photo credit: Photos8.com

I’m planning a series on the many ways of generating revenue from your online forums. Before I get into this, however, I wanted to start by asking you: how are you making money from your online forums?

Please go into detail. For example, if you work with advertising networks, say which ones. If you work with an ad market place of some sort, say which one. Basically, if you use a company where other forums can sign up or request more information to join for themselves, I want to know the name of that company.

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PostRelease, the forums-based advertising platform, and research company Synovate have released the results of a survey aimed at determining the influence of people who contribute to online forums, as opposed to those that do not. They polled 1,000 citizens aged 18 and older in the lower 48 United States from November 19 through 23.

They found that one in five Americans contribute to an online forum and that those that contribute to online forums are far more likely to help a friend or family member make a purchasing decision, recommend a specific product, post reviews and ratings online, share advice offline and online, share links about new products, take an active role in organizing an offline event and more. For the highlights and exact percentages, see the table below.

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Skimlinks, a service that I reviewed in May, allows you to generate income from links posted on your site by checking to see if the site linked to has an affiliate program.

In my review, I noted that links posted on your site were redirected through the redirectingat.com domain name, owned by Skimlinks. While understandable, the fact that all links were being redirected through a third party domain name could cause people to question the legitimacy or safety of the links, simply due to fear of the unknown.

I also mentioned that Skimlinks was planning to introduce a new feature that would allow you to direct the links through your own domain name, which would go a long way in dealing with this issue. I received an e-mail today announcing that this option was now available.

Instead of redirecting through redirectingat.com, you can go through go.yourdomain.com or whatever subdomain you’d like. All that is required is a CNAME addition to your domain name (often times done by your web host if you are on shared hosting) and a small change to the Skimlinks code on your site.

The ability to do this is definitely a nice addition to an already solid service.

In “Managing Online Forums,” I wrote about a monetization idea that, to my knowledge, did not yet exist functionally. Basically, I believe that communities should be able to generate revenue from sales generated through their site, passively, if the merchant selling the product has an affiliate program.

I am speaking, primarily, of links included in posts. Of course, you can’t go into member posts and change their links to affiliate links. Besides editing posts in that manner being a no no, it’s also inefficient. So, the only solution would be an automated one, something that automatically includes an affiliate tag onto links out to qualifying sites, without discretion. In the book, I discussed something like this when working with Amazon.com.

While I was at South by Southwest Interactive in March, I met Joe Stepniewski, co-founder of Skimlinks. What is Skimlinks? Well, it’s basically the type of service that I had envisioned. It takes ordinary links on your website and turns them into an affiliate link, where applicable.

Their homepage shows this example: let’s say you were writing about a product from the Gap. You don’t need to mess around with any affiliate code or even apply to be a member of the Gap affiliate program – just post a link to the product like normal, just as if you were passing the link to a friend. With Skimlinks installed on your site, that link will automatically become an affiliate link.

Skimlinks keeps a portion of the revenue generated. But, their FAQ states that they are able to negotiate better affiliate rates than an individual affiliate would be able to get and, because of that, “you can earn up to 110%” of what you normally might.

One of the markets they are targeting pretty heavily is online forums, where people regularly link out to products related to the community’s subject. I’ve had the opportunity to test Skimlinks out on a couple of sites for around a month and I’m ready to talk about the pros and cons of the service, in my eyes.

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CommunityAdmins.com (i.e. the big logo on the top right portion of this page) is a community for people who run communities, but also moderators and users of communities, in general. Anyone interested in online community. But, the focus is certainly on the management aspect.

I thought that I would highlight five recently active, interesting discussions that popped up on the community. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to jump in!

1. Cult Threatends Legal Action Against Forum

An administrator shares the challenges that his or her community is facing, in dealing with a supposed “cult” and it’s threats against negative comments posted on the site.

2. Do You Used Non-Disclosure Agreements for Members of Staff?

In addition to standard staff guidelines, an NDA is also a viable consideration for many administrators.

3. Staff Members Doing Whatever They Want

The thread born out of this post on ManagingCommunities.com has inspired some interesting discussion and real experiences of staff members who have crossed the line.

4. How Much Can You Make with Forums?

Administrators share the ways they generate money and the expectations that you should have when doing so.

5. Private Communities: How Do They Work?

Finally, a discussion on private communities and who they will work for and won’t work for.

If you have any interest in discussing the management of online communities, I would definitely recommend joining us at CommunityAdmins.com.

About a month ago, Gary Vaynerchuk blogged about finding advertisers, specifically how you can do direct ad sale deals with people, with them buying place on your community. Well, OK, he said “blog/vlog,” but those are communities and what he said is just as applicable to other types of communities, as well. His advice was really solid and I liked the way that he presented it, so I wanted to share.

This is something that I really, really need to get into and this video certainly helped to motivate me. I’ve never really done it (all that much), but I am working on getting myself in a position where I can.

If you are hype into making a business out of this and hype into selling ads, set yourself up with an ad server and rates, identify some potential advertisers by looking at your competitors, and then go in. Go after them. It’s about the hustle. Not hustling in the sense of ripping people off, but hustling in the sense of busting your butt more than the next person. Good luck.

I wrote a guest post on The Graduate Student Survival Blog on the subject of blogging for dollars. The premise was to talk about how you could create a profitable blog in three months with a budget of $20. The blog is a part of the Albany Times Union website. Thanks to Brandon Mendelson for having me.

Forum One has released a report titled “Online Community Revenue and ROI Techniques”. The title is pretty descriptive – it talks about revenue generation on online communities and the best ways to approach it, according to the 51 people who participated in the survey. I’ve scanned over it and it makes for some interesting reading.

It’s available for a limited time, so even if you think you probably don’t want to generate revenue for your community, there’s no reason not to go ahead and grab it, download it and stow it for when it may be useful to you.