Hi everyone,

I run what has become the busiest fishing forum in the UK - Talk Angling fishing chat and tackle advice - Powered by vBulletin - the forum gets over 3000 unique users a day and 10K+ page impressions.

I would like to turn all this traffic into some income but without ruining the users experience - any ideas what would be the best way forwards and what would be a realistic amout I could get monthly in terms of revenue?

All help much appreciated.

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http://www.dvd-and-media.com/ Largest suppliers of DVD cases in the UK
http://www.talkangling.co.uk/ Busiest fishing tackle and angling chat site in the UK

Are there are affiliate schemes that would fit with your site. Would suppliers want to advertise on the site?

Well suppliers of fishing tackle would do but haven't seen an affiliate scheme that is specific to the fishing tackle industry.

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http://www.dvd-and-media.com/ Largest suppliers of DVD cases in the UK
http://www.talkangling.co.uk/ Busiest fishing tackle and angling chat site in the UK

Syndicated google and/or yahoo ads that are automatically based upon the content of each forum page would be a good idea. Just make sure that the ads aren't too obstructive or painfully annoying for your users. Give them adverstisements for items that they may actually be interested in, this could potentially even increase your users' overall experience.

Another route is to sell basic advertising space to sponsors, per Mike H's suggestion. Sell space on either an impression basis or a monthly payment. You may find that the fishing industry would be more comfortable with a monthly rate rather than a PPC or PPI method -- but that's just a hunch.

Best of luck sir!

EP

I think it would be a good idea to start local , maybe some fishing tackle stores including (hunting, archery, and other related sporting good stores) . also any assocations and clubs that may be local, like deep sea fishing clubs, archery clubs, biking clubs, ect.


To me, it's more comfortable when i see an ad for a local website or store here in my town .. than to see unfamiliar advertising with adsense or even worse.....

I'm sure your members have fishing videos of their trips, stories etc.. use AdSense / YouTube / Google heck.. there are many to choose from.

Just an idea

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How about a lure or tackle of the month club?

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Cheers!

WineGuy
ROIdomains.com

Just searched and found several for ya
Affiliate Program

Just searched Google for:

affiliate program fishing tackle

Good luck with it, should do very well indeed.

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Fishing newsletter. is an excellent place you can place adverts, these can be delivered to your users. you have the email addresses.

If you can deliver thousands of subscribed emails to fishers every couple of weeks. you have some very acceptable advertising space.

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I can help you monetize your traffic into leads and income for you.

We specialize in SEO Consultation and LEAD Generation.

IF your site gets 3k visits PER DAY! Then talk to us, as we can work with you and help you convert more of your traffic into paying entities.

PM us.

Thank you.

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Ontario Traffic Ticket Forum

A lot of us have this same question, how much should I make, what can I make, how to do it?

Network ads like Google - easy, get a copy of "The Adsense Code" or similar book for a quick boost in it.

Affiliate ads like you find on commissionjunction.com or shareasale.com may pay better.

Internal ads where you do the hard work of contacting fishing manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, magazines, etc. They're usually willing to pay more.

Subscriptions and merch like upgrading your account for $19.99 per year, bumper stickers, hats, t-shirts, etc. Cafe press will do a lot of that for you if you can get some designs together and then you just send your users to that site.

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Steve
www.gmtruckclub.com

NO, you can make MUCH more money by NOT using third party advertiser agencies. Email us for details.

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Ontario Traffic Ticket Forum

Mryang,

Although you asked about advertising, don't forget that you can greatly monetize your forum by setting up special member groups and special access subforums. People often can't resist being rated, and perhaps your visitors could be grouped according to skill or achievement level, such as novice, intermediate, competition, etc. They could either pay for just forum support bragging rights (with custom icon), or get to enter exclusive subforums, etc.

Just an idea that has worked really well with my forum.

--E.

Yahoo has ads web owners can place?

