Your Revenue

From where (if anywhere) does your forum's revenue come? Do you sell advertising space? Premium Memberships? Donations?

Furthermore, what do you do with the income? I keep any and all income in my PayPal account for expenditure on the site's necessities - e.g. renewals, new products, etc.

 

Ad space, sure. Premium memberships? I've never thought about doing those to be honest. Donations are iffy with me, some of the setbacks they can have can be a nuisance.

Nick, I would be careful with having a lot of money in PayPal. Actually, I hope the account is a separate one for this site or your sites in general and you use it for purchase products or expenditures. You know how PayPal is with freezing accounts over complaints.

I've found various ways to make money, and I have one method that you may like, Nick.

 

Advertising space? YES

Premium Memberships? YES

Donations? YES

I get about 20-30% of my monthly revenue from Google Adsense as well.

I also keep most of my money in the PayPal account for reinvesting into the site(s). This makes it easy for me to pay people for freelance work or other expenditures.

 

That is certainly true. And, it helps prevent me from spending it when I shouldn't. If I were to transfer it all into my bank account, I'd not be able to properly keep it aside untouched. :devil:

 

Donations, Google Adsense and premium memberships. I have tried to make the donations/premium memberships overlap each other as much as possible. If you make a $10 donation, you receive premium membership for a corresponding period. I also setup two separate premium memberships: one that is visible and a second that is invisible. This allows recognition for those who wish others to see it and allows others who appreciate the benefits of premium membership but not the public status of being a donator.

 

I don't gain any revenue as I fund all of my projects myself - I guess you could say that I gain "virtual" revenue with my premium memberships... which members can purchase by meeting a specific post count on a monthly basis.

 

Since my post went unnoticed by Nick and others, have any of you considered signing up for a nice paying referral program? Such as HostGator or ThePlanet where you pick on of their ads and you place it on your site and hope someone signs up for it?

 

No, I haven't considered i because I can guarantee you I won't get any clicks, let alone sign-ups from my audience. :p

 

You run a bird forum, right? Or am I thinking of something else?

 

Yes - for a specific parrot species.

 

I like to stick to the "all money made from the site goes back into the site" rule of thumb I have made for myself. Luckily I have never needed to worry about this as I've never made any real money in the past. :p

 

Ah, but you will be shortly.

 

I don't like to have much advertising on my sites so i sell one banner at the top sometimes and maybe som links in the sidebar but thats it no more than that.

Premium membership is something that i have on almost all my sites even if its just an small one.

Donations its the same as premium membership for me sometimes i call it donations and sometimes Premium, sometimes it is called something else dependning on the site.

 

I get revenue from Google Ad's and Paid Subscriptions :3

 

Advertising Space, Premium Membership, Sponsors, Me, the Graphic Work we produce, donations...

We get a nice amount of revenue.

 

Cool, I was into birds a long time ago. Not anymore.


I think I'll add onto what I said earlier and say that referral programs are also a cool way to make money and usually come with incentives. Hosting companies have great partner/referral programs, so that's one thing to check out in the future.

 

Advertising space? Nope, Just Affiliate Secion

Premium Memberships? Yes

Donations? Yes


I Choose Who To AFfiliate With, And They ONly Pay For V.I.P STuff That I Dont
Release To Other Members On My Site. Donations Get Alot, Just A Dollar LIke Every
Few Weeks. And The Money Goes To Site Rev Amps And Touch Ups. ANd License
Renewal.

 

RCTgo doesn't have any revenue. But because I get the hosting for free and the domain is less than $10 a year, it's certainly not a problem at all at this point

 

Mostly AdSense and donations at the moment, but I want to sell ad space too.