it's own momentum.

Right now all you need to know is Google AdSense, it'll be the exact thing you need to get the income you need. If you can't make it with AdSense, you won't be able to land much more with other services, and it offers you all the features and tools you need as a community leader.

So work hard on your community's member base! Use myspace, use chat rooms, think hard and come up with creative ways to spread the word! Make up cool little graphic icons that represent your forum and make a thread on it in your community asking members to put the icon on their myspace, livejournal, and so on to help get links to your forum for more members. Encourage spreading the word about your great community and how wonderful the topics are! Make it an adventure to be apart of your community! Make it warm and welcoming, and you should be perfectly set, my friend.

And at the end of all this you won't need AdWords to spread the word about your site. You'll be earning income from clicks and you won't need to spend it looking for new members or exposure! Right now in your community's life it is the typical development stage. MANY forums out there don't bother using AdWords to promote their forum because they understand there IS a natural slow period in forum community lifecycle. Ride it out and work through it.

Also! Start looking into "modding" your forum with extra features to make a member's stay more fun! Hope all this info helps! If you have any side questions or comments feel free to send me a private message! Remember, keep a good outlook on things! You are a community leader!

-Turbine.

WOW.....what an info...this would help any newbee..thanks

Centertainment1 · 11-08-2007, 03:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by backgammonnn123

Sounds like a good forum. I will help u out a bit by signing up there in a few days

.

Really glad to hear it! It would be of great help to the community

And thanks for the great advice, all of you. I actually was planning on moving my forum to a subdomain, because I was thinking of making a home page with a website and blog. This would make it more interactive, and give members an incentive to come on the site to check out some of our latest news (that includes site news and world/science news), and discuss it in the forum. I will try and post as much original content there, rather than just sourcing everything from other, larger sites...