UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Promoting Your Community Making Revenue Sugguestions?

Hi gang,

I have (fmforums.com) currently I have banner advertising for my members right now I charge 199 for a banner per year and 299 if they want a static square banner in the footer. Seems cheap compared to others but I just don't see how someone would pay $500 a month for a simple banner. - I know I never would - heck that is a truck payment!

I am trying to think of other methods to enhance or add value to advertisers to increase advertiser participation or create other marketing levels not only to increase the monthly/annual price but have different packages available.

I have been getting some small revenue from Google & Amazon programs. But I would like to have more participation w/ the community members.

Membership on our site is free. Therefore we don't anticipate changing this anytime. Some have suggested to create a value added area where certain forums are paid. or subscription only but I am not sure that this will provide much revenue.

I have both the Spider Hack and Josh's Search Engine mod and we are getting thousands of hits on google this I am sure will increase traffic. But I want to provide better service to my members by attracting more advertisers.

Maby some sort of incentive program to potential advertisers. Or perhaps some sort of - cash back program?

I have instituted an Open House program like it is here on threadsdev I hope this will bring out some of the members to advertise since they only are in the spotlight for a week they may say hey let's do this more often by purchasing advertising.

I also have another domain called - filemakermarketplace.com and want to build some sort of ad centric area there to help drive traffic.

Just looking for some advice I guess. I am sure many of you wrestle with this as well.

Thanks

Stephen

well, you definately have a niche forum, so I think the best way to determine how to make money is to decide what your target users would be willing to pay for. I mean, if you came to your own site as an active user, what is one thing you'd LOVE to have, and wouldn't mind throwingi a few bucks to have?

I can't answer that question, I've never even used Filemaker

But use my site for example... mainly it's the photo gallery. Jeep users take tons of pics of their vehicles, off-roading trips, etc. Usually, these users have no place to upload them, or if they do, it's with imagestation or a similar service, where they can't link to their photos in their posts. So.. by giving people who donate money to the site added photo space (5, 10, 20 MB) a lot of people are willing to pay to make their own galleries on a website they use everyday rather than just some 3rd party system.

So that's my real niche.. I'm not sure what yours would be, but think about that, and see if there is a really cool feature, or addon you might put in place to only allow paying members to use. A little bit goes a long way...

[] if you came to your own site as an active user, what is one thing you'd LOVE to have, and wouldn't mind throwingi a few bucks to have?
[/]

Never to see mySQL Errors again

no Honestly I have been giving thought to this and perhaps in the near future when things change in the next month or so there will be new opportunity to create value added areas that people may wish to pay for. Perhaps a "code" or "file" locker. I was also thinking of perhaps a way to create incentive for people to make solutions and make it inexpensive then when others pay to down load it money goes to the developer and we get a small percentage. A win-win situation.

Perhaps I will commission josh and throw in the paypal mod as well. Make it simple and painless but some how uncover the fine line that makes it profitable.

I am curious about your situation you allow people to have xx mb of storage and charge them a fee but at the same time your also increasing your hosting requirements in order to offer these services. At some point you would have to increase your plan to get more bandwidth or storage thus increasing your monthly cost and in turn reducing the margin of profit. - Where is the break even point. Also the management of setting up email accounts and ftp accounts etc.

I have been reading other post on this topic the pros and con of advertisers contributions vs member paid value added services. There is no clear cut answer.

I guess the ol' saying is true... you can please some of the people all of the time all of the people some of the time but never all of the people all of the time.

I guess I am on the quest for the middle ground.

I really appreciate if I can get more of this type of feed back feel free to sound off and tell me pros and cons what has worked and hasn't worked.

Thanks

SD