Communities and revenue

Hi all, I wanted to start a discussion about generating revenue from Community Server sites. A well run site with great content offers great value, and by generating as much revenue from it as possible means more resources can be applied to improving and promoting the community, so everyone wins - we all own better communities, and our community users get a better site, more content, etc.

Here's a few areas where communities can generate revenue, and I encourage feedback and for you to share your thoughts on areas that work for you. I hope some of my post is useful to you.

AdSense. This is the easy one. Bang the code in the site, and it generates income. Kinda. I've found that AdSense takes a lot effort, tracking and tweaking to get, but the results can lead to a several-fold increase in revenues. They keys are are to a) put the ads somewhere where they can't be missed, on forum posts a good position is inside the top message, on the right. b) blend the ads into your site and stop them looking so much like ads, so get rid of the box around them, and use the same text/link colours as your site. c) track. turn on AdSense channels and use them to see which ad block are generating the money. d) use the AdSense HTML code to mark out where your page content is, to assist AdSense in matching the ads against the right content (better matched ads means more relevance, which means more clicks). For CS in the future, I'd love to see the ability to easily drop ads into certain pre-defined positions, including After The Last Post, After the First Post, Inside The Right-hand Side of the First Post.

Referrals. I posted elsewhere about a "Links" tab that contains categorised links off to oher sites, and for each shows a title, and a brief description. This means the site can offer a fantastic repository of links to resources elsewhere for education, training, fun, or whatever, but some of those links could be affiliate links and generate referral income for the CS site owner.

Product placement. Contextual advertising systems like eMiniMalls are beginning to take off on many sites. These work really well for product-based sites (so not mine) and show an image of a product related to the content of the page, a description, some reviews, and a list of best prices at retailers, all inside a neat little tabbed interface. Some people appear to be finding it generates more revenue than AdSense, but I expect it only really work on product-related sites.

Subscriptions. I'm investigating how best to provide additional subscription services to my CS site, but I expect that exclusive forums, accss to valuable resources, discounts negotiated with third-party suppliers, and freebies will encourage people to sign up. I expect to be able to do this using the roles system and PayPal subscriptions, but it would be reall great for CS v4.0 to have support for this out of the box, i.e. just enable the subscription system. PayPal has pretty good integration.

Search engines. As part of all of the above, a key process involved in revenue generation and growth of any web community is traffic building. I think the CS team has done a fantastic job with CS, and it is so much more search engine friendly than DotNetBB that we used before. In the future it would be nice to see more improvements - so the ability to specify the meta desc/keywords on a page by page basis through the admin interface, and to provide reporting on which referring sites are delivering registered users. For those of you with extensive SEO experience, what other features are needed to get the best out of CS?

Banner ads. I use Xigla's Banner Manager which is an ok product, and does what I need. I wouldn't ever suggest CS provide full banner management as there are many products out there that do it well. If there was something in this area I'd ask for, it's explicit out of the box support for AdSense, because it is rapidly becoming a total solution advertising outsourcing supplier that can manage all advertising revenue for a site, whether through textual ads, image ads, and I expect in time, product ads like Chitika's eMinimalls.

To be clear, one of the reasons I mention all of this is because as each CS community grows and develops visitors and revenue, more of the site owners who have grown to love CS, will be able to buy the full licenses and add-ons they need, so there is a direct link between how easy Telligent makes it for us all to make income from our sites, and how much income they derive from license sales. At the end of the day if someone sets up a (free) CS site, and it makes them money, why would they NOT buy a license of CS?

I welcome your thoughts...

Ollie

 

I think the 'Referrals' option has huge opportunity. I've been searching for a simple product that would integrate with CS 2.0 to offer a basic Link Manager/ Indexer. This post ( http://communityserver.org/forums/thread/508217.aspx ) started a brief discussion on such a product.

Ollie, your post is a must read!

Thanks

Thanks Kingsley. I'm glad I'm not alone in seeking ways to build successful communities. In the old days of the net you could build a great community, put all the effort in, and even after getting on the phone to sell ad space, handling the invoices, putting the images up, advising clients on how to create banners, etc, the income is still low. NOW, as search engines improve, and as contextual advertising and affiliate schemes improve, there is a much clearer avenue to confidence that if we create a genuinely great web site with great content, not only will visitors love it, but now it can pay its way and generate income to grow the community.

I must admit I am staggered by what can be achieve with AdSense alone simply by spending an hour a day over a week or two tweaking the settings.

For me the next area to look at in more detail is affiliate programs. I have previously had affiliates who will pay £50 and £35 for purchases made (about $80 and $50), and by having neatly categorised links on the community, users get the ability to browse related, relevant products and services, and if they decide to purchase any, my site sees a commission. Of course there's a moral burden on me to ensure the links are relevant and the suppliers have integrity.

One area I forgot to mention in my original post was this...