Rick

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How I Dominate the Search Engines

Clickbank has text box ads out now also

Rick

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How I Dominate the Search Engines

Firstly, I'm coming from a similar background, albeit that my site is guitar related, but just somewhat higher unique visitor and pageview rate.

Totally agree with the first suggestion - Google Adsense will definitely generate income, not huge, but if you carefully select from their options the promo which best fits into your site, noticable without being obtrusive, you'll have a reasonable basic return.

From my experience, I would avoid the affiliate 'middlemen' like CJ and research sites in the fishing industry who either already have affiliate programs, or where you can pitch your traffic to interested webmasters/site owners and work out either a pay per click or sales-based affiliation agreement.

Don't by shy about selling the benefits of working with you, you have a strong base of fishing enthusiasts who obviously love what your site offers and who will trust any honest recommendations you make. Make them prove to you that they will deliver value to your visitors with their product, whether it be tackle, boat hire, or any of the myriad commercial sites in the fishing milieu.

My site has been around for 10 years - when my SEO efforts started to produce traffic I initially signed up for standard affiliate programs. Over the years I forged relationships with site owners and worked out much better terms based on my own site traffic than they were offering thru their ( mostly farmed out ) affiliate programs.

This type of affiliation allows for a really flexible arrangement where they can provide content for your site ( with your affiliate code embedded ), and give discounts, special offers etc. for your loyal visitors. Win/win situation for everyone.

Obviously if you can move from a free service to a monetized subscription basis within your existing capabilities this would be ideal, but from my own experience people like free sites like ours, but are predisposed to accepting recommended commercial products in the same arena, based on the trust built up from the free but valuable service provided.

The important thing is to ensure that the sites you partner with can prove that they will deliver quality and value to your trusting visitors.

PJ

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P.J. Murphy, Guitar Chords & Lyrics
http://www.guitarsongs.info
http://guitar-chords.blogspot.com

If you do have trouble getting people to look at your site and decide to start a blog let me know so I can write some controversial stuff that will get hundreds of people writing on it, complaining (all publicity is good as it is not you writing the stuff)
My first post would be "A beginners guide to to fishing with just a hand grenade"
Part (1) Why sit in the freezing cold pouring rain for hours when
just a quick lob can bring all the fish you can eat to the surface..... (continued in the blog) the pieces would be writen in the style of "The emu files" http://www.ssrichardmontgomery.com/emufiles.htm should you be foolish enough to accept my offer.

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historical information links re uk and usa
http://www.ssrichardmontgomery.com

There are sufficient mail order angling suppliers in the UK, like Climax, who would be prepared to pay an affiliate click through charge to make your commercialisation worthwhile.
I would contact them by telephone, although they may be large, it is still people who run these places and a percentage of a sale could be very good for you.

As far as I know, they sure do. I've never personally used their ATP network, but might be worth the time to check it out.

Yahoo! Publisher Network

EP

Have you considered donations instead of advertising? Or maybe a combination of the two. Make a donation bar representing the monthly costs (server costs + expected profits) and reset it at the beginning of each month. See if it fills up

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Open Web Directory

You will find many suppliers on cj.com. Just join their program and display their ads.

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Premium Directory Script | For Directory Owners | 26,000 + List of Directories

From my experience, Google Adsense would almost definitely make your site look cheap, even it may help monetize the site.

Follow the example from sports betting forums. Get suppliers to sponsor contests and charge them a small fee for monitoring them. Another thing you can try is to get suppliers to sponsor categories. You could also sign up with video gaming affiliate programs that offer fishing video games.

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You can lead a blonde to reason but you can't make her think!

I have tourist websites in Texas, and one of the popular tourist attractions is fishing guides.

You can set up a separate section of the website for Fishing Guides and list the fishing guides in your area for about $98 per year up to $240 per year each, depending on how much business you can bring them.

Some fishing guides charge as much as $400 a day, so they can pay for the listing for a whole year with their first customer. It is a good deal for them and a good deal for you. Over the years, as they get more and more business from you, you can increase the prices.

I would not use banner ads, make it look more like listings and info on the fishing guides so it looks more like you are providing information for the viewer, rather than have it look like advertising. If you can have your whole website look like you provide free information for the viewer, instead of advertising, your website will be more popular and more successful.

How much money? - based on a 2% click rate, 3000 visits, and $0.10/ click, you can get $6 a day straight away from google.

But @ 3000 / day, you should (also) just attach a shop and sell .... anything, but preferably fishing related - beer can holders, tshirts, bumber stickers, books, boats, toy rc boats ... you should make a 2-10 sales / day if its done half right.

Finally some hard numbers!!!

Good to see that you have put a calculation into place, and used some base rates to figure this out.

My only question is: Where did you get those base rates? 2% CTR and $.10 per click.
Are these industry standards for Google Adsense? Is $.10 per click the advertisers take? or the total CPC? I dont think that google actually tells you what their split is when they share the income with content providers.

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neighborhood websites for communities, associations,clubs & organizations

The figures I posted are very ball-park, based on observations from my own accounts. You will get anything from about 4 cents to $4 per click, but most would average to about 10 cents.
2% CTR may be a bit high, but this will depend on how the ads are presented - ie high on the page or low etc.

I dont know anything about industry standards or advertiser's take. They are based on money going into my account.

I just set up a hostgator affiliate ad on one of my pages & got a $50 sale overnight - thats what hostgator pays when someone buys based on your referral. I thought that was pretty good & so I bet there's some other good affiliate schemes worth looking at. It would take me about 6 weeks to get that on adsense.

Okay, here is what you do besides getting local companies to put ads on your site.

Make a store and pick some items to sell. You say "I don't have anything to sell!" AH HA!

Use drop shipping. Seriously. You can make a bundle. Most people use drop shipping for EBay but I've used it for a website store and it did very well.

Doba is a good one but then you are in the UK. Ooops. Okay, others can check Doba out. But you get the idea. Find a drop shipper for the UK. Of course if you get hits from the USA, Doba is the one to use.

Okay, next, is Amazon. Find stuff on Amazon and post it for sale. You don't have to worry about it from there on out. Maybe have a book section and make an aStore with just books. Or videos.

These are 2 ways you can monetize a site easily without going for Adsense or other banner ads.

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Freelancers Gone Wild | Take your advertising to the next level | BLASTOFF! To make money and save money

You can monetize your website by selling ad spaces on it. The best way to make money from your website is building your own independent ad serving business. For example, you can use SmartPPC EVO (smartppcevo.com) software. It provides a large variety of control functions over your advertisers, xml feeds and javascript-feeds (google, ypn and others).

This is OK in theory but would you buy something of value from an unknown none related website I certainly would not. Id go to one of the big names.

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historical information links re uk and usa
http://www.ssrichardmontgomery.com

AdSense will ruin your forums they're too slow comin' down the pipe! Go directly to manufacturers and offer them pages/topics and introductions by you to your forum. Tell them you'll make sure their people will know when people are talking about their products etc. That also tells your users you are not just trying to meonetize but also improve the forum. There are some who bolt at the sight of anything commercial. We did this on a musical instrument site and manufacturers were thrilled. Notifications are easy just sub them to get anything posted to the company topic. So you aren't selling the company's ads you're selling them real estate and an audience on your forum.

Hope this helps...

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If I may ask, what types of fees did you charge these manufacturers you approached?

Rick

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How I Dominate the Search Engines

I would stay away from putting advertisements, unless its directly with advertisers. Forums have notoriously low click rate. It of course will ruin the user experience too. If i were you i would create some kind of marketplace where users can trade stuff, over the vendors can sell their products associated with fishing and tackle industry. Even a business directory can bring in decent revenue without ruining the user experience. 3000 users per day is not bad.

Providing more content for your visitor whether paid or not does not ruin your guest's experience. Furthermore my ppc income increased dramatically when I started developing forums

Rick

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How I Dominate the Search Engines