My forum gets 194k unique visitors per month - How can I make money?

Well...this could go on forever...why don't you try giving us an idea of what your forum is about and then maybe some people could narrow down things a bit.

Also, your asking a question about monetizing a forum on a forum that is monetized (in my opinion) very well...so look right here for some ideas.

What kind of forum is it? Discussion wise I mean, that'd be a great place to start.

Depending on that, create a opt-in email list separate of the sign-ups (weeds out spam).
*I mean don't just add everyone that registers on the forum to the list.

Market to those people daily, weekly, by weekly, monthly, whatever you want really.

Look into private advertising SPECIFIC to your forum's niche. People are much more willing to dump out money to a company for advertisements if it's targeted traffic.

It appears you already make some pretty good money on your forum.

Interested to see what other ideas Warriors have.

With that kind of traffic you should make a killing if it is monetized correctly. Show us a link to your forum maybe we will make a few posts for you and add to its success.

Search for other forums in your niche, and observe what they use to monetize their forum.

P.S. You may also pick up some monetizing ideas from the forum your on right now. (WarriorForum)

Create a sticky post - Title it "Awesome Info & Books" Then add some aff links and other things.

Add some CPA offers for free stuff related to your forum.

did you try tribal fusion, they pay well CPM

Can't you sell car audio physical products from within the forum and have them drop shipped?

psuedonymble wrote:
I'm curious, do you think that if your content and community are strong enough, you might lose a few people, but keep the good ones? Do you want to run a forum that big without making the kind of money you want from it? And, people like to buy things. So if you're selling them something they like to buy, why not?

Some people will cry and moan and go away. They weren't going to buy anything from you anyway, so is it really any loss? Somehow my guess is that many of them are making money off your site, and don't want any competition from the person who owns it?

Just a few thoughts. Hope they are worth a few cents to you one way or the other.

Just look at how this forum does it

honeslty man, there are just so many good ebooks on the WSO that will teach you just that. Plus they are pretty cheap as well so just pick one up for like 12$, you can't go wrong.

are you serious all that traffic and your looking for ways to monitize??

man just sell advertising (banners etc) run surveys, approach large companies in various related niches to your market, forget the nickel and dime stuff

Hi ,
you need a sugesstion on forum software or CMS If Cms I would prefer to have drupal
And please be clear about what sort of forum is it

Are you selling ad space directly? With that kind of traffic, you can easily sell ad space directly. I'm certain vbulletin must have an adserving plugin.

Look up the "ultimate heatmap". It's free and will open your eyes on ad placement.

How do you get so much traffic?

Think outside the box with this one man. You can make a boatload of cash from these guys offline.

Why not use your massive reach in the niche to organize SQL/SPL competitions/car audio shows around the country. I mean you could do one just show a month in the most populous states.

Charge the guys like $20 to compete/show the cars, and even though they are anti-industry online it is an accepted practice offline to pay for competitions. I mean with your reach you can easily get 200-300 guys to show up for a show out of nearly 200,000 for sure. This is $$$.

Also since the industry is trying to resist internet sales you can charge a premium to local car audio shops since you'll have hundreds of potential customers in one spot. This is $$$.

And since no event is complete without food so you can even rent out space to local food vendors. This is $$$.

Best of all, because of your great position in the niche you don't have to pay for advertising. Just slap a banner at the top of the forum.

You can net a lot off of these events. And renting out a car lot for an afternoon isn't terribly expensive.

As far as logistics go, you probably would need to hire 10 people or so to help you.

You'd need guys to help with getting everyone parked, you'd need guys to collect the money, you'd need guys to help with setup/cleanup.

As far as other expenses go, you'd probably need a few prizes for the top guys, pay 2-3 guys to be the judges, and other miscellaneous stuff.

Off the top of my head I think you could do your first one for under $2,000 for sure. Start with your own state and expand from there.

Then you know what will happen next. All of a sudden instead of being perceived as a faceless greedy webmaster all of the users, even the old ones, love you because you put on these great events for them, you've met them, shook their hands, sat in their cars and listened to their SQL levels personally.

After the first event suddenly Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Car Audio Blogs, and your own Forum are flooded with pictures and praise for how awesome a time it was.

Your next event will attract even more guys from your forum and elsewhere since word of mouth will be in full effect, and then the next one after that will attract even more.

You'd be netting tens of thousands per month, instead of getting pennies for clicks and affiliate referrals. Think big dude...

It will definitely take some work to do this, but please don't sleep on the power you're sitting on. You can communicate with nearly 200,000 people at will, almost instantly. History shows us that massive empires have been built by men who had fractions of your reach.

-Garland R

once you hit 50k per day, start your own advertising/PPC program

Some sites have some level of visitors, but tough to make good money from... unless you are really into DIY auto, i would look at this as a spoke on the wheel and move on to creating more spokes...

It may be true that DIY folks are against anyone making money to a point. Often it is part of how they sell themselves on DIY to begin with. They are broke and cannot afford professional work.

That being said, I agree with Blogmudgeon... Send the prissy little girls to someone else's site. I might even create a fake username and create an uprising, taking as many as I could to a competitor's site. Let it be their problem.

The simple fact is that offering value is worth a profit. It's what make the world turn, and if your traffic dropped massively down to 150K you can still make a killing.


Now, all THAT being said, the layout of your site annoys me visually, and I clicked away even though it is actually a topic I am interested in. Specifically, I hate opening a page and being slammed with video advertisements. Secondly, advertisements are placed in the site in places that my eyes like to go naturally, rather than your actual site content.

I know that a lot of 'experts' give advice to do it that ways, but it annoys me enough that I just leave and never go back. If a site that I was a long-term member of did that, I might feel like it cheapens the site.

I agree 100% with those who have suggested you take a good look at this site and model it. The quality content is user-friendly and given first, and money is made on the back-end. There is another company that has a similar model of offering quality and user-ability while putting their advertisements tastefully on the side as a Value-Added service, instead of in your face. You may have heard of them, their name is "Google".

Just my 2 cents. Hope it helps make you some money!

What a great topic, thanks for all the useful information

Silly question - what is DIY?

what is a whitelabel?

very good traffic that can be monetized to make some pretty great income...

PM me if your willing to sell sticky posts

how about you team up with a local mechanic and and come up with a do it your self tutorial video series on automobiles and promote that.this is more like cross selling these guys might well be black hats at car audio systems but may not be in other areas when it comes to automobiles,but they probably are interested in them.

and to increase the profit like some one else mentioned have $1 membership option. paid members will have no adds displayed. and they will have your video tutorials either at 75% discount or for free.and try to come up with vedio tutorial series at least one in 3 months covering every aspects or car care from beginner to advanced.

then do a promotions to bring up more paid members to the site.let you already members of the forum do the work for you.example you have a contest winner will get the most sort after car audio system and the winner will be decided by the most number of new paid members he or she brings to the site.

and also make sure that membership payments are not made monthly basis but rather like one year or 6 months subscription then you will get enough money to create the video content

Gimme a quote on that forum. I want it