Using eBay to Monetize a Forum
Online discussion forums costs money to run. The actually costs can be quite low if run on a budget or they can be quite high if there are extensive customisation to the software and designs. On top those direct costs, there are the time costs of the administrator and moderators to run the forum, to monitor the forum, to create new content and keep thing under control and running smoothly. Because of that there are a number of ways to monetize a forum. This include the use of pay-per-click advertising programs such as Adsense; the direct selling of advertising; the use of premium or paid membership; and the use of affiliate programs such as Amazon.
One other affiliate program for forums is eBay. There are several advantages to eBay for forums. One of these is you can get feeds of products that are relevant to the topic of the forum, so its targeted. The other advantage of eBay is that eBay operates in many countries, so you can take feeds from all of them to better cover the globe. How often have you visited a website with eBay advertisements and they only targeted one country? What about the visitors to that site from other countries? It is possible to serve different feeds from eBay in different countries geotargeted via the OpenX Adserver based on the IP address of the country of the visitor.
The eBay editor kit can be used to create block advertisements that can be inserted into a block on the forum, Alternatively, a RSS feed can be created and each eBay auction can be inserted into a thread as a message.
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