Email marketing. I need to be able to send out regular emails to all the users of my community, however under British Law (and for the few American users, the CAN-SPAM Act) I am unable to use the mass email facility in CS because users need the ability to opt-out, and that doesn't seem to be included yet. For solid branding, I also need the emails to be HTML emails, with the content fully under my control. There are loads of companies out there who will send mass emails on your behalf from a CSV file (could CS provide integration with Vertical Response, Constant Contact, etc? I suggest avoiding Got Marketing), but the key for me before any of these services can be used is to be able to have users opt in or out of the CS mailing list. Later, I'd like the option to specify multiple lists (Newsletter, Weekly Update, Special Offers, Upcoming Events, etc) and they can opt in and out of each. The benefits to end users of this are that they can get as much or as little information sent from the community as they like (e.g. a monthly update of the best threads in the last month), and they get details of exclusive special offers. For example in my community many members have said they will offer discounts to other members, but right now I cannot send a newsletter out listing those discounts (which benefits everybody) because the email marketing facility has no opt-out. From my side, the benefits of email marketing are clear - regular communication keeps traffic at a higher level, it maintains relationships, and it can generate significant referral income.

Ollie

Reply:

Ollie, were is your community?

You can see mine at www.kdkeys.net. I have been working on the issues you mentioned for a while. Among them, working out a viable email / lists / newsletter system. You can see mine at www.kdkeys.net/lists

The challenge with creating my own home spun solution is that I don't have some of the commercial email tracking features (read rate, response rate, etc.)

I have also looked at the possibility of using the commercial guys out their. I have more than 30,000 members in the database, and the only solution that would make sense would involve the company exposing some sort of API. Uploading text files etc. would not work.

Perhaps we can exchange ideas and notes amidst our busy schedules.

Regards

The community I operate is at http://www.singingpig.co.uk/

I'm curious - you have a good sized user base, but your forums are very quiet. What drives membership sign-up?

For me the critical thing is certainly the ability for users to opt in and opt out, and later I'd like the ability for them to specify which lists they are opted into. If CS can provide an interface for that, store the opt-in data, and provide the ability to download a CSV file, it then becomes possible to run email marketing campaigns pretty effectively, if a bit cumbersome.

I would to avoid investing the time and money in creating an email marketing system as a third-party can do the email sending, and the requirements for CS are relatively simple (I think!).

Ollie

 

Ollie:

You made a sharp observation. There are periods when a of of people joing the community and during other periods, activity is moderate.

Guess what mainly drives the sign-ups. We have some data mining source code written in VB6 and C# and people just want to register, download the code and then ask for more code :-)

In case you didn't notice the Lists feature at www.kdkeys.net/lists (check http://www.kdkeys.net/lists/ServiceAgreement.aspx) uses an opt-in process.

I will take a look at your community.

Interesting site you have there, ollie - I may have to start lurking there...

FYI, you should have a look at your stats, because they're currently reading as

5,338 users have contributed to 11,945 threads and 273 posts.

Now, that can't be right, can it?

Yeah, the stats are definately wrong - there's about 90,000 posts. I had some suggestions from Jose on how to fix it, but no joy yet..

Ollie

 

Ollie:

I saw the reference to 5000 + members . I didn't realize that you have 90,000+

How did you manage to generate this type of activity and interest? I am taking notes and would really like to know.

Thanks,

There are 90,000 posts, and 5,000 users. The post volume has accumulated over 3-4years. The community has moved around a bit since about 2001:

1. MSN Groups
2. ASP.NET Forums v1.0 (all posts migrated screen-scraping MSN!)
3. DotNetBB (posts migrated with custom scripts)
4. Community Server

I haven't done any marketing to date, the community grows through word of mouth and search engines.

Ollie

 

I run a "small site" (Da Mans Dem) with only around 300 members, but they're a very active bunch, having generated around 60,000+ posts in only 10 months!

Will be rewarding them with an upgrade to CS2.0 and a sexy new custom skin in time for our 1st birthday...

As a follow-up to anyone searching for ways to generate revenue from community sites, this service is interesting: www.contextcash.com. It's not a good implementation, but to be fair to them it is in beta. It is first implementation of such a system I have seen. Basically:

1. You sign into the (subscription) web app
2. Select keywords you want highlighted in your blogs/posts/etc as affiliate links
   
3. Pick the products you want assigned to those keywords from ClickBank, Amazon, and apparently soon eBay, Digital Rivert, etc.
4. Stick a bit of JS into your pages

The JS in the page seeks out all the keywords, and highlights them as links so when clicked they go through to an affiliate product. The key to my mind is to very carefully select the affiliate products so they are of high value to readers. I'm aware this kind of contexual in-page advertising can be annoying (e.g. IntelliTXT).

Btw Gary, your users must be wearing their keyboards out with that level of posting.

Ollie

Good information Ollie.

Thanks

This is a topic I'm personally interested in as well (as are many on our team) and one that we've been talking / thinking about lately.

If there are specific things that we can do to make Community Server better for enabling revenue for our customers that's good for us and our customers, i.e. makes Community Server a more compelling platform.