Building a private social network is fun. It’s exciting, it’s rewarding but when you’re building it as part of a business, it should also be profitable. Not only is it possible to make money with a community, it’s also possible to do it in a number of different ways.
Advertising
Advertising is the most obvious way to make money out of a community and the simplest—it works for Facebook! But it’s also the most intrusive. By all means, use advertising to fund your community but don’t depend on it.
Sell Products
A less intrusive form of advertising is to use your community to promote your own products or those of partners. Mumsnet (www.mumsnet.com) has an Offers section that promotes products from its partners. Members get exclusive offers; partners get sales; and the community gets a cut.
Sell Information
Interest-based communities will attract members with different degrees of knowledge. Offer courses and eBooks to bring newbies up to speed and you’ll both deepen the quality of your private social network and earn some valuable cash.
Organize Events
An online community is great but if you can bring your members together offline, then you’ll really cement the sense of communal identity. Organizing an event will take a bit of work but share it out among other members and charge a fee to participate, and you’ll have an enjoyable way to pay for the community.
Create Merchandise
Members who feel a close affinity to the community will want to show off their membership. Use sites like Zazzle and Cafepress to offer print-on-demand hats, tees and tote bags and you’ll make sales while advertising your site.
There are plenty of other ways to monetize a community, from building a marketplace to charging for premium services. If you’re not making money out of an active community, you need to take action.
That’s all for now! Next time, I’ll talk about the other benefits a community can bring.
Nice ideas.
What’s the best to integrate Google AdSense ads, in Peepso?
For instance, is it easy to insert an AdSense ad zone, let’s say, a 468 x 60 pixels banner, after the third “item” on a member’s wall?
Yeah, of course. All is well @Merav
Can you share some specific examples of how to monetize with peepso? For example:
Can I create a paid site membership?
Can I require a log-in to view certain areas of my site?
Can I have a classifieds section where users pay to post items for sale or other ads?
I am evaluating SocialEngine but thought peepso might be a better option for my site if I can monetize in ways like this.
Hi,
To be honest no site comes to my mind when it comes to examples of sites that monetize but there are sites which do have paid memberships (paid memberships with the use of 3rd party plugins like paidmembershipspro.com). PeepSo can be made to be available only to logged in users, and that’s not a problem. It’s a matter of settings.
As for classifieds or ads, those can most certainly be used, but PeepSo doesn’t offer these features. You could use 3rd party plugins for those. Monetization is just a matter of focus. Like the blogpost states, there are many ways to do it. Just pick the focus. Make sure it is suitable for your community and that’s it 🙂
Kindest regards,
Eric Tracz
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