How to make money from forums

Being a web worker means constantly searching for opportunities to earn cash from the internet. There are so many methods that you can try and one of these is creating a forum website of your own. Although this entails a lot of hard work, think of generating traffic and encouraging more members to join the forum, this also means serious money if you are to succeed in this venture.
Here are some of the things that you can do to generate income from forums:

1. Run advertisements Once your website already has thousands of active members, you can install Google Adsense in the most strategic places of your site. You can also accept banners and text link ads from companies and other websites. Pricing depends on the number of page views that your forum is receiving in a monthly basis.
2. Subscription model Premium membership or paid subscription is another way to earn from a niche forum.  This method is only effective to forum sites that offer highly valuable information to members. People are willing to pay if they can benefit or learn important things by joining your site.
3. Use it to search for client leads Starting a niche forum or one that has a sharp focus on a particular topic can lead you to finding more clients for your business. For example, if your website is about making crafts, you will attract people who are also interested in similar things. In the long run, this will also pave way to meeting customers who are in need of your crafts.
4. Create backlinks As the owner of the forum, you have the freedom to build backlinks to your personal or business blog. You can make use of signatures and html links to drive visitors to your other sites. Another thing that you can do is to charge members for inserting links in their signatures on a monthly basis.
5. Affiliate programs Promote Clickbank products in your site that will be interesting to your members. If the forum is intended for people who want to lose weight, promoting informational products such as videos and ebooks about how to burn fats will definitely sell like hot pancakes. You just have to carefully select digital products that will solve the problem of your members.

As much as possible, try not to clutter your forum website with advertisements which are not relevant to your niche as these will only distract your members. Monitor also every member’s activity to avoid spammers and scammers because this will discourage people, specially those who are paying for the membership, to come back to the site.