Weight Loss Niche......

I currently run a decent size forum dedicated to weight loss / diet. What would be the best way to monetize my site? [ $50+ per lead / sale ]

Thanks

 

Hi,

Well, there is more than one way to do that:

1) You could send affiliate product offers to the people who register on your forum. I am assuming that you collected their email addresses when they registered and have an autoresponder like Aweber or iContact to send them a newsletter or such from time to time. I would say to go to ClickBank, PayDotCom or Commission Junction and search for products in the weight loss niche. I suggest that you actually review the product to make sure it is quality before starting to promote it. Then, you could do an honest review of it in an email to your members so that your recommendation is legit. You would then include a link to your affiliate id product link in the email and when someone buys from your link, you'd get a commission.

2) You could start a blog or website (assuming you don't have one already) and promote that to your forum members. You could then drive traffic from the forum to the blog or website. On the blog or website, you could do any number of things to monetize: banner ads, Google AdSense, CPA offers, promote affiliate products, etc. If you have an experience or expertise on the topic, you might alos think of making your own information product such as an ebook, video course, audio course, or combo of these. This way, other than the commission you pay any affiliates, the money is all yours rather than just getting a % commission on all sales. If you don't want to make the product yourself and have the money to do so, you could go on a freelance site and hire someone to make it for you according to what you want.

I really could go on and on, but I will stop here. There are lots of possibilities. One last suggestion would be to look here at Digital Point, Warrior Forum, or any other forum, particularly in your niche, and see what they are doing to monetize their forum.

Best of luck to you

 

Affiliate marketing and premium subscriptions

 

Don't expect to put up banners on a forum and think you will be raking in the money. I'd do what friendlyIMer8 suggested I think you would get better results that way.

 

Adsense + afiliate links ...

 

Ignore people who just say slap adsense and affiliate links on it. Start building a mailing list, or use the forum features to mail them and learn email marketing. That's how you start getting the 5 figure pay days and leave the shitty Adsense and Affiliate banner world behind.

 

Why not do both? You are leaving a lot of money on the table not promoting affiliate offers.

 

A mailing list would be a no-brainier for this type of community . The OP said decent size so i assume that it would think that he already did that . As for AdSense it will prolly display targeted ads with the same thing that you will try to sell .

 

You might want to also think about authoring your own book, or having one ghost written for you. This way you control the quality of the material as well as pricing and now you have something to offer others to sell for you. If you just look at the various threads in your forum you should find a host of ideas, along with solutions to different problems. You can offer information on everything from "21 healthy recipes that taste great" to "20 minutes a day to a slimmer you".

You might also want to think about adding a Premium section to your website where people have to pay to access. If you have good additional information that is not available for free you can set up a continuity program. Your Free information must be outstanding however so your members think "If the free stuff is so good, I can't wait to see what the paid section looks like". Under promise and Over deliver.

 

Google adsense and amazon associate account

If your forum has any traffic at all, you should be able to make money by either way.

The thing about amazon, they have so many banner styles and so many products, you should be able to tune the banners until you start getting good results. If one amazon product line is not working out, change to something else.

Also, sign up for the amazon newsletters - they will tell you what some of the best selling items are in certain categories.

 

Thanks guys. I appreciate the responses!

 

You might also want to look into come Clickbank products. There are some really good products listed there that have high gravity ratings, meaning they sell very well. So well in fact, you could dedicate a page or 2 to just that particular product.