How do you make cash from your community?

[brakkar]

Hello,
I would like to discuss about possible revenues generation from a strong community forum. Of course there is advertising.

But how do you do beyound simple advertising?

-Gold membership? Which privileges (i was thinking about more storage, personale email, attachments....)?

-Special services?

-Off site stuff?

Share your tips and tricks about how you generate revenues from your community.

Cordially,
Brakkar

[rogerd]

Monetizing a forum can be tricky, brakkar. Advertising is certainly one way, and that can include:
1) Regular CPM or CPC ads.
2) Google Adsense.
3) Affiliate ads/links related to your topic.

Adsense is the easiest to get going, but the others may be more lucrative if you are in a good niche.

Selling premium memberships is fairly common. Some of the benefits you see often are,
- private forums
- more storage for PMs
- recognition (e.g., bigger/better avatar, different user class, etc.)
- more board powers, e.g., can post attachments, pictures, etc.

I'd guess the exact benefits that will appeal most will vary greatly by site - a gamers board is going to be quite different than an executive recruiters forum, for example.

What kind of off-site stuff did you have in mind?

[kodaks]

If your forum has a specific subject (like gardening), you could develop a guide and advertise it. This guide could then be only accesed by paying members.

[Bamikanarie]

You could open a subforum for commercial messages, and charge the posters in that forum a small amount with for example PayPal.
It's also a good way to get rid of them in the other subforums.