Earning Money

When I look at some of these large forums, I ask myself how they were able to get so big. Did they really offer the uniqueness people wanted? Or were they just early in the market so they had the time to grow? Was there something else that was really helping them that was revolutionary in the market? I was looking at a forum I used to frequent and I was trying to figure out if they would have been such a success if the owner did not set up an adsense sharing system on the forum. Would he have been quite so successful and is it really a good idea to use that on your forum? I’m going to talk about the latter, but the former will always be on my mind.

What happens when you use an adsense sharing system on your forum is that you are, in a sense, setting up a way to share the clicks that you get with those that post on your forum. To get them to post more threads, you say that whenever they post a thread, 50% (or whatever %) of the impressions that appear. So, say you make a thread and ten people see it, half of the time, your adsense code would be up and if someone clicked on that ad while your code was up, bam, you’d make money for that click. So, in a sense, this was a way to get people to post more and more threads because they hoped that if they made so many, they might really begin to get some clicks on their ads and thus, make some decent money. Is that the case? Depends on the forum.

So, that brings up another question. How do I know if MY forum is the right forum to use this adsense sharing program on? You don’t really know. Naturally, if you run a webmaster forum, you’re going to offer it because most webmasters use Adsense to make money. But, what if you don’t run a webmaster forum like MOST of us don’t? Is it a good idea? That all depends on how crafty you are. Let’s just say that you want to try and make money on every single one of your users, but you don’t want to take their money? Set up a page ALL about the revenue sharing. Let them know that every time they make a thread, X% of the time, their ads will appear. But, if your niche is ‘dog care,’ chances are, they won’t have an adsense account. That’s fine. At the end of the page, put in a nice large banner that says, “if you haven’t signed up for adsense, sign up here!” Then, you’ll get the money for signing them up and, they will start to populate your forum more. And, if they see that there is money to make online, they may just try harder to make more threads and you get the point.

Revenue sharing works if you can manipulate it to work. Set up the % to 85% like my friend at webmaster forum does. By doing that, he has shown people that he really wants them to make money and that really helps. Fifteen percent may not seem like a lot of money, but if you’ve got a lot of people making threads, then it really does add up. A forum can’t succeed without threads and posts and all of that; the more that you are getting posted, the better. And, your members will be happy, so they will bring even MORE people to try and help their friends make money too. Sure, you won’t make 100% of the income on the site, but you will get a large forum and that is where the success is on the forum. Good luck.

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