How many of you run forums for a "living"? and how many do it for the "love"?

I know. I think you have mentioned that once or twice. ;)

I don't want paid sponsors because you end up protecting those sponsors by censoring posts.
I've had a few auto related banners. Affiliates pay zip.
I don't mind making less using adsense. It's enough to keep my site running.

When you say "affiliates pay zip". Have you had no converts on that, but you're getting clicks on that? I'm not talkign about sponsorships, I'm talking about being an affiliate. I wouldn't want sponsors for the same reason.

Caleb
 
You can make a lot of money from affiliate marketing, if you put the work into it, on one site two purchases of NOD32 anti-virus paid out over $60.00 when that program was running, it takes customers to buy to make that money though and you need a lot of traffic to get a lot of customers buying.
 
There's the good, bad, and ugly side of ads. Most ad sites can not discriminate the users of a site. All they see are the words typed.
Example...a recipe site versus a baratric surgery site both typically talk FOOD. Now the ads don't see that the ones on the baratric side when typing that they MISS pizza don't want to see ads for pizza. Where a food site that talks about pizza would welcome ads for pizza. See the difference? So even with human intervention, you still have too much automation involved.

Easier to not have ads at all in some cases. And if you really don't want ads, like I don't, I don't have them cause I simply don't care for them, and don't want to expose my members to them.
 
What are you coaching them on??

Any topic they want to be coached on, ebusiness, webmastering, automated spamming ???

When I went to your site it did not list an expertise description of any type that you were selling.
 
I'm talking about listing what people are actually paying for on your forum, I did not see any listing of the type of consulting you do there on your forums.
 
I don't want paid sponsors because you end up protecting those sponsors by censoring posts.
Never did that. We remove spam from other shops but we would do that without the sponsors too.

If your sponsors are honest and offer good deals, there is no need to censor anything :)
 
There's the good, bad, and ugly side of ads. Most ad sites can not discriminate the users of a site. All they see are the words typed.
Example...a recipe site versus a baratric surgery site both typically talk FOOD. Now the ads don't see that the ones on the baratric side when typing that they MISS pizza don't want to see ads for pizza. Where a food site that talks about pizza would welcome ads for pizza. See the difference? So even with human intervention, you still have too much automation involved.

Easier to not have ads at all in some cases. And if you really don't want ads, like I don't, I don't have them cause I simply don't care for them, and don't want to expose my members to them.
This probably could be its own thread and don't mean to take away from the original post.
Depending on content, adsense can be very relevant. If I have one section dedicated to one topic, the ads are generally specific to that topic.
Or if I visited say network solutions, then I'm going to be seeing ads for network solutions on other sites. Adsense is getting smarter all the time. Maybe a little too smart.

If I was able to make ends meet selling a product, it would be a different story. But I can't.
 
Never did that. We remove spam from other shops but we would do that without the sponsors too.

If your sponsors are honest and offer good deals, there is no need to censor anything :)
There is that occasional dissatisfied customer though.
Drifting O/T. I had a vendor who doesn't even advertise on my site tell me to remove a thread or they would issue a cease and desist letter. I soft deleted the thread, read it and reopened it. Told them, send me the letter. They never did.
 
There is that occasional dissatisfied customer though.
Yes, and that's actually one of the reasons members like to buy from our sponsors: if any problems arise between them and the sponsor, they know they can post it on the forums and we will just allow them to do that. Our sponsors know this and do everything to avoid this. If for example an order is lost, they will send that order again with an extra gift!

The important thing to remember is that the customer is king and as a business you need to keep each and every one of them happy. Our sponsors know this, and that's why they do not have a problem with negative feedback. They use that feedback to improve their business.

If it turns out a customer is really dissatisfied and keeps ranting without a good reason, then of course there's a point when you just have to close the thread. But at that point everyone's going to see that this person is just unreasonable.

Of course it's easy for me to say because I have a very good relation with all my advertisers/sponsors. I can understand this is not easy to achieve for everyone. And especially for new forums you will go through some problematic advertisers, but just like problematic members, you need to drop those and move on.
 
I'd rather be making money than making fake friends on the internet. Fake friends won't pay the bills.
I'm an *******, so I'm not making friends on the internet, but the chances of a forum paying out the same amount my work does is nearly nil, unless I run one of those forums where I screw over members, and then my ethics would lead me to suicide.
 
Are you selling forum subscriptions then ??

Or do you get half million unique visitors a day and make it from ads ??

Well, my boards are in extremely niche markets, I make a more than comfortable living off the avertising revenue, which is all personally negotiated with the suppliers in the industries :) Maybe he does the same?
 
I gotta say, reading this post all it smacks to me is of a scam, especially since those people replying and claiming to have brought it all have low postcounts ;)

Those guys are a different type of webmaster who focus on selling information products to each other, sort of like Amway, you get others to sell it for you as an affiliate downline and that is the secret of "how to make money on the web".
 
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