How To Monetize a Forum [12 Proven Methods with Examples]

Most people who start a forum do it because they are driven by passion yet still need to earn decent money to keep it active. This guide will show you 12 proven ways to monetize a forum.

I will also help you decide which monetization method should work great for your discussion forum.

Some of these monetization methods don’t require too much traffic to make a decent profit. You can make a couple of hundred dollars with a new forum by selling advertising or offering paid memberships. In contrast, you can make thousands with an established one by providing online courses or affiliate marketing.

Oh, You don’t have a forum yet?

Here I will show you step-by-step in a complete guide and start a successful forum. Read that guide before proceeding any further with this one. Or you can also try some of these monetization methods, like writing and selling an ebook or offering paid consultations with a Facebook group or a Youtube channel.

Let’s start finding how to monetize a forum. Here are 12 methods that can increase your profits this year and beyond. Choose more than one and see which combination makes you the most profit.

1. Add a shop to your forum

As your community is built on people that share a common passion or interest, you may set up a shop and sell some merchandise.

An online shop might be something you never even considered. But, it’s a great place to put the products your readers might need; right next to the content they love.

The most common community software (Invision Community) lets you set up shops inside the platform.  You can easily set up a shop using Shopify or WordPress and Woocommerce on a subdomain if yours doesn’t.

There are many items you can sell, starting with digital items (checklists, templates, training materials), promotional materials (t-shirts, hats, pencils) with your community brand, and products related to your industry and niche (You can find a partner that will take care of shipping and handling).

2. Affiliate Marketing

Generating income through affiliate marketing is when you earn a commission by promoting someone else’s products on your site. It’s similar to advertising because it’s a passive income stream, and you don’t have to produce goods or services, but unlike advertising, you only get the income if your affiliate makes a sale.

Affiliate marketing is a lucrative way to monetize your audience.  If you don’t know much about affiliate marketing yet, you should check our affiliate marketing for beginners’ complete guide.

Also, here is a list of 65+ affiliate marketing high-paying programs that can inspire you. You should know enough about affiliate marketing, so check the best 21 affiliate marketing networks you can signup for.

In a nutshell, you must find the best affiliate programs for your audience, review them, and show them to your audience.

3. Create an online course

More people are taking online courses than ever before. The e-learning industry is expected to grow to about $325 billion by 2025. Online courses can take many forms for a forum owner. The easiest way to make a course is to write it as a series of PDF documents that your reader purchases and studies on their own—much like an eBook, but with exercises and extra resources explicitly designed to educate the reader.

Recording media to accompany the course can make it feel more personal and gives the course more value. Whether you do it as an audio file or a video, people who buy the class will benefit from hearing you explain the concepts aloud. Video can benefit physical or visual niches, like fitness or design, were demonstrating the idea can be easier than explaining it.

The most time-intensive course style is to meet with the students in real time through a chat room or online education portal. The disadvantage of this class style is that it requires people to be available at a specific time to attend, limiting interest and attendance.

4. Write and Sell an Ebook

The most successful eBooks come from forum owners whose brand is based on expertise. You can either release the eBook as a PDF directly from your site or through a retailer like Amazon for almost no financial investment.

You want to ensure it contains new material that’s not just a rehash of the information readers can get on your blog for free. A compelling eBook topic might be an in-depth analysis of a trend in your field or a comprehensive how-to solution to a common problem.

Income from an eBook tends to reach its highest levels shortly after its initial release. Referencing the book in your future posts or running a promotion could cause spikes in sales, but if you’re marketing the book, the bulk of your subscribers will buy it right off the bat if they’re going to. Subsequent spikes in sales tend to be from new readers who have come to you since the initial release.

5. Join an advertising network

You can join advertising networks when your forum gets more than 40K page views monthly. There are many advertising networks available for form owners. Some are highly selective.

You should also do this if you’re not getting enough advertising requests or don’t have time to approach potential customers. The downside is that these advertising networks get around 25-45% of the money the advertisers are paying.

Advertising networks I recommend for forum owners: BuySellAds, AdClerks, Adsense.

Do some research before signing up with a new ad network. Check out sites that use it to see how it shows up on their pages, and if you can talk to other bloggers about their experience with the site, that’s even better.

Remember that the more exclusive ad networks have limited access for a reason. Their advertisers are likely to pay more in exchange for a guarantee of higher viewership. As your traffic grows, considering better ad networks could be an excellent way to increase your profit.

6. Sell advertising directly

You may also sell ad space in certain sections after the forum has become more popular. Some advertisers are willing to pay no less than $3,000 per year, depending on your community’s popularity. If you want, don’t like how much you should charge, check the BuySellAds marketplace. You can get a pretty good idea of how much a forum with similar traffic to yours is making.

Now that you have a pretty good idea of the advertising prices, you should ask them may signup up for an account with them or sell advertising on your own. Just create one advertising page like this and let your members know they can purchase an ad on your site. You may also check Monetize.info’s Advertise with us page.

If you just started your forum and the traffic figures are pretty low, and you don’t get any advertising requests, you can still make a couple of bucks by placing Adsense ads or Amazon ads. Just make sure you follow their guidelines to get your site approved.

7. Add a business/links directory

Your community is enriched by people interested in a topic, and as long as there are services/products available for selling, your members will buy them. 

If your community is about digital marketing, charge people to add their agency to the directory. If you talk about auto parts, invite auto repair shops to list them in the directory.

The picture below shows how AffLift, an affiliate marketing community, started a business directory and charged companies to list their services. AffLift community is listed on our best affiliate marketing forums and best money-making forums.

Depending on your traffic, you can charge anywhere between $25 – $100 for a listing.

8. Ask for donations

Your members should know how much time you spend running the forum and the expenses. It’s nothing wrong with asking for donations.  Just tell them how much you need and show a report on what money will be spent and the donations will come. This is a 100% foolproof method, and it doesn’t matter your niche.

9. Offering paid consultations

Remember when I said you should create a forum in a niche you know and are passionate about? Well, monetization is one of the reasons. When you administrate a forum, your member knows that you’re very knowledgeable about the matter and can pay you for this knowledge (this tool might help you create it). Set up a page with your services. You may check ours.

You can offer paid consultations or sell reports if you’re in the SEO business, you may do SEO consulting, or if you started a forum on web design, they might hire you to design their website. The bottom line is that your knowledge grows with your community, and you have an open market at your fingertips. Email your members and let them know about your services.

Here is an article where we show you how to turn free consultations into paying customers. Whether you set yourself up as a life coach, career coach, or business development coach, you can earn a significant income through just a handful of clients.

10. Offer paid access to Forum sections

Can you provide other benefits besides the usual? How about exclusive access to other tutorials in your niche? I should also mention that setting up a recurring payment model may not be ideal. Remember, forum members come and go in cycles, which means they are less likely to sign up in the first place unless your offer is insanely valuable.

Many communities offer a premium paid membership with more benefits than free members have. Check our article on Top Affiliate Marketing forums to see how several community admins charge anywhere between $20 to $99 for a paid membership.

Here are several benefits you can offer to your premium members:

1. Access to a special sub-forum where you can share exclusive information.
2. Remove advertising for premium members.
3. Special badge and mentions (different text color, member group, etc.).
4. Discounts on other purchases.
5. Member’s signature may contain adverts/links.
6. More private messages storage space.

Note: Most of the information you provide should be free of charge and generally helpful. Leave only the most essential/crucial bits as a premium option.

Please remember that most of your revenue should come from the value you provide, which turns your members into loyal fans.

11. CPA Marketing

One of the most lucrative ways to monetize a community is via CPA marketing. That’s because, in CPA marketing, you can get paid for users that don’t spend money purchasing a product. Instead, they can fill out a form, try an offer, download a product, etc.

That’s different than in affiliate marketing, where you get paid a commission for what you spend on the members you bring in.

We have written a step-by-step CPA marketing for beginners guide where I will show you: what CPA marketing is, how it works, what’s the difference between CPA marketing and affiliate marketing, what are the top CPA networks you should work with, how to get approved and how to promote CPA offers and cash in the earnings.

If you want to learn more about CPA marketing, I recommend you take a CPA marketing course to give you a complete road map on monetizing your community.

12. Sell your forum

If you decide to sell your forum, there are several places where you can do it. Besides the usual marketplaces, I suggest you first contact companies or competitors from your niche, especially if your niche is not as popular as digital marketing or forex.

That’s because these companies know your community’s value and how to monetize it properly, so they usually pay more.

Check also our article on how to sell your blog. Many tips will help you with selling your forum.

Top 3 Blog Monetization Mistakes

Takeaways

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Conclusion on How to Monetize Your Forum

So you made it till the end. Congrats on that. Now you know how to monetize your forum with 12 proven methods. Some are easy to implement (selling advertising, joining an advertising network). In contrast, others require more work (offering paid consultations, creating ebooks, creating online courses) but are way more lucrative